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Introduction for many years, I knew my grandmother’s famous father only as a majestic bronze bust, glowering in her hall. During his lifetime, Jacob Gordin was an important and beloved playwright, his plays performed wherever Yiddish speakers lived. That I knew. But to me he was obscure and distant, a stern head on the horizon. We did not talk about him. Every July we left our home in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and flew or sailed to broiling NewYork City, my father’s birthplace, to visit my Kaplan grandparents . Before we even got off the elevator at their Upper West Side apartment , I could smell my grandma’s welcome—borscht, kulebiaka, piroshkis. She had been cooking for days, convinced my shiksa mother was starving us to death. The apartment door flew open, and there was stumpy Nettie Gordin Kaplan in a shapeless print dress and old lady black shoes. Behind her loomed the dark glinting bust of her father, who was known in my family, sometimes with a smirk, as the Shakespeare of the Jews. My scientist dad Jacob Gordin Kaplan never talked about his grandfather , his namesake, except with derision. His younger brother, my brilliant Uncle Edgar the champion bridge player, expressed the same disdain for his famous forebear. Why? This was a question that for years preoccupied only me, that was most relevant, of everyone in the family, to me. All my life, words, spoken and written, have been my vocation and my joy. I began scribbling stories and letters at the age of six, and a few years later was performing on radio, television, and stage. At eleven I won a national essay-writing competition. The local newspaper came to take my picture, and the interviewer asked what I wanted to be when I grew up. “An actress,” I replied serenely, “and a writer.” ix How did I know, so young? No one else in my family acted or wrote for a living. When I entered a London drama school at twenty-one, the director inquired what I hoped to accomplish in the theater. “To change the world,” I replied. At thirty, I took leave of my acting career to get a graduate degree in creative writing. And yet it wasn’t until I chose as my master’s thesis to research and write the life of my great-grandfather Jacob Gordin, the writer renowned for his work in the theater, work he insisted would change the world, that I began to ponder the obvious genetic link behind both my vocations—the endless braiding of the generations, down from him to me. I have spent almost twenty-five years unearthing my ancestor’s life. When I began at the age of thirty-one, with my infant daughter sleeping beside me, I used those archaic instruments of research, the letter, the electric typewriter, the telephone, the airplane. After the MFA degree was granted, I kept on sleuthing. It is hard to grasp, now, that I didn’t even own a computer until 1986, or use the Internet for research until 1997, fifteen years into the work. Today, my daughter is ready to have children of her own, and my then unborn son is an exceptionally tall young man with a beard. And at fifty- five, I have finally said, “Dayenu.” Enough. From the beginning, I worked alone except for one invaluable collaborator : early in my research I was blessed to meet Sarah Torchinsky, who became my Yiddish translator. For twenty years, Sarah translated everything in Yiddish that came my way. This book would not exist without her. At the start, I believed with regret that all the stars of the Gordin drama were dead. How grateful I was to meet, often just before they floated out of reach, ancient relatives previously unknown to me. I journeyed three times to Queens to talk to Jacob Gordin’s youngest daughter, my great-aunt Helen Gordin Zielstein, who was in her late eighties when I first met her. She died five years later in 1988, the same year as her much younger nephew, my father. I took the bus twice to Lakefield, New Jersey, to interview the Gordins’ first grandchild, a cousin my father had never met:Anna Greenspoon Richmond, nearly deaf and blind at ninety-five and yet eager to tell me her tales. I managed to track down other family members lost for decades, so that once sparsely decorated branches of the Gordin family tree are now blooming...

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