On April 9, 1924, Senator Ellison DuRant Smith of South Carolina makes a speech in the halls of the Senate, calling for--begging--America to shut the door on immigrants. "Let us breed pure American citizens,"he says. "We do not want to tangle the skein of America's progress by those who imperfectly understand the genius of our government. Let us keep what we have . . ."

In the fifty-seven blocks of the Lower East Side, just that day, there are 112 candy shops, ninety-three butchers, seventy saloons, forty-three bakeries, and 500,000 Jews, and just that day Lillian Leyb arrives in America. She has two pieces of paper inside her blouse, for safe-keeping, in addition to the usual, which isn't much.

She had sold her mother's red silk petticoat, sold the one goat that had wandered free and safe, sold the Kiddush cup, and given away the things for which no one had the money or the interest. A neighbor had given her their daughter's coat; the dairyman had given her a satchel that had belonged to his brother. Lillian had stood in a dead woman's coat, holding a dead man's leather bag, and her mother's half-sister had limped over to press a flyer into Lillian's hand: Come to America, the New World. 45 rubles a ticket. Beneath the words there had been a drawing of workers; you could see they were workers because they were short and bowlegged, with caps on their heads, and instead of a chicken under the arm, or a bolt of cloth, each little man had a bag of money, with the American sign for money on the bulging sack, and they were running, running, with their bags of money to a pillared building across the street, marked BANK. The puffs of smoke from the factory, the streetlamps and workers' shiny black shoes, all had a round, friendly quality to them.

"This place is cursed for you now,"Aunt Mariam had said, waving her hand at the empty yard and the dark house. It had sounded as if she was also suggesting that the village was now cursed by Lillian and her unlucky, eviscerated family. "Go to America, you have a cousin there, Frieda. My other sister's daughter. My niece. Here's her letter."

Lillian hadn't said, But I don't know them. She hadn't said, Will they be kind to me? She hadn't said, You have always wanted our house. She had to go. She had buried her parents and her husband and made a grave for her daughter, whose body had not been found (Mariam swore she saw Sophie's body floating in the river out of reach, and Lillian could not ask her if she said that to comfort Lillian, put an end to her uncertainty, or to hasten her departure.) She was twenty-two, she would go to America. She had read Frieda's letter every day. They have room, Frieda says, for family or dear friends. They have a little business and can provide employment while people get on their feet. It is a great country, she writes. Anyone can buy anything, you don't have to be gentry. There is a list of things Frieda has bought recently: a sewing machine (on installment but she has it already), white flour in paper sacks, condensed milk, sweet as cream and doesn't go bad, Nestle's powdered cocoa for a treat in the evening, hairpins that match her hair color exactly, very good stockings, only ten cents. They have things here that people at home cannot even imagine.

Lillian cannot imagine, even as she's walking through it, the noise, the crowds, the filth that is nothing like mere dirt, a dozen languages, market day times a million, a boy playing a harp, a man with an accordion beside a terrible, patchy little animal, a woman selling straw brooms from a basket tied to her waist and three more strapped to her back, making a giant fan behind her head, a colored man in a pink suit with black shoes and pink spats, singing something loud and cheerful, and tired women, who look like women Lillian would have known at home, smiling at the song, or the singer, a very old man and a very young girl selling shoelaces and shiny twists of dough on a stick, and the smell rises up through Lillian's chest and under her chin, making her swallow and swallow again, so she has to wipe her hand over her mouth and pull hard, she is that hungry. She did not imagine that as she approached cousin Frieda's apartment building--having held up the letter and the block-printed address a dozen times to faces that were blank, or worse than blank, knowing and dubious, and held it up to some people who could not themselves read, who pushed her aside as if she had insulted them--that a woman would be standing across the street, dressed only in her nightgown and a man's overcoat.

Lillian watches the woman open a folding chair and take a china plate from her pocket and hold it on her lap. People pass by and put a few coins in the plate. Frieda comes down the stairs and hugs Lillian. "Dear little Lillian,"she says. Frieda is thirty. Lillian remembers her from a family wedding. Frieda took Lillian into the woods, and they picked wild raspberries until it was dark. Lillian watches the woman across the street, sitting stock still in the chair, tears flowing down her face, onto her large, loose breasts, splashing onto the plate with the coins.

"Eviction,"Frieda says. "You can't pay, you can't stay."She says in Yiddish, "Es iz shver tzu makhen a leben"("It's hard to make a living"). She wants to make sure Lillian understands what she's saying. She doesn't want Lillian to be frightened, she says, everything will work out fine between them, but there is nothing wrong with Lillian seeing, right away, how it's nothing to go from having a home, which Lillian does now, with her cousin Frieda, to having no home at all, like the woman across the street who was thrown out that morning. Frieda takes Lillian by the hand and crosses the street. She puts a penny in the wet plate and says, "I'm sorry, Mrs. Lipkin."Going up the stairs to her apartment, Frieda says to Lillian, "Poor thing."The lesson is not lost on Lillian, still holding everything she owns in Yitzak Nirenberg's leather satchel.