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we were never told what happened to the Jews who survived,” I said.
    “Many people died from disease. But others spent years in other camps, waiting to be resettled, like my mother.”
    “Do you ever wish she had gone west rather than returning to Romania?”
    Andrei was quiet before he answered. “I can’t think that way. If she hadn’t gone back, she wouldn’t have met my father…my brother and I wouldn’t exist…I wouldn’t be sitting here now.” Then he paused and smiled, pointed to the stack of work on his desk. “Just imagine the backlog.”
    And we laughed.
    Once, when I asked Andrei to tell me more about his father, this is what he said:
    “There’s not much to tell.”
    We were walking to the bus stop together after work.
    “When did your mother marry him?” I prodded.
    “When she was eighteen. He was double her age and already a widower. I don’t know if they were ever happy,” he continued. “My father was away so much of the time, working as a miner in the mountains, I don’t know…”
    I nodded.
    “He had one long holiday every year, around New Year’s, which probably explains why both of us, my younger brother and me, were born in September.”
    As we walked, a smile spread across Andrei’s face. “My favourite memory of my father is of lying with him on the couch, singing songs by the Mamas and the Papas that we had memorized, by phonetics, off an illegally copied album.
    “We were lying close together, which is probably why I remember it. My father wasn’t a very touchy kind of person. He didn’t kiss or hug us. My mother was affectionate, but never my father—although he could be sweet with my mother. He had strong ideas about what it meant to be a man.”
    I saw a bus approaching in the distance.
    “When did he die?” I asked.
    “In 1968, when I was eleven. He had emphysema. There was nothing the doctors could do. He wasn’t even sixty. For the last month of his life, he just lay on his bed, taking short breaths from an oxygen tube he held in his hand. Then one morning I woke up and he was curled up on his side, trying to get air. When he stopped breathing, the whole house turned quiet.
    “After he died, I stayed in my room. I had a short-wave radio my father had built years before and I lay on the bed and listened to the music shows on Radio Free Europe. Phil Ochs. Bob Dylan. That sad sandpaper folk music. Every night I listened until the radio transmission stopped. One morning I woke up and found an extra blanket on the bed and my brother, Eli, sleeping close beside me.
    “Seeing him there made me pull myself together. I remember thinking, If Papa is dead, then it is up to me to protect everyone. “
    S HORTLY AFTER SHE BURIED her husband, Andrei’s mother was presented with an opportunity to emigrate to Israel. News had spread that the dictator was selling Jews to Israel for hard currency, tenthousand dollars for each exit visa. Sarah declined: she refused to be treated as a commodity. Instead she went to work. She joined a local co-operative, and eventually became chief tailor of a small dressmaking and dry goods shop in the middle of town.
    She sat at the sewing machine from morning until evening, making clothes, bedcovers and curtains; unfurling metres and metres of stiff buckram, a coarse blend of linen and cotton that could refurbish a chesterfield or “shield an army from bullets,” as she put it. Though she worked with fabric of various colours, she herself never wore anything but black. Not just any black but the deep charcoal black of mourning. Even ten years after her husband’s funeral, she wanted the villagers to know that his was not the only death she remembered.
    Andrei helped his mother at the co-operative as often as he could. The rumbling of the roll-up metal doors was a signature sound— we’re open —heard from blocks away. Sarah taught her sons to wind a bobbin, chalk the pattern marks onto fabric and use the foot-pedalled Singer (and, later