Twice a year, on the anniversaries of her parents' deaths, my mother placed on top of the icebox an ordinary kitchen glass packed with wax, the yortsayt, and lit the candle in it. Sitting at the kitchen table over my homework, I would look across the threshold to that mourning glass, and sense that for my mother the distance from our kitchen to der heym, from life to death, was only a flame' s length away. Poor as we were, it was not poverty that drove my mother so hard; it was loneliness— some endless bitter thoughts over all those left behind, dead or dying or soon to die; a loneliness locked up in her kitchen that thought every day of the hardship of life and the nearness of death, but still kept struggling in the lock, trying to get us through by endless labor. With us, life started up again only on the last shore. There seemed to be no middle ground between despair and the madness of our ambition. Whenever my mother spoke of her hopes for us, it was with such unbelievingness that the likes of us would ever come to anything; such dim hope and readiness for pain, that I finally came to see in the flame burning on top of the ice-box death itself burning away the bones of poor Jews, burning out in us everything but courage, the blind resolution to live. In the light of that mourning-candle, they were ranged around me how many dead and dying , how many eras of pain, of exile, of dispersion, of cringing before the powers of this world ! It was always at dusk that my mother' s loneliness came home most to me. Painfully awake to every shift in the light at her window, she would stare at the street as if to warm herself in the last of the sun. " How sad it is !" I once heard her say. Twilight was the bottom—most part of the day, the chilliest and loneliest time for her.