I spoke flawless Hebrew - a language that now, when I hear it, has the quality of a half-remembered dream. I was an Orthodox Jewish girl who had the siddur memorized, who belted out the Birkat Hamazon with my father after every Shabbos meal. You could have gotten us bread from the Nazis. She’s still gripping me when she says: We could have used you in the ghetto, little blondie. What does she see? I am pale, blue-eyed, delicate. Kushner runs her hand through my hair, which is white-blond, the same color as my eyebrows.

I’ve heard whispers that she and her family dug a tunnel out of the Jewish ghetto in their Polish town during the war, enabling hundreds to escape. She’s a stout woman with a teased hairdo and a thick accent. I’m young - five or six-and when I come outside to say hello to the grown-ups, Mrs. But on this day, the Kushners are just nice older people, quite a bit older than my parents. Many years later, their son will be arrested and imprisoned in a tawdry case involving hookers and embezzlement. Lunch is served cold, as it always is after my dad returns from temple. I know this much: it’s Shabbos, which means no cigarettes for my father, no radio for my mother. The adults sip iced tea from green plastic cups and relax on the kinds of lounge chairs that leave marks on your thighs when you stand.

A forsythia hedge spills over the next-door neighbor’s fence. An early memory: it’s a Saturday afternoon in the late 1960s and my parents are sitting with friends in our New Jersey backyard.

Inheritance novel by dani shapiro