The Grossman family lived downstairs on the second floor in our tenement house on the Lower East Side when I was a kid. We hardly knew them though they were physically imposing figures that ordinarily could not be disregarded. Mother, father, three grown sons, two adult daughters, the men all over six feet, the older daughter a head taller than all the other women in the building. We wondered aloud sometimes how all of these giants managed to live together in a three-room apartment with one toilet in the hallway shared by two families. But we hardly ever spoke to them.

The reasons were never mentioned. Mrs. Grossman had the habit of opening her second-floor door whenever anyone was traipsing up or down the stairs, which meant that she opened her door dozens of times each day. She'd nod to neighbors, say hello and sometimes add another bit of conversation, but nothing more. My mother didn't especially like this intrusion and kept her distance.

My father had religious reasons. The Grossmans were non-observant. Their radio blared away during all of the Sabbath, loud enough to be heard in the hallway and on the stairs. I longed as a kid to go to their apartment to hear some of the famous radio programs since we didn't own a radio until I was eleven years old, but I didn't dare ask. I heard summaries of Jack Benny and Fred Allen and Jack Armstrong, the All-American boy, and the Lone Ranger and Tonto from my friends in school, but I dared not admit that I hadn't heard the programs myself or that we were too poor to own a radio.

The Grossman boys and even the old father walked around with heads uncovered summer and winter, and this was unheard of among religious Jews. So inevitably, relations between the Grossmans and people like my mother and father were coldly cordial and minimal. On Sundays I stood on the stairs of the second floor on my way down from our fourth-floor apartment and strained to listen to the opening lines of "The Shadow" as I had heard them imitated by my school chums. If Mrs. Grossman opened her door at my shifting footstep, I ran.

It was therefore with elation and not a little surprise that I came home from Hebrew School one evening to find old Mr. and Mrs. Grossman seated at our kitchen table. My parents were standing close by, and glasses of tea and slices of honey cake were also on the table as for all guests.

"I hear your older daughter Celia is making a trip to Poland," my father said.

The two Grossmans nodded.

"Is it just for pleasure," my father continued, "or maybe for your sons' business or something?"

They were tall even in their seats, the Grossmans. Mr. Grossman was even taller than usual because he had come up to my parents' apartment wearing a top hat that added six inches to his height, undoubtedly in deference to my parents' religious sensibilities.

"What business?" Mrs. Grossman said. Her husband kept silent. "The hell with it. It ain't worth a nickel. We should spend hundreds of dollars to send Celia to Europe for that stupid business? Crazy we're not. Believe me you."

Her voice was strangely different from her hall voice. In the hall, the natural resonance of that space magnified her every tone. Here in the apartment, she sounded tweety, high-pitched, thin as a reed, without body, but the intensity was there and the self-assurance and even the aggression.

"So she's going just for pleasure? It's a lot of money to spend," my mother intervened to say. "Such a beautiful girl, she deserves it for sure, but it's still a lot of money, the ship and everything."

Mr. Grossman continued munching away at the brown honey cake with nuts. He sipped his tea through a solid piece of sugar held between his teeth, or perhaps between his gums, since he didn't seem to have teeth to speak of. His cheeks had fallen in because of the toothless mouth, but in eating they blew up and inflated and deflated like little balloons. His churning mouth left no room for speaking.

"Such a beautiful girl," Mrs. Grossman tweeted in sarcastic approval. "So beautiful she ain't married yet at twenty-eight, and me with a younger daughter and three giant sons who can't find girls for themselves to marry and eat up everything in the icebox even though the store don't bring in a penny. That's what beautiful means. It's a curse, not a blessing."

"Zindik nisht," my mother hastened to add. "Don't say words of sin. Your children are strong and healthy and very nice looking, kanihurih. God will look after them. God will help."

Mrs. Grossman slammed her glass of tea to the table. Luckily, it was only half full, and the liquid jumped high but stayed in the glass. My mother's word against the evil eye must have worked.

"So God will help. That's all He gotta do is pay attention to a Grossman family in an East Side with a million people? He can't even stop a Hitler from marching into Austria, He's gonna march my daughters and sons to the chupih, the marriage canopy? It won't happen so fast unless I do somethin' about it. So I send my daughter Celia to Europe with all the money I can borrow or steal, God protect me. So I send her to our old shtetl in Poland and hope that one of the lazy nogoodniks who still lives there gets interested in her and also thinks she's beautiful which she ain't."

My mother looked at my father who sat down slowly at the table at the one remaining seat. His head was slightly bowed and his brow furrowed in deep thought, the way he always looked before beginning to recite a prayer.

"Mr. and Mrs. Grossman," my father said finally. "Our home town of Sambor is not too far from Kalush where you were born and lived. If your Celia is in Kalush, she can also go to Sambor in less than a day."

Mr. Grossman stopped swallowing.

"We have a young second cousin there who is maybe twenty-five, maybe thirty. A fine boy. Not so religious, but a fine boy. His whole family is still there - mother, father, brothers, sisters -like yours. He's even educated. He went to a technical high school in Poland and to cheder too for religious learning. He's even nice looking. And a calm disposition. He wouldn't hurt a fly even though he was in the Polish army. He's strong too. And the whole family there is worried about him because the other brothers and sisters are all married and he's the youngest and he's not married."

Mrs. Grossman began guzzling on the half-filled glass of tea. My mother refilled her glass immediately.

"We can write to him right away, and I'm sure he would meet Celia at the train station and show her around for a few days. Who knows? Who knows what would happen? I mean nothing would happen. He's a good boy. But maybe something good would happen. What do you say?"

Mrs. Grossman burst into such laughter that she sprayed all of us with droplets of hot tea. She slapped her husband on the back, and the tall man with the tall hat let out a yelp through mounds of brown honey cake that showed he had a voice and maybe even an opinion.

"You hear, Yankel?" she said to her husband. "Not only are they learned and religious, righteous Jews of the highest type, this family, but the mister is also a shadchan, a marriage broker, and he and his wife together wanna make a shidduch for our Celia with even a member of their own family in Poland. A match made in heaven. Can anything be better?"

My mother bowed her head. "It's the greatest mitzvah in the world," my mother said softly. "Maybe we can make another Jewish family, and maybe we can save a life too."

Mrs. Grossman slapped my father on the back the same way she had previously slapped her husband's back. My father was much shorter and weaker. He almost fell to the floor.

"Mentschen, it's a deal!" she shouted. Her voice suddenly sounded like the hall voice, loud, determined, self-assured, aggressive, and I in my corner marveled at the unforeseen turn of events in our tenement house.

Celia Grossman was not beautiful. She was tall and could have carried beauty like a robust pine towering over a forest of lesser trees, but her face was sallow and pockmarked, her lips fallen in without ever having lost her teeth, her eyes squinty and colorless, her form out of all proportion at every turn. Celia Grossman left for Poland a month after Passover and returned just before the High Holidays in September alone, without escort, but officially married to our cousin Harry who was called Herschel by my elated parents. At the beginning of the following year, in February, Herschel himself arrived to join his new bride, and we went to greet him along with Celia and along with the whole Grossman clan at boatside on 46th Street in Manhattan. The following September, war broke out in Europe as Hitler's hordes attacked Poland, and all connections with Herschel's family in Poland, with the Grossmans' distant family in Kalush, and with the cousins of my father and mother in Sambor, Borislav, Dobromil, and Radom where my father's brother was a shoichet and a dayun/judge in the Jewish community were broken almost irrevocably. But Herschel was safe in the United States of America and Celia had a husband. A shidduch, a match, had been made on earth, if not in heaven.

I'm getting ahead of myself. Months before the war broke out in Europe, things happened after their marriage, exceptional things.

Celia's younger sister by perhaps a dozen years - Celia was the eldest sibling, her sister the youngest, with the three boys in between - was named Feigy. She was much shorter than the general run of her family, so much so that she seemed to be from another clan. She was thin, wispy, fragile like a bird, which is what her Yiddish name meant. My mother always referred to her as Feigeleh, Little Bird, a diminutive of affection that fitted her very well.

She was very pretty, very sweet-looking, not in the bulging sexual way of my Aunt Geety, but a charmer nevertheless. She certainly was not physically imposing like her elder sister, but she generated frissons of pleasure in everyone with a winning smile and a demure way of moving about under and over and side to side and with a surprised look of delight on her face that absolutely arrested attention. It didn't take long for people to realize that her new brother-in-law Herschel had begun taking undue notice of her.

Herschel looked much younger than Celia his bride. He was certainly much shorter than she, half a head shorter, and definitely much better looking. He had a shock of rust-colored hair that always flopped over one eye no matter how many times he shoved the strands backward. And since he didn't ever wear a hat - my parents' original comment to Mrs. Grossman that their young cousin in Poland wasn't particularly religious being close to the truth - he was always working his hair. It was not in the least annoying to onlookers. It was, in fact, a winning trait.

Feigy would visit her sister often. By luck, an apartment in our building in the back of our fourth floor had become vacant just before Herschel's arrival from Europe, and the Grossmans jumped at the opportunity to secure it for their daughter and their new son-in-law. "Vacant" is not the most accurate word. It's previous tenant, a widow named Gussie had actually been evicted by the landlord for non-payment of rent. The widow and her few sticks of furniture were placed on the street one fine day. It was an awful sight - my mother, in fact, looked away and started to cry. She was inconsolable, but Celia Grossman, as yet sans presence of husband from Sambor, moved in very quickly without the slightest display of emotion.

It turned out to be not the most tragic of denouements because my mother found a place for the widow Gussie in Mount Vernon in the house of our Uncle Oosher whose daughter Geety had vacated a room upon her marriage to Big Red and her move to Canarsie in Brooklyn. Uncle Oosher didn't live in a five-story tenement on the Lower East Side. He actually had a house, a separated house in a northern suburb among gentiles, a house with many rooms and a toilet inside. My mother had to break down her own resistance to putting a widow woman into a home with her widower brother. Though both were fairly well advanced in years, it wasn't, after all, particularly nice. But in this instance, as in so many other instances with my mother, the desire to help another lost soul overcame any social or cultural or religious qualms. The widow Gussie went suburban, and Celia Grossman, now called Celia Frimmer, had her own bridal suite prepared for her husband on the fourth floor of a five-story walkup. It was in the rear of the building where we lived in the front facing the street, but lucky for her, it was also two floors above her parents who were too tired to walk up to her door with any consistency.

Feigy did walk the two flights - frequently at night and many times by day. And many times after Herschel's arrival from Poland, especially when he was there and Celia was not. It happened this way. Celia went out to a job by day - she worked as a finisher in the garment district where dozens of women sewed clothes and men ironed them. On the other hand, Herschel soon got a job as a night watchman at a matzoh factory on Rivington Street. Though he was nowhere near as tall as his brothers-in-law or his wife, he was uncommonly strong, with arms bursting with muscles, and in spite of his invitingly handsome baby-face looks, he also looked fearless. That stuff about his service in the Polish army must have been true. End result - a watchman's job, which was not bad for a new arrival whose English learned long ago in a Polish school was spotty, to say the least. So by day, Herschel was consistently home, alone. And Feigy came to visit.

My father who himself left the apartment in the afternoon to go to work as a melamed, a teacher in the local Yeshiva on Houston Street opposite the park, a Yeshiva I never attended, was home every morning and quickly became aware of the shenanigans on the floor. He rose early to go to the neighboring synagogue for morning prayer and returned home for breakfast within the hour. Sometimes, he would see Feigy barrel up the stairs in a housecoat, sometimes in a flimsy skirt and blouse that was already half unbuttoned. Sometimes he heard what he didn't want to hear though he looked for nothing and hoped for nothing. He was not a meddlesome man, in spite of his major act of arranging the shidduch, the match between Celia and Herschel. But he could not help himself in this case. Not only was Herschel an ember saved from the frightful conflagration soon to engulf all of Europe, but he was also a newly-found son to my father. And though he was inevitably a newly-found elder brother to me whose sudden appearance from inside the European cauldron could never offend, he represented a massive problem of heart and soul to my father, for major principles of another sort were at issue here.

My father did not know the ways of subterfuge or false diplomacy. He only knew Torah law and Torah tradition.

"Herschel," he said to the young man who was drinking the inevitable cup of tea at our kitchen table. This time my mother was nowhere to be seen. The matter was too delicate for her ears. But I was at the door, my open schoolbook at the ready if I were discovered. "You're like my son. Herschel, it clearly states in the Torah you can't take a wife and her sister together. That will specially aggravate the wife and destroy the family. It's in Vayikraw, the Book of Leviticus. We read it again by Minchih services on the afternoon of Yom Kippur before the closing N'eelih service. Do you know why we read it on Yom Kippur?"

Herschel Frimmer, now called Harry, did not ask for an answer.

"We read it then because it's one of the worst sins, along with all the others mentioned there of family promiscuity. We read it then because at the final moment of judgment, on the most awesome day of Yom Kippur, we must cleanse ourselves of this brutish inclination. We read it then because, to our sorrow, many Jews only come to sheel on Yom Kippur, and they must hear these words before it's too late. Herschel, my son, before it's too late."

Harry wavered between talking and not talking. "It's too late," he finally said bluntly to my father.

My father did not show emotion or give up talking. "It's never too late," my father said. "You must break the relationship now before it's too late."

"I can't," Harry said. His words were like his physical body - short, to the point, and iron-strong. "I won't, Uncle." He always called my father "Uncle," even though Harry was simply a second cousin once removed of my father, but my father was much older and enjoyed the status of uncle with him just as cousin Geety, much older than I, was always Aunt Geety to me.

"I don't understand such talk," my father said. "Do you love that child so much you can't think straight? You're married less than a year, you're six months in America, and you're already carrying on without control? It's beyond understanding."

Harry crossed one leg, uncrossed it, then crossed the other. He wiped his mouth with a flowing handkerchief Then he adjusted the brim of his slouch hat which he wore, I'm sure, to our apartment just to please my father. He looked like a handsome Dillinger just before the FBI shot the gangster in front of the movie theater.

"I married Celia without love. I did not love her. I don't think she loved me. She loved marriage. I loved getting to America with her help and with yours to save my life. I didn't save my life in order to die an old man in America without love."

Suddenly my father stormed at him. My father jumped up and pounded on the table. His face went white. The benign look in his eyes turned cold and piercing. I had almost never seen him act this way before.

"What kind of stupidity is this? What kind of foolishness? Has America with the movies and the naked women in the papers scrambled your head? Dih bist ah Yid! You're a Jew! You're not a heathen. You're not an animal. You're God's creation. You were meant for higher things. Yes, the body must be served. It is God's creation too. A man must love. A woman must love. But is there only one woman in the world, and that one gotta be a sister? Celia is a good woman. The way God made her is the way God made her. She will give you children and a home and love, if you let her. She's big, she's strong. She'll give you a bundle of children."

My father's next sentence he said slowly, out loud, emphasizing each word one at a time. "You will have a family again." A moment of silence, and he added, "A big immediate family again, Hitler or no Hitler. Is that to be thrown away for a man's foolishness? I expected more from my young cousin, from almost a son of mine."

Harry put his face into his cupped hands. The long fingers covered his eyes and pushed the slouch hat up so that the errant shock of rust-colored hair plopped out and down.

Suddenly, Harry began to mumble through his spreading fingers. His words were loud, still defiant, but almost muffled into incomprehensibility. I figured them out after all. "Jacob married Leah and Rachel," he said. "It's not against Jewish law. Leah and Rachel both. It says so in the Torah. You're a scholar, Uncle. You know all that stuff."

My father's patience finally grew thin. "You're now giving me instruction in Torah? Do you hear that, Leah? Our Hershalih is teaching me Torah in my old age."

My mother whose name was also Leah was not within earshot and probably did not hear her name mentioned. She was in the bedroom doing something or other, reading the Tzena U-R 'ena, the Torah translation in Yiddish. I was in the living room in our railroad flat at the door facing the kitchen where the two men were sitting. I had long since put aside my physics textbook.

"Don't be such a wiseguy," my father cautioned Harry. The plain American word we always bandied about in the street sounded funny in the mouth of my father.

"The Patriarchs lived before the giving of the Law at Mount Sinai," he continued. "Some of the pre-Sinai injunctions against certain relationships did not apply as yet to them. But after Sinai, no self-respecting Jew would carry on with both a wife and her sister, God forbid. That's the law until the Moshiach, the Messiah comes."

"I can't wait that long," Harry said impetuously. He got up as if to go. Though of average height, he towered over my father.

My father must have thought that he was losing him. He straightened up so that he grew several inches at once in my feverish estimation. He put both his hands on either side of Harry Frimmer's cheeks, squeezed them gently, and spoke in a much softer voice. The shouting was at an end. I breathed deeply in relief though the moment of deeper truth had not yet arrived.

"Herschel, listen to me. Maybe you think there is a God, maybe you think there isn't a God, may I be forgiven for even mentioning the last possibility. This modern world, the one you grew up in over there in Poland and the one we're trying to bring up good Jewish children in over here in America is too much for me to understand at times. But I know this. God may be looking for a sign from us. Most of the people in the world always look for a sign from God. But in this time of terrible danger for our people in Europe, God may be looking for acts of goodness and morality and devotion from us to see if He should save the Jewish remnant from the terrible violence of the evil tyrant."

Herschel's face, his cheeks under my father's hands, clearly changed colors from tan to deep red to stark white to red again.

"Your family is still in Poland. Your mother, your father, your sisters and brothers, uncles, aunts, and cousins. My younger brother, the shoichet in Radom, is also there with his family - all of them in the greatest danger. The tyrant stands ready to attack, and if he makes a war and even if our dear relatives all escape destruction in the coming military battles, they will then surely face agony and death in the terrible concentration camps made for all Jews and for others too. The consequences of Nazi rule for the Jews in Europe we have already seen on that night of the broken glass, that Kristallnacht last November. Those optimistic people who closed their eyes in the past to the possibility of the worst happening cannot close them anymore after that night of a national pogrom against the Jews. Do you hear me, Herschel?"

Herschel nodded.

"Who knows? Maybe small acts of goodness and decency by us here will push the scales to the side of survival. Maybe these pious acts will be the sign God is waiting for. God may listen to us, Herschel. Yes, He may listen. In fact, He must listen to us. We will force him to listen to us by our righteous deeds. Maybe the ultimate decision is not, God forbid, His to make, All-Powerful and All-Merciful as He is. Maybe the decision lies in our hands."

My father squeezed his own hands more tightly toward each other on Harry's discolored cheeks.

"In our hands," my father added. "Our fate is in our hands. In your hands, Herschel."

Within a month, Hitler invaded Poland, and my father almost went berserk. Every day, upon his return from teaching at the Yeshiva, he turned on the little Philco radio we had recently acquired and turned the dial from one news program to the other. He could not stand still. He marched up and down the living room, doing miles of roadwork in a constricted area of fifteen feet by ten feet. He mumbled to himself constantly, something I had never seen him do. My mother did not try to stop him. She watched him out of the corner of her eye, brought him a cup of tea the moment he sat down, and tried to comfort him.

"Your brother, the shoichet in Radom, is a scholar, a wise man," she said. "He'll know what to do to get away from the Nazis with all his family. Don't worry so much."

And she always invoked God. "Your brother is a tzaddik, a righteous man. God will watch over him and his family. Don't worry. A Jew must hope and trust in God."

I was so disturbed by my father's actions that I had almost forgotten about Harry Frimmer and my father's conversation with him. I had even forgotten to snoop around the hallway to see if Feigy Grossman was still making her trips to his apartment when Celia wasn't there. It dawned on me that Harry might be just as worried as my father about the fate of his remaining relatives in the hometown in Poland. After all, Harry had left parents there in addition to brothers and sisters. And they were cousins of ours too. A crazy idea came into my head that if I mentioned Harry's relatives to my father, it might get his mind off his own brother. And he might even calm down a little in talking about somebody else's fate. It was a ridiculous mistake.

My father quickened his pace across the living room floor. "My brother, my sister-in-law, my nieces and nephews, my cousins, all the Jews -" he said, "they're all in trouble, in the worst trouble ever. Nobody is exempt. No matter if religious or not religious, with a head covering or without. We have sinned. We came to America, and we sinned. We began to live like all the others, violating the Sabbath, drinking, gambling in pool rooms, allowing the yetzer hawrih, the evil inclination, to rule us, running around with other women, even with a sister, God forbid. It says so in Yechezkel, I mean the prophet Ezekiel, in chapter 22. Because of their sins against the poor and their immorality, the House of Israel will be like brass or tin or iron or lead in the middle of the furnace, like the impurities of silver. In the furnace, in the flames. Oh my brothers and sisters! My brother was right. Free America will destroy us. Even if it kills us slowly, Hitler, yemach shemo, may his name be erased, will kill us quickly because we have sinned."

About a week later, I saw Harry Frimmer downstairs at the candy store. He was making a lot of calls on the candy-store phone, and Vinnie the owner was annoyed because he was expecting a call from a candy distributor who was going to give him a better deal.

I told Harry what my father had said without mentioning running around with a sister. Harry nodded, blew his nose into his knuckles without a handkerchief and didn't say anything.

And a week after that, Harry was gone. My mother said that he had taken a train up north and had joined the Canadian army to fight Hitler. Harry had served in the Polish army, so he must have gotten in very easily.

My mother cried a little. She liked Harry and feared for his life. She wanted Hitler to lose, but she wanted Harry safe at home. The two things didn't go together, but my mother never thought about contradictions like that.

A month after Harry had left, Celia told everybody that she was pregnant with her first child. My mother was elated.

"God works in strange ways," my father said. "Maybe this is the beginning of the repentance, the geulah, the redemption."

"Haliviy," my mother said. "Would that it were so." She thought for a moment, as if debating with herself whether to say something that might disturb my father or not. She spoke softly, slowly. "But do so many people have to die for the geulah to come?" she asked.

Naturally, I didn't have to snoop around the hallway to know that with Harry having gone to war, Feigy Grossman stopped going upstairs secretly except to see her sister Celia and help her out in her pregnancy. Feigy didn't reveal a single sign of anguish or concern at Harry's disappearance. She was so beautiful and so alive, and she found boyfriends elsewhere, but that's another story.