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and the wife of the man who led America into its bloodiest war, in defense of the institution of slavery. Only Sachs could have known something like that. Only Sachs could have informed you that when the film actress Louise Brooks was growing up in a small town in Kansas at the beginning of the century, her next-door playmate was Vivian Vance, the same woman who later starred in the
I Love Lucy
show. It thrilledhim to have discovered this: that the two sides of American womanhood, the vamp and the frump, the libidinous sex-devil and the dowdy housewife, should have started in the same place, on the same dusty street in the middle of America. Sachs loved these ironies, the vast follies and contradictions of history, the way in which facts were constantly turning themselves on their head. By gorging himself on those facts, he was able to read the world as though it were a work of the imagination, turning documented events into literary symbols, tropes that pointed to some dark, complex pattern embedded in the real. I could never be quite sure how seriously he took this game, but he played it often, and at times it was almost as if he were unable to stop himself. The business about his birth was part of this same compulsion. On the one hand, it was a form of gallows humor, but it was also an attempt to define who he was, a way of implicating himself in the horrors of his own time. Sachs often talked about “the bomb.” It was a central fact of the world for him, an ultimate demarcation of the spirit, and in his view it separated us from all other generations in history. Once we acquired the power to destroy ourselves, the very notion of human life had been altered; even the air we breathed was contaminated with the stench of death. Sachs was hardly the first person to come up with this idea, but considering what happened to him nine days ago, there’s a certain eeriness to the obsession, as if it were a kind of deadly pun, a mixed-up word that took root inside him and proliferated beyond his control.
    His father was an Eastern European Jew, his mother was an Irish Catholic. As with most American families, disaster had brought them here (the potato famine of the 1840s, the pogroms of the 1880s), but beyond these rudimentary details, I have no information about Sachs’s ancestors. He was fond of saying that a poet was responsible for bringing his mother’s family to Boston, but that was only a reference to Sir Walter Raleigh, the man who introduced the potatoto Ireland and hence had caused the blight that occurred three hundred years later. As for his father’s family, he once told me that they had come to New York because of the death of God. This was another one of Sachs’s enigmatic allusions, and until you penetrated the nursery-rhyme logic behind it, it seemed devoid of sense. What he meant was that the pogroms began after the assassination of Czar Alexander II; that Alexander had been killed by Russian Nihilists; that the Nihilists were nihilists because they believed there was no God. It was a simple equation, finally, but incomprehensible until the middle terms were restored to the sequence. Sachs’s remark was like someone telling you that the kingdom had been lost for want of a nail. If you knew the poem, you got it. If you didn’t know it, you didn’t.
    When and where his parents met, who they had been in early life, how their respective families reacted to the prospect of a mixed marriage, at what point they moved to Connecticut—all this falls outside the realm of what I am able to discuss. As far as I know, Sachs had a secular upbringing. He was both a Jew and a Catholic, which meant that he was neither one nor the other. I don’t recall that he ever talked about going to religious school, and to the best of my knowledge he was neither confirmed nor bar mitzvahed. The fact that he was circumcised was no more than a medical detail. On several occasions, however, he alluded to a religious crisis that took