It is the early 1930s. A girl in New York City, just tall enough to see over her family’s kitchen table, catches a moment of tacit communication between her parents. The mother pauses in her reading of the newspaper to say to the father: “Zenya, it’s coming again.” Even the young girl, Grace Goodside, knows what “it” means: Hitler’s rise to power. The “again” was more mysterious—more compelling—both for the girl and for Grace Paley, the writer and activist she became, who retold this memory.
