My mother and father never knew the dates of their birth. In Russia, where they grew up, survival was the issue. Birthdays? Who could remember the birth of one more child, let alone celebrate it? It wasn’t that the idea of birthdays was discarded. It had never been considered. It was simply unheard of, at least in the ghettos where my parents grew up like sturdy weeds.

My father would tell us, his children, how his mother would place a loaf of dark rye bread on the table for supper, and and he and his eight brothers and sisters, would tear off a piece of bread as fast as they could before it was gone. That was supper. Birthdays and cakes? Could they really exist?

Of course, my mother and father did not know each other in Russia. They did not know each other until many years later when they met in New Jersey at a card game while they were both married to someone else.

Yet, in both of my parents’ childhood stories, bread and ovens played a role.

Russian winters were the coldest of all. My father would say, “…the wind was blowing, and the snow was snowing.�

How did they keep warm in the country? One thing they did in my father’s home was to bring the livestock inside at night. The body warmth of the sheep and cows warmed the one-room house. And the same oven that baked the bread also helped to keen them from freezing. When privileged, my father would sleep on top of the stove and, while he slept in the delicious warmth, he could forget the cold.

Birthdays, what use could a birthday possibly be?

I use the word childhood, but for my mother — she had no childhood. According to my mother, no one had a childhood, unless bitter was called a childhood.

At the age of four, my mother washed clothes in the river and took care of other people’s children for a penny. A rag was a doll. That was childhood.

My mother’s father had died the day she was born, at his grief at her birth, his seventh daughter, my mother — so my mother told the story. Of course, those were the days when sons had value, and daughters didn’t. These were also the days before Freud and Jung and psychology and birthdays and childhood had yet been invented.

When my mother was eight years old, she was apprenticed to a cousin who had a bakery. My mother slept on the floor in the bakery, and at 3 a.m. or earlier, she had to get up to light the ovens. And then while it was still dark, she had to go deliver the warm bread.

My mother was delivering bread one early morning when she found a 100-ruble note on the dark street. It was with this hundred rubles that she paid her passage on a boat to America by herself when she was twelve years old.

If my mother had not worked at the bakery, and she had not found the rubles for her passage, presumably, my brothers and sisters and I might not have been born in the U.S.A and what would our lives have been then?