In My Brother's Image

In My Brother's Image is the extraordinary story of Eugene Pogany's father and uncle-identical twin brothers born in Hungary of Jewish parents but raised as devout Catholic converts until the Second World War unraveled their family. In eloquent prose, Pogany portrays how the Holocaust destroyed the brothers' close childhood bond: his father, a survivor of a Nazi internment camp, denounced Christianity and returned to the Judaism of his birth, while his uncle, who found shelter in an Italian monastic community during the war, became a Catholic priest. Even after emigrating to America the brothers remained estranged, each believing the other a traitor to their family's faith. This tragic memoir is a rich, moving family portrait as well as an objective historical account of the rupture between Jews and Catholics. | Acknowledgments
Author's Note
Prologue: Sorrow in Search of Memory
Chapter 1: Departing
Chapter 2: Crossing Over
Chapter 3: Crucible
Chapter 4: Providence
Chapter 5: Harbingers
Chapter 6: Exile
Chapter 7: Breach
Chapter 8: Flight
Chapter 9: Sanctuary
Chapter 10: Betrayals
Chapter 11: Path of Sorrow
Chapter 12: Samaritans
Chapter 13: Death and Resurrection
Chapter 14: Ascension
Chapter 15: Reunion
Chapter 16: Disarmed
Chapter 17: "Jew Priest"
Chapter 18: Revisiting
Chapter 19: Memoria Passionis
Chapter 20: Mourning
Chapter 21: Remembrance

Notes

| "Highly readable and deeply inspiring.... I recommend it to all readers who wish to know more about what happened to European Jewry during the Holocaust." --Elie Wiesel

"A gripping, wrenching tale, a powerful addition to the Holocaust literature." --The Boston Globe

| Eugene L. Pogany is a practicing psychologist in Boston. A frequent speaker on anti-Semitism and Jewish-Catholic relations, he has written for Cross Currents, Sh'ma, Jewishfamily.com, and the Jewish Advocate. |

Praise for In My Brother’s Image

“This is not just another story of the Holocaust. It is a lesson in tolerance . . . and it is written in tears from deep within the soul.”

—Middlesex Jewish Star

“Moving . . . [Pogany] makes us understand the complexity—and feel the heartbreak—of his family’s one-of-a-kind history.”

—New York Post

“Profoundly riveting and morally compelling.”

—The Philadelphia Inquirer

“A tool . . . to help move Christians from . . . mere defensiveness to . . . moral ownership for the part that Christians played in the evil of the Shoah.”

—Father David C. Michael, The Pilot

“Remarkable . . . There is much to recommend about this book for anyone interested in World War II and the Holocaust. There is also much to recommend to any Jew or Christian who wishes to contemplate the complex relationship between faith and experience.”

—The Roanoke Times

“[Pogany’s] book is one of the most compelling personal narratives to come out of the Holocaust.”

—Booklist

“A memorable family story, full of vivid atmosphere and stirring incidents.”

—Kirkus Reviews

“Eugene Pogany’s power-packed and poignant narrative of his father’s wartime years, his return to his Jewish faith while his brother became a Catholic priest is highly readable and deeply inspiring. I recommend it to all readers who wish to know more about what happened to European Jewry during the Holocaust.”

—Elie Wiesel

“In this powerful and searing memoir Eugene Pogany opens his heart to share the incredible story of his Jewish father and his Christian uncle, twin brothers whose lives were profoundly altered in the crucible of the Holocaust. In My Brother’s Image is a sensitive and overwhelming tale which constitutes a vital addition to the legacy of the Shoah.”

—Alan L. Berger, Raddock Eminent Scholar Chair of Holocaust Studies, Florida Atlantic University

“In My Brother’s Image is a very remarkable contribution to the Holocaust Literature. It is a riveting account of a very unusual familial conflict, caused by the conversion to Catholicism by some members of a Hungarian Jewish family. This fascinating conflict between two identical brothers echoes the schism between their separate religions. Reading the book turned me into a virtual witness to what happened, day by day, to the Jews of Hungary between World War I and the end of World War II. Eugene Pogany lovingly tries to understand and bring to life the struggles and soul searching of the generation before him. His book is a real page turner.”

—Edith Velmans, author of Edith’s Story

PENGUIN BOOKS

IN MY BROTHER’S IMAGE

Eugene L. Pogany is a practicing clinical psychologist in Boston. A frequent speaker on anti-Semitism and Jewish-Catholic relations, he has written for Cross Currents, Sh’ma, Jewishfamily.com, and the Jewish Advocate. He lives in Newton, Massachusetts, with his wife and two sons.

IN MY

BROTHER’S IMAGE

Twin Brothers Separated by
Faith After the Holocaust

Eugene Pogany

And still it is not yet enough to have memories. One must be able to forget them when they are many and one must have the great patience to wait until they come again. For it is not yet the memories themselves. Not till they have turned to blood within us, to glance and gesture, nameless and no longer to be distinguished from ourselves—not till then can it happen that in a most rare hour the first word of a verse arises in their midst and goes forth from them.

RAINER MARIA RILKE

The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

“The moment one definitely commits oneself,” wrote Goethe, “all sorts of things occur, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance which no man could have dreamed would have come his way.” In addition to those individuals mentioned in the Author’s Note who helped with the factual content of this book, there are numerous others whose assistance and goodwill were invaluable in making it a reality. I wish to express my gratitude to Nancy Malone, O.S.U., the tireless and visionary former editor of Cross Currents: The Journal of the Association for Religion and Intellectual Life. Along with her discerning coeditors, Joseph Cunneen and William Birmingham, Nancy introduced this story to the journal’s interfaith readership by featuring my essay, “In Each Other’s Likeness,” in its Spring 1995 issue (Vol. 45, No. 1). I have quoted briefly here from both that essay and my later piece, “Exile and Memory: Reflections on Tisha B’Av,” which appeared in the Winter 1995–96 issue of Cross Currents (Vol. 45, No. 4).

My friend Jürgen Manemann, of Westfälische Wilhelms University, Münster, Germany, further advanced the telling of the story by translating “In Each Other’s Likeness” into German and facilitating its publication in the Swiss Catholic periodical Orientierung, where it appeared in August 1997 (Volume 6, Number 15/16). Similarly, I wish to thank Professor Randolph L. Braham, preeminent scholar of the Hungarian Holocaust, who graciously recommended my essay to the distinguished Budapest Jewish quarterly, Múlt és Jövő [Past and Future], where it appeared in its 1997/2 issue.

From the very inception of this book project, I have been especially grateful for the friendship of Beverly Coyle. Her support and goodwill have helped to open doors, and her timely advice has familiarized me with the publishing world. My agent, Helen Rees, believed in this story and convinced me of its viability as a book, and her endless enthusiasm helped find the book a home with Viking. My editor at Viking, Jane von Mehren, steadily and decisively stewarded this project through the entire editorial process, from the initial board meeting to the crafting and shaping of the book through its various stages. I was blessed throughout by her skill, sensitivity, and unflagging good judgment, as well as by her gracious support. Jane’s assistant, Jessica Kipp, provided a literary ear and thorough professionalism well beyond her youthful years. Copy editor Carole McCurdy’s meticulous attention to detail and style, as well as her profound sensitivity to the story, helped to make this a better book than it otherwise would have been.

Abundant thanks, as well, to Joan Leegant and Ronnie Friedland for their generous editorial counsel during the early stages, and to Don Gropman and Sandi Gelles-Cole for their seasoned advice and adept assistance on the book proposal. My good friend Jeff Baker brought a keen and sophisticated sensibility to his reading of a first, voluminous draft of the manuscript. Charlie Puccia unselfishly did everything from arranging my travel to Italy to translating my uncle’s Italian letters.

I extend my appreciation to Professor John Clabeaux of St. John’s Seminary, in Brighton, Massachusetts, and Father Tom Kane, S.J., of the Weston Jesuit School of Theology, in Cambridge, both of whom refined my understanding of Catholic ritual, liturgical practices, and Scriptural interpretation. I am responsible for whatever errors remain in the text.

I also wish to acknowledge the dear members of the Boston One Generation After writers’ group, in whose warm and supportive company I thought and wrote, read, and listened for more years than I have worked on this book. Special thanks also to Cynthia Ozick, whose incisive correspondence alternately blessed my efforts and impelled me to think deeply and clearly about the painful history between Catholics and Jews.

I am immensely grateful to Katharina Lamping for the many hours during which she shared stories and vignettes with me of her seventeen years of service to my uncle and his parish church. My brother, Peter, and sister, Ellen, were always in my thoughts, especially when I wrote of our early years together. Although people’s recollections of the same events can often vary widely, my siblings naturally served me as touchstones for those times. Thanks, as well, to Bob Buday, our long-lost relative, who also helped get this book off the ground. The excitement and love of the many extended-family members and personal friends who have watched me bring this story to life over the years, often in relative isolation, have been a source of ongoing comfort.

Although my father and mother are noted in numerous other places for the contributions they made to informing the content of this book, there is insufficient room to adequately thank them. I was initially afraid that they would tire of the many hours they spent with me during the past several years being recorded on audio, video, and notepad. I can only hope that they have been as enlivened by our encounters as I have been. I can now more confidently say that I truly know my parents—what they have lived and suffered and how their lives have influenced the person I have become. May what my father and mother learn about their son for his efforts at portraying them prove equally as precious to them.

Finally, my dear wife, Judy, prolific reader and no-nonsense critic, gave timely and insightful feedback and showed immense patience and forbearance as wife and mother throughout the years of this project. This book would not have been conceivable without her abiding and loving presence. Last but not least, our sons, Ben and Elias, must often have wondered what this complex story was all about and when it would actually be completed. Now that I can place the book into their hands, may the silences that pervaded our family’s life during my own childhood begin to be dispelled in theirs. I dedicate this book to them.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

I began work on this book a few weeks after the death of my uncle, Monsignor George Pogany, in July 1993. It is a sad irony that I could not begin to tell the story of my Jewish father and his Catholic twin brother until after they were separated by death. When my uncle came to the United States in 1956, he promised my father that he would not bring up religious differences with his brother’s children. In the aftermath of the brothers’ nearly two-decades-long separation, however, they seemed to have little ability or willingness to discuss with each other the agonizing matters of grief, disappointment, and recrimination surrounding their mutual losses in the war and my formerly devout Catholic father’s return to Judaism after the Holocaust. Consequently, there was much silence growing up in their midst, interrupted by sometimes tense conversations about themselves and their family. Their sister’s only visit from Australia, in 1984, generated discussions among the three siblings that helped familiarize me with virtually all of the people in earlier generations of our family, as well as with some of the more poignant themes in their lives.

When my uncle died, my father broke the brothers’ vow of silence about religion and the war. In the process, he revealed a truly astounding memory for details, going back to the beginning of their lives. He shared facts, conversations, and impressions of the various characters, as well as hunches about their inner lives and motivations. We took two trips to Hungary together, which liberated his memory and immensely enhanced my understanding of my father’s origins.

As work on the book proceeded, my mother became equally engrossed in the project. She had always told dramatic and heart-wrenching tales of suffering, loss, and survival. Now, she provided necessary and gripping details, and courageously touched on closely guarded, painful stories of how her identity as a Jew had been threatened. These accounts only affirmed for me the resilience of the Jewish spirit, even after the Holocaust, and heightened my appreciation for my mother having so thoroughly instilled in her children a love of belonging to the Jewish people.

Partly through my uncle’s lifelong love and solicitude toward me as his nephew, I gained a realistic and direct sense of him as a person. After his death, Katharina Lamping, George’s devoted parish assistant and housekeeper of many years, provided invaluable insight into my uncle’s faith and religious vocation. Katharina’s reminiscences, coupled with the survival of a sizable collection of his homilies, as well as what my father eventually shared with me, helped me to form a picture of Father George’s life as a singularly devoted Roman Catholic priest. Although the conversations I recount between him and Katharina occurred more in my imagination than in actuality, they are based on everything I have learned about the relationship between them, on actual events in George’s life and statements he made, as well as on his psychological and spiritual sensibilities as evident in these sources.

In regard to my uncle’s life with Padre Pio, in Rome I met with Padre Pio Abresch, George’s former boyhood student of Greek (and chess) in San Giovanni Rotondo. Soon after, I journeyed to that town to visit the Our Lady of Grace friary, where I was graciously guided by Padre Joseph Pius Martin. Both of these very kind padres helped me gain a vivid appreciation of the years George spent in the service of the saintly Padre Pio of Pietrelcina.

In addition, the Reverend C. Bernard Ruffin was exceedingly helpful for his superlative biography of Padre Pio, which includes an invaluable interview with my uncle. The Reverend Mr. Ruffin’s encouraging correspondence and phone conversation were also extremely informative. The most gentle and generous Father John A. Schug, Cap., who is also an eminent biographer of Padre Pio, shared with me the correspondence of Father Dominic Meyer, English and German secretary to Padre Pio from 1947 to 1959, relating to my uncle’s life among the Capuchian fathers of Our Lady of Grace. Mrs. Anna Zegna of Biella, Italy, wife of the late Albino Zegna, was also helpful in this area. Both husband and wife had been close personal friends of my uncle and devoted followers of Padre Pio. Mrs. Zegna, along with her daughter and son-in-law, Gianna and Roberto Borsetti, provided valuable correspondence—including many of my uncle’s letters—and precious insight into the nature of the lifesaving sanctuary Padre Pio offered my uncle as a Jewish-born Catholic priest in San Giovanni Rotondo during the years of the war. Ms. Maria Callandra, of the National Center for Padre Pio, in Barto, Pennsylvania, forthrightly shared her understanding of the inviolability of Padre Pio’s spiritual purity in the midst of danger to innocent life during World War II. I wrestled greatly with her comments.

Events occurring among family members, as narrated here, are based on history that I witnessed or that was personally conveyed to me. They are honest attempts at capturing the spirit and content of interactions, many of which I know to have taken place but for which I could not have actually been present. They serve to establish a more vividly realistic and textured portrayal of social and historical circumstances.

I especially agonized over interactions among members of my family and historical individuals, such as those between my father and Bishop Vilmos Apor, a singularly courageous opponent of the Nazi designs on Hungarian Jews. My father’s distant memories of the content and spirit of Father Apor’s sermons while he was a pastor in Gyula, Hungary, helped to inform the statements I attribute to him. I was equally concerned with the credibility of discussions between my uncle and Padre Pio. My uncle had spoken with me and others about the nature and content of personal conversations with the padre. While no one still living knows precisely what warnings Padre Pio gave George about the potential dangers to him during the war had he left San Giovanni Rotondo, I have relied both on secondhand reports of individuals familiar with the two men (referenced in the Notes) and on inferences drawn from what I know of my uncle’s circumstances during those years. The nature of their discussion about my father’s turning away from Catholicism is also referenced in the Notes.

My efforts, then, to reconstruct interactions among my ancestors and to elaborate the nuances of their beings—their feelings, inner dialogues, points of view—spanning nearly an entire century, represent an attempt to enter and participate in the lives of those to whom I am admittedly connected through my own longings and imagination as much as through the historical record, personal reports, and my own life experience. My relatives speak through me about themselves, and I boldly speak for them in order to illuminate a religiously and historically turbulent landscape of Jews and Christians in the century of the Holocaust.

All of the larger historical events narrated here are as accurate as a nonhistorian’s research would allow them to be. The seminal works of Randolph L. Braham, Eugene Levai, Moshe Y. Herczl, and Raphael Patai—among a host of other resources referenced in the Notes—provided the backbone of Jewish and interfaith cultural history and Holocaust political history to which I can only hope I have done justice. In a few cases, names have been changed, abbreviated, or omitted in deference to the dead, in respect for the living, or in the spirit of not unnecessarily invoking the various names of Amalek, the namesake of those who have been committed throughout history to the destruction of the Jewish people.

Now, at the end of the millennium and the beginning of the next, much progress has been made among Jews and Christians in coming to some mutual understanding of their respective roles in the spiritual unfolding of history, and in the Catholic Church’s increasing willingness to take responsibility for the atmosphere of hatred that fostered the Holocaust. I know that many people—perhaps my father among them—remain skeptical about the possibility of a complete healing between the Jewish and Christian communities of faith in the aftermath of the Shoah. But even in deference to those whose life experience I must honor, I believe that if there is one singular and preeminent purpose for telling this story, it is to envision that Jewish and Christian brothers might someday stand—although my father and uncle could not—at the gates of Jerusalem and embody the spirit of Isaiah 52:8: “Together they shall sing, for eye to eye they shall see when the Lord returns to Zion.”

PROLOGUE

Sorrow in Search of Memory

How goodly are thy tents, O Jacob!
How beautiful your sanctuaries, O Israel!

NUMBERS 24:5

A seminal fragment of my family’s lore: on a sweltering afternoon in the summer of 1918, two five-year-old boys named Gyuri and Miklós scurry across the vast cobblestone courtyard of St. Stephen’s Basilica in Budapest. They climb the two long tiers of granite steps to Hungary’s largest cathedral, located only a few blocks from the banks of the Danube, the fabled river that divides the nineteenth-century half of the city from its thousand-year-old counterpart. The boys look more alike than brothers. In fact, they are identical twins, indistinguishable in the smooth innocence of their faces, their wide brown eyes, and their shorn hair, nearly shaven to their scalps to thwart the summer heat. They are dressed alike—in white, short-sleeve summer shirts and light blue short pants with attached suspenders of the same material, crossed in the back and buttoned in the front. Their cumbersome, high black shoes rise halfway up their calves. Most of the time, from the day of their birth, it has been difficult for almost everyone to tell them apart. The brothers know each other as only identical twins can.

At the entrance to the grand church, the boys surreptitiously slip through the six-inch-wide opening of the formidable oak middle door, with its inlaid bronze bas-relief portraits of the Hungarian kings. They giggle gleefully and a bit nervously as they peer into the dimly lit chamber, which feels refreshingly cool in contrast to the scorching afternoon sun they have just escaped. In mannerism and impulse, the twins mimic and build on each other’s playful daring. Even their spirited laughter is identical, punctuated by squeals of delight.

The awe-inspiring sanctuary, sheathed in red marble and gilt, is lined with magnificent statues of saints, angels, and kings, larger-than-life somber paintings of the crucified Christ, and four enormous central columns supporting a domed cupola that rises to where heaven meets earth. What natural light enters the sanctuary filters through a number of oblong windows at the base of the dome, interspersed evenly among painted friezes of celestial beings. There is also a circular window at the very height of a second dome above the apse, directly over the altar. It illumines the guilded paintings of archangels along the dome’s curved walls.

At the moment the boys enter, only a few people occupy the unending rows of delicately carved mahogany pews that fill the nave of the church. An elderly woman with deep creases crisscrossing her face, wearing a plain black dress and a red flower print babushka covering her head, is seated in the last row on the right side of the central aisle as the boys tiptoe in, still giggling. When they realize that she is there for her own purposes, and is not about to tell them to leave or behave themselves, their anxiety abates as they stride in a make-believe processional up the aisle with the imagined solemnity of priests and the exaggeratedly stiff gait of soldiers.

An old man in a coarse brown shirt, workman’s trousers, and well-worn cavalry boots, hat in hand and his head bent over onto his chest, is seated on the opposite side of the aisle, in the front section of pews, just beyond the first two giant columns. The boys pay him no mind as they high-step past him with an air of impunity, making their way toward the imposing altar. Their solemn march dissolves, and they trot, then dash toward the front row of seats. Suddenly, the boys stop in their tracks and their attention becomes sharply focused. They stand transfixed, frozen and inert, gazing impassively at a brightly painted statue of a thinly clad man suspended on a cross, with drops of blood flowing from his hands and feet. As they stare at the figure, they instantly imagine the agony he must feel. Then the moment is over, as suddenly as it began, and the boys proceed to play at genuflecting, crossing themselves and mumbling imitations of incomprehensible Latin liturgy.

These children have never been to a church service before. In fact, they have never been inside a church sanctuary. But on numerous Sunday mornings they have overheard the Latin chants issuing from the open doors of their neighborhood church, less than a block from their family’s apartment on Tölgyfa, or Oak Street, in Buda, near the foot of the Margit Bridge. Some of their Christian playmates have told them about crossing oneself and bending one’s knees to pray in church, so they have a vague notion of Christian ritual.

Now, standing in front of the altar, they pretend to chant, interspersing familiar names or Hungarian words: “Domino, pomino, Jesus, Maria, Isten öriz . . . ”

“Let’s go find his hand,” says Gyuri, with an irreverent laugh.

“What?! What are you talking about?” asks his brother.

“St. Stephen’s hand. The king who made the Hungarians Catholic. That’s his statue over there,” he says, pointing to a shiny and colorful icon in the middle of the altar. “I heard that his hand is kept in a golden box behind the altar somewhere. Let’s go find it, Miki,” Gyuri continues, with a look of mischievous relish.

“No!” Miklós blurts out. “We’re not supposed to go back there,” he says, with a reverence in his voice that borders on fear and panic. Then a laugh breaks his momentarily stiff mood. “But that’s the craziest thing I ever heard—a king’s hand inside a box in a church. He must have been pretty mad when they cut his hand off.”

Gyuri laughs and gives his brother a gently dismissive shove on his shoulder.

Earlier that afternoon, the boys had become bored in their summer villa in Rákosszentmilhály, on the outskirts of Budapest. Their mother was ill in bed and their step-grandmother was not the most engaging of caretakers, especially when she needed to look after their baby sister. The twins roamed briefly and impatiently in the large garden of the villa, then decided on impulse to climb the lone mulberry tree at its edge, up over the high wooden fence surrounding it. They walked along the tram tracks toward the station, which they knew would surely guide them into the city. Then, acting on another sudden impulse, they decided that their destination would be the basilica, where they would go to “pray.” The boys’ father had been away at war for nearly four years, serving as a captain in the Austro-Hungarian Army, and they knew he had become Christian before his departure. Their impetuous pilgrimage may have been partially an impulse to be closer to him, the father they hardly knew.

When the local tram conductor, who was familiar with the boys, saw them walking on the tracks, he stopped to pick them up. They told him they were going to pray at the basilica, and he offered to take them there. At least he would take them to another tram that would drop them within walking distance of the church. The boys didn’t hesitate for an instant. If walking into the city was a feasible project, how much better to get a free ride on the tram. They even handled the transfer onto the next tram with confidence, sure that grown-ups would naturally take care of them.

On their foray into the church, the boys were acting out an assimilationist impulse all-too-common among many Hungarian Jewish families, some of whom they were acquainted with. They had rarely seen Orthodox Jews in their neighborhood and had only heard stories of old men with beards, dressed in black, who spent their days in prayer and lived far away in the countryside, or at least in the Jewish quarter of Pest, somewhere on the other side of the river. None of their Jewish relatives or family friends gave them any idea of what being Jewish meant: these Jews observed the Christian holidays as national days of celebration and gift-giving. Today Gyuri and Miklós were Jews merely playing at being Christians, but, their own Jewishness notwithstanding, they knew more about Christianity for their visit to the basilica than they had ever learned about Judaism.

The boys continue standing before the altar of the basilica for several minutes. It is a struggle for Gyuri to tear his gaze from the awe-inspiring figure suspended on the cross directly above him. He finds the image strangely comforting. He imagines that even a god as powerful and revered as this one is also human and tangible and can feel pain and suffering. The child studies the pierced hands of this suffering Lord and feels sad and sorry for Him. For reasons he cannot begin to understand, this sorrow comforts Gyuri and helps him feel less alone in his private melancholy, for his mother is often sad and sick, and he misses his father terribly, fearing that he will never see him again.

While Gyuri remains entranced, Miklós turns away from the wounded god on the cross. Though just as enraptured as his brother, on this hot summer day he is more aware of how refreshed and revived he feels in the cool and mysterious sanctuary. Here in this marvelous chamber, Miklós feels, if only momentarily, welcome and at home.

Well before dawn on an autumn night in 1992, seventy-four years later, the city was darkly quiet. Directly outside our hotel, the Chain Bridge connecting Buda and Pest was still partially illuminated, as were the facades of palaces and other imperial buildings overlooking the Danube. Budapest was undeniably beautiful, yet its predawn serenity felt as tenuous and fragile as the momentarily quiet surface of the river that flowed through its heart. I sensed a subtle but grinding tension just below the surface, and below that a deeper current of sorrow—silent, unclaimed, and unredeemed.

My family had arrived from New York the previous afternoon. There were fourteen of us scattered throughout the Budapest Hyatt. My brother, sister, and I had come with our respective families to accompany our parents back to the country of their origin on the occasion of our father’s eightieth birthday. Among all the members of our immediate family, only my uncle George was missing.

George had not ignored the importance of this landmark occasion, for as my father’s twin it was his birthday, too. But the country of their birth had come to possess painfully different and seemingly unbridgeable meanings for them. Neither had left it with pleasant memories, but the nature of their earlier choices and the timing of their departures colored how each felt about coming back.

My wife lay asleep beside me as I listened to her breathing and that of my two young sons in the adjoining room of our suite. I lay still, gazing at the faintly illuminated city through the gossamer curtains of our hotel window. I could hear the occasional rumble of a car or taxi disturb the stillness of Roosevelt Square, by