![]() 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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