Most days my grandfather sits at his computer, playing chess online with old friends.

Stark and majestic in steel and poured concrete, sitting on a solitary bluff overlooking the Gulf, it is not the house you'd imagine for a retired couple, but they didn't move south to wither in the sun and die. They bought a small house on the Gulf Coast, a flat-roofed masterpiece built in 1949 by an architect who would have become famous if he hadn't drowned the same year. In the end they gave her what she wanted and my grandparents, following tradition, sold their apartment and moved to Florida. There must have been a good deal of haggling, but I could have told the conglomerate that haggling with my grandmother was a waste of time. It was, according to everyone, a fair offer, so my grandmother asked them to double it. In the late nineties, an insurance conglomerate made an offer for my grandparents' company. He never lost his accent, he never voted in an election or listened to American music, but he became a devout Yankees fan. If it was summer and the Yankees were playing, a radio (after his seventieth birthday, a color television my dad bought him) broadcast the game. When I was small, I would sit on his lap, staring at the stump of his left index finger, rounded and smooth, the top two knuckles so cleanly severed it seemed he'd been born without them. My grandfather manned the desk, doing all the paperwork. She charmed them or she frightened them, and either way, they bought.

My grandmother was always on the phone, selling. They had their own small insurance company, working out of their railroad apartment in Bay Ridge, catering primarily to other Russian immigrants. I grew up two blocks from my grandparents and saw them nearly every day.

And certainly not my grandfather himself, the smiling watchman of my earliest memories, the quiet, black-eyed, slender man who held my hand as we crossed the avenues, who sat on a park bench reading his Russian newspaper while I chased pigeons and harassed sugar ants with broken twigs. Not my grandmother, who knew every folktale from the old country-most of them gruesome children devoured by wolves and beheaded by witches-but never spoke about the war in my hearing. Who told me? Not my father, who never shared secrets, or my mother, who shied away from mentioning the unpleasant, all things bloody, cancerous, or deformed. I don't remember anyone telling me-it was something I always seemed to know, the way I knew the Yankees wore pinstripes for home games and gray for the road. My grandfather, the knife fighter, killed two Germans before he was eighteen.

City of thieves benioff