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Jews could even own land and build their own houses—as Aunt Sonya and Uncle Leo did on Wabash Avenue in Boyle Heights.
    Sonya and Leo built their house in 1926, when Wabash was just being developed. Approaching their brand-new house, you smelled the delicious sweet scent of fresh wood and heard a symphony of clanging hammers, rasping saws, and the shouts of men swarming over the construction sites—carpenters, plumbers, stuccoers. And what a feast for the eye, the bright facades of the just-completed houses. So modern, so proud.
    Sonya and Leo moved into their house in March, just before Barbara and I turned five. Mama, with us in tow—and our new brother or sister huge in her belly—went there almost every day that spring. Sometimes Sonya had summoned her to witness the house’s latest adornment. More often Mama was simply drawn there, as if under some compulsion to go the six blocks from our house (not new or owned, but rented and in need of repair) and torment herself with her sister-in-law’s affluence.
    “I need to walk! Hurry, girls!” Mama would cry. We’d grab our sweaters, and sometimes persuade her to take us to Hollenbeck Park, where we’d happily spend hours hurtling into space on the swings. Or we might go visit Auntie Pearl, who delighted in playing with us. Mama and Pearl laughed together, whereas Sonya got on Mama’s nerves.
    Most of the time, though, when we took a walk, Mama’s feet turnedtoward Sonya’s. Sonya was twenty-four then, but no one would have believed she was only a year older than Pearl. Sonya was settled, with her fine house, her two-year-old son, Stan, and her husband, Leo, a stolid, gray-haired man who constantly complained about his dyspepsia. In some ways, Sonya was the better-looking of Papa’s sisters; a “handsome” woman, she wore her brown hair elegantly pinned up, and even at twenty-four her plumpness made her seem important and matronly. (Sonya eventually served as the president of more than one women’s organization.) In contrast, Pearl often looked like she’d just emerged from a hot kitchen, her hair in unruly tendrils and her face shiny.
    The first thing Sonya always said to Barbara and me when she greeted us at the door of her house was not to get anything dirty. And then she’d turn her attention to Mama.
    “Charlotte, did you notice the chandelier? It got delivered yesterday,” Sonya would crow. “Well, how could you not notice? Thirty-two pendants of Czechoslovakian crystal! Two men it took to bring it into the house and hang it!”
    “Beautiful. So elegant,” Mama said of every new item. Then, unable to help herself, she always added, “Can I ask, what did it cost?”
    “We got a bargain, someone Leo knows in business,” Sonya said of every item, before proceeding to reveal the price. Along with bragging about her acquisitions, she’d point out the room she was fixing for Zayde, because of course he’d prefer living in her spacious new home rather than the room off our kitchen.
    Mama was called Charlotte, but her real name was Zipporah, which is Hebrew for “bird,” and she sounded like a bird twittering whenever we walked home from Sonya’s. “Dreck,” she’d mutter. “All that money, and not a shred of taste … If she thinks Zayde is going to trade my cooking for hers …” Mama had started talking to herself a few months earlier, around the time when Papa announced, “Your mama is growing a little brother or sister for you in her tummy!”
    Papa was usually calm and dignified, but often during that winter and spring, instead of giving lessons after dinner, he took us for walks. He said we were going out “to give your mama a little peace.” But I felt he had tomove because he had so much excitement inside him. It felt almost dangerous to walk after dark with this man I did but didn’t recognize, a jolly Papa—a Papa who whistled! If we ran into a person he knew, he called “hello” in a big outdoor voice. “My girls,” he