October 1935: Just one more season of selling furs to frauen. Your Berlin birth meaningless, you did not own the ground you walked on.

A snarly underling wears a brown shirt to work, demands you make him partner. You are a furnace, fueled by the molten myth of your own dignity, laugh flames. They hold you for three days, ripping and burning away whatever dancing your 25-year-old leg might have once held.

Finally, something from your parents’ tenuous Hungarian birthright: the legation comes to free you, it still being considered a good use of time to save even one Jew.

A chance meeting with one of your workers as you limped to work in November your second salvation: Don’t go to the shop! They’re waiting for you!

Here is where you tell the story differently each time I ask, a kaleidoscope of truth. Once you jump off a train in Belgium. Once you kill a Nazi. Once a distant relative vouches for you. But you would never see the bed you woke up in that morning again, were dressed in enough money and papers to get on a boat, escape.

I am made manifest by your manifest but, oh yes, you were doubtful. Your once-fine suit, the leg with the seeping bandage, your flimsy tourist visa from Hungary, no luggage, labeled you: Doubtf. 3 (2).

Again in a holding cell, you spoke four languages but not the one you needed. They kept you at Ellis Island 48 hours, until maybe a border agent felt generous when the sun hit his face through a clerestory window, or maybe he had gotten laid the night before, or maybe he flipped a coin.

You were allowed; the knot untangled just enough that I might be born.