Washington Heights, late Soviet émigré years.

My mother moved in the orbit of writers and poets—some now canonized, like Dovlatov, others less so—who kept an intellectual life going at the height of the Cold War.

I didn’t understand any of it. I was more concerned with a grape popsicle. But by osmosis I absorbed something—literature, history, exile—and, with no way back to the USSR, let imagination fill in the rest.

A bodega, a “PALACE,” the Romanovs, popsicles and potatoes—coming shortly.