The New Yorker, Culture Desk, February 4, 2017
My grandmother had no husband, or at least that is always what I assumed as a child. While I could account for each member on my mother’s side—a large Italian family of great-grandparents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and a myriad of cousins, first and second, who met for traditional Sunday meals that began at 1 P.M. and ended at nine or ten—my father’s side, which I vaguely knew as “Russian,” seemed vast and empty.