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my pen to poison relatives, must stem from years of forgotten emotional tyranny.
    No complaints. Everyone needs something to shape a complicated character. Tyranny was the force that created my love of liberty, my identification with the underdog, my passion for the rights of man—and woman.
    When my sister Claudia was born in 1947, the whole family constellation shifted. Suddenly there was “the baby.” Suddenly it was the postwar boom and my father was rich—or so it seemed. Suddenly my parents did things like fly to Havana or Jamaica for winter holidays or to London and Paris for summer ones. Suddenly there was a baby nurse who wouldn’t let me touch the baby because I had caught ringworm from my best friend’s cat.
    Home from kindergarten for what seemed like an eternity, I was banished by the baby nurse from the baby’s room. The little redheaded interloper—my sister—ruined my life. Everyone fussed over her. My mother lay in bed like a lady of leisure; my grandparents moved out to a nearby apartment (banished at last because my parents had now been analyzed and had outgrown such retrograde Mitteleuropa notions as extended families). Life changed dramatically. And mostly I remember standing in a tub, holding my gauze-swathed arm above my head and being hosed down by my mother, who wanted to make short work of me so she could run to “the baby.” That damn baby—how Nana and I made her suffer. We bundled her in suffocating clothes and made her sit in the doll carriage. We dragged her into the linen closet, which was still our running-away-from-the-Nazis cave, because even though the war was over, it wasn’t over in our heads. There, we would eat butter-and-applesauce-and-powdered-sugar sandwiches (based on a recipe in a Booth Tarkington novel my big sister was reading). There we would hide and whisper, running out to the kitchen for more supplies when the coast was clear.
    Claudia smiled sweatily and put up with all our mishandling. She was “the baby.” She knew her place. Today she tells me how much she resented us. That was nothing to how much we resented her merely for being born. While we went to school, she got taken to Caribbean islands in the sun. While we were left with Mama and Papa, she was with Eda and Seymour. Of the three of us, she is the only one who calls our parents Mommy and Daddy. And we also resented her for that. My parents seemed mysteriously like siblings to me and my older sister. And my grandparents seemed the real parents. Maybe that was why they had to be banished.
    When I was eight, my older sister thirteen, and my younger sister three, my grandparents set sail for Paris, hoping to find the artists’ Paris of Papa’s youth. He had sojourned there as a poor Russian art student before he married, subsisting on bananas donated by some art-loving Jewish philanthropist—possibly a Rothschild—or so it went in family myth.
    â€œMirsky wanted to go without her,” my father says. “He thought he could dump Mama with us.”
    â€œBut I refused,” my mother says. “How dare he have the delusion he could recapture his youth?”
    Mama and Papa sailed on the Mauretania. Little black-and-white square glossies record that fateful day: Claudia and I racing around the decks in our English chesterfield coats, matching bonnets, and kid gloves; Nana a sullen, sulky, Elizabeth Taylor clone of a teenager, draping herself on assorted deck chairs and smokestacks and flaring her nostrils for the camera.
    My parents must have felt as liberated as we felt bereft. And as for Papa and Mama, what on earth could they have been thinking? How could the Paris of 1951 fail to disappoint an artist who left Montparnasse in 1901? He was no longer young, no longer single, no longer in love with bananas. The Russian-Jewish boy from Odessa had become a man of the world (or at least a man of Manhattan). How could he go back? It turned