The Anatomy of Exile

Brooklyn, New York, 1972

Early one Sunday morning in late July, Salim flung the front door open and shouted, “Get up, get the hell up.” He’d just come home from an all-night shift at the TSS store on 42nd Street in Manhattan, where he moonlighted as a security guard on weekends. Tamar and the children scrambled into the living room. For the four years and seven months they’d been in America, she had dreaded this day. She had watched him go from a man in full control of his emotions to someone at the mercy of them.

Something awful must have happened: a fire, a death, or maybe he’d been robbed at gunpoint. The newspapers were full of such crimes. The children gaped and rubbed sleep from their eyes. Ruby leaned against the open window, where not a breath of air stirred the curtains. Bleary eyed and yawning, she tugged on the Betty Boop T-shirt that barely reached her thighs, a distasteful character, in Tamar’s mind—all that faux innocence and cartoonish sexuality, and couldn’t her daughter have put on a pair of shorts? Rachel stood in first position as if about to jeté out of the room. She was a serious student of ballet and had developed the muscular litheness that comes from hours of practice. Ari looked ready to burst into tears: mouth dry, crusted with saliva, toes polished red. Rachel had used him as a dummy model to hone her manicuring skills. His face was as pudgy as an overstuffed doll. At age...