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he have imagined it as a boy in Brooklyn? And how many other green campuses and private oases were there, tucked away amidst the vast, busy, noisy, crazy country? Who ever dreamed, in history, of such a protected, lucky geography?
    When he ambled on down the one main street of two or three blocks long, filled with spry shoppers, stores, banks, realtor offices, Manny again felt the presence of free and easy serenity, sanity. Just as God—or Private Property and well-heeled capitalism—had ordered, in His Intelligent Design, right? At the end he returned to the large oval green at the center of the campus, sat on a white rocking chair at the Hanover Inn, and read through the New York Times while sipping a bottle of water. A leisurely wait to pick up his son after school. Engulfed in this autumnal comfort, could he really project himself back into the gray world of East Europe, the unimaginable world of the Holocaust? A reach of the imagination, to be sure. And maybe even a world too far for the imagination to encompass? But how else to search for that RW mystery, now that his own past interest was re-ignited? …
    As he basked in the spring sun, within the safe port of the campus, he remembered fondly his days in Madison, as a grad student, sitting in the student building overlooking the glorious lake, and waiting for one of his dynamic professors to join him for a coffee. It didn’t really matter who it was—Hesseltine or Curti, Williams or Mosse or Goldberg. Each contributed a different intensity, a new idea, to stir him up for the month. (George Mosse, the transplanted German Jew, had first talked to him about Wallenberg, suggesting he was a perfect ‘mystery study.’) A vibrant history department, in the late 1960s, in one of the heated intellectual centers of the country. Activism—including a real blowup or two!—combined with the scholarly. But the scholarly always trumped activism, no matter how activist the prof, and it remained the password to accomplishment.
    An exciting five years, all told. Launched Manny into the future. Toward his teaching, his writing. And toward the track of easy academic jogging. Staring at the green oval, he recalled those salad days, a superior graduate ride of post-pubescent pleasure, where serious learning mingled with stretches of Wisconsin Dells idleness; bursts of study and paper-writing interrupted days of lazy ping-pong indulgence. Grad school had become a native pastime, a middle-class pastoral not to be missed. A pastoral that had continued into the faculty present, into Manny’s later teaching days.
    He saw the clock hit ten to three on the white library tower, and knew it was time to go pick up the boy and drive him to his cello lesson. One of the unique pleasures of his adult life, having the boy, watching him turn into a little cellist, and listening to his music. (And the older boy, a budding literary fellow.) Manny stood up and moved off. Taking a pit stop in the inn’s basement bathroom, he washed his face vigorously and took a quick view of himself in the wall mirror: a sixty-four-year-old gent with a glint in his eyes, still swinging. Perhaps a pale version of the “Trotsky” that was his nickname in his forties. Was he ready for a new nickname?
    Manny figured he’d surprise the boy with an ice cream cone, and he found the Ben & Jerry’s shop. As the aromas hit him, another memory wafted back, from his youth in Brooklyn. Al’s Pizza and Italian Ices Shop on Rutland Road, the Sutter Ave. El subway stop rumbling overhead. He had worked there as a young teenager, selling pizza slices for twelve cents, and custard or soft ice cream. Al was a round, pink-faced, kindly boss in his thirties, whose white T-shirt and apron were always smeared with ices or pizza. His two Hungarian brothers, older and less jolly, owned the restaurant next door. Once Manny had repeated a nasty Hungarian curse, and the shorter fellow had slapped him across the face. Another time, the older