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nothing had he been born in southern Italy. Kasha’s father sat silently in a brown stuffed chair and busied himself with his Yiddish newspaper. The police dog was growling, fangs bared. Francesco’s knees were shaking. The apartment smelled of the cooking smells in the hold of the ship that had taken him across the Atlantic. In another moment, he was going to be violently ill. Kasha’s younger brothers sat anticipating the event with tiny mean smiles on their faces. Her mother saved the day, shooing the girls and their beaux out of the apartment in the nick of time. There was a strange piece of metal screwed to the doorjamb (a mezuzah, of course, though Francesco did not know what it was), and Kasha kissed the tips of her fingers and pressed them to it the moment they stepped into the hallway.
    Francesco had decided Kasha would be his girl for the night. He had made this decision without first consulting Pino, and he had done so because he had already abandoned whatever fantasies he may have had of his date being a blond, blue-eyed, narrow-waisted American girl. He was now willing to settle for someone who at least looked Italian. Kasha had black hair, brown eyes, and a chunky figure; he might have been back home in Fiormonte. Pino’s girl, Natalia, was tall and skinny, and had a habit of covering her mouth with her hand whenever she laughed, possibly because her teeth were bad. They must have made quite a pair that night, tiny fat Pino (he had regained a lot of weight since his arrival in America) and lanky Natalia with her hazel eyes and fight-brown hair, hand flashing up to cover her giggle whenever anyone said anything even remotely comical. I normally despise attempts at recording dialect, possibly because it translates so badly into Braille, and I promise this will be the only time I’ll try to capture the sound of immigrant speech. (“You have never kept a promise in your life,” Rebecca once said to me.) But it seems to me the conversation among those four budding young Americans on that April night would lose most of its flavor and all its poignancy if it were rendered in any way other than it must have sounded. Bear with me, bear with them; they were trying.
    “Whatsa matta you gran’pa?” Francesco asked. “He’sa craze?”
    “He’s ah
kahker,
” Kasha answered, using the Yiddish slang for “old man.”
    “Caga?”
Francesco asked, and tried not to laugh.
Caga
was Italian slang for shit.
    “Kahker, kahker,”
Kasha corrected. “He’s
ahn alter kahker.”
    Pino, who now realized Kasha was talking about shit, burst out laughing, and then immediately sobered and tried to elevate the conversation to a more dignified plane. “Theesa two boys,” he said. “They tweensa?”
    “Tweensa?” Kasha asked, puzzled.
    “Gemelli,”
Pino said. “Tweensa. Tweensa, you know?”
    “I don’t know vot it minus ‘tweensa.’ ”
    “Tvintz, I tink is vot,” Natalia said, and giggled and covered her mouth.
    “Oh,
tvintz!
No, they nut no tvintz. The vun has ett, en’ dudder has nine.”
    “I gotta one sist hassa ten,” Francesco said. “An’ dada one forty.”
    “Four-
teen,”
Pino corrected.
    “
Sì, quattordici
. Attsa home. Dada side.”
    “Vhere is det you from?” Kasha asked.
    “Fiormonte. Attsa cloze by Napoli.”
    “Whatsa
you
home place?” Pino asked Natalia, and she giggled.
    In such a manner did they manage to communicate, or to
believe
they were communicating, all evening long. The girls would not go to the restaurant that had been recommended to Pino because it was not kosher. (It suddenly occurs to me that the word “kosher” may have stuck in my grandfather’s head, causing him to have recalled incorrectly the name of the girl who was his date. Every time I eat kasha knishes, I think of her. I wonder if she’s still alive, I wonder what she’d have thought of Rebecca — my grandfather was wild about Rebecca — and I wonder what her real name was. Yes, but what’s