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adventure outside the city.
    It was through Sam that my father made the ac quaintance of the Pearlman family. They were German Jews who had already been in New York for three generations, having arrived before the Civil War, and were well established in social as well as business circles, completely Americanized. Hershell Pearlman, one of three brothers with diverse interests, was a lawyer; it was he whom my uncle was friendly with. A younger brother, Robert, had taken over his grandfather’s jewelry shop on Park Avenue, and it was he who was seeking a tutor.
    The only real requirements for the job were fluencies in both English and Yiddish and a willingness to spend time with children, my father was told. These were qualifications he had. Familiarity with farm chores would be a plus, and he had some of that as well. For my father, the thought of spending the summer in the country, far from the stink and steamy heat of the city, was a delight. He had spent his early childhood on a farm, and, though it had been a mean life, one his family was anxious to escape, he harboured some nostalgic memories that made the prospects of spending the summer of his twenty-first year on a farm especially appealing.
    It was the last week in June of 1914 and the sun was shining brightly, the air fragrant with the scents of early summer mixed with exhaust fumes from the end less procession of taxicabs and streetcars on Park Avenue and manure announcing the presence of horse-drawn wagons on the side streets. My father, who had walked north from Mott Street, where he was still living with his parents, younger brothers and unmarried sister, arrived at the jewelry shop at the appointed time, wearing an ill-fitting woolen suit he’d borrowed from his father. My father was two inches taller than my grandfather and his ankles and wrists protruded from the sleeves and cuffs, making him look somewhat like a stick figure drawn by a child. His curly black hair crackled with electricity from the unused-to brushing it had just received at the hands of his sister Ida.
    He stopped on the corner of Forty-seventh Street, a half block south of the shop, where a noisy crowd was milling around a newsboy. The banner headline on the New York Herald proclaimed the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand of Austria. My father gave the boy a penny and put the folded paper under his arm, thinking it would add to the overall impression he hoped to make. Beyond that, though, he gave little thought to the day’s news.
    A clerk ushered my father to the rear of the shop, where he found Pearlman, a tidy man in his late thirties with a well-trimmed moustache, impeccably dressed in a fawn-coloured suit, examining a glittering stone of some sort through a jeweller’s monocle. “Ah, young Harry,” he said, removing the monocle from his eye and rising to shake hands, but through the interview that followed my father persisted in the feeling that he was being examined in just such a thorough, microscopic manner as the stone had been.
    The interview was short and seemingly undemanding. “Tell me something about yourself,” Pearlman asked after they’d been seated on either side of an im pressive oak desk.
    There was little to tell but my father tried. He’d come to America with his family when he was ten, from Galicia, a troubled corner of what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire, over which the Archduke Ferdinand – just murdered – had ruled. As a boy on the farm his family rented, he had often helped the hired workmen with milking cows, collecting eggs and shooing the geese, and at this news Pearlman smiled approvingly. He had learned reading and writing and other subjects from a succession of young rabbinical students who came to the farm three afternoons a week – it pleased him no end that, should he win this position, he’d be doing much the same as his own tutors. In New York, he’d attended three grades at the public school on Henry Street, just a few blocks from