![]() My grandfather manned the desk, doing all the paperwork. She charmed them or she frightened them, and either way, they bought. ![]() ![]() My grandmother was always on the phone, selling. They had their own small insurance company, working out of their railroad apartment in Bay Ridge, catering primarily to other Russian immigrants. I grew up two blocks from my grandparents and saw them nearly every day. And certainly not my grandfather himself, the smiling watchman of my earliest memories, the quiet, black-eyed, slender man who held my hand as we crossed the avenues, who sat on a park bench reading his Russian newspaper while I chased pigeons and harassed sugar ants with broken twigs. Not my grandmother, who knew every folktale from the old country-most of them gruesome children devoured by wolves and beheaded by witches-but never spoke about the war in my hearing. ![]() Who told me? Not my father, who never shared secrets, or my mother, who shied away from mentioning the unpleasant, all things bloody, cancerous, or deformed. ![]() I don't remember anyone telling me-it was something I always seemed to know, the way I knew the Yankees wore pinstripes for home games and gray for the road. My grandfather, the knife fighter, killed two Germans before he was eighteen. ![]()
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