In six years of conducting research on America's poor Jews I have met no one more delightful than the seventy-year-old man I will call Yankel Kanter. As the sort of research I do is based on speaking with people over a long period of time, it is only natural that I would be especially attracted to such a man as Yankel. If the purpose of my work is to allow people to describe in their own words how their lives are being led, then Yankel, eager to talk, was the perfect person to participate in the research.

Over the years of our friendship Yankel has talked about a great many things, although never once about the death of his wife and children in a death camp in Poland. He is in his way, although he would never say this, a scholarly and learned gentleman whose immediate response to almost any question of mine was: “Oh you know, just the other night I was reading a book on that very subject.“