Across the Street, Seventy-Six Years Later

In 1980, just out of college and newly returned to the United States after a year abroad, I moved to New York City for a job. I explored neighborhoods throughout the city and decided that I wanted to live in the East Village. I found a small third-floor walk-up studio in an old tenement building, with a bathtub in the kitchen and a toilet in the hallway. Beneath the cracked linoleum floor, I discovered newspapers dating from the early twentieth century. The address was 97 East 7th Street, in a neighborhood I soon learned was known as Little Ukraine. Now that I was settled in New York, I decided to do some research about my late grandfather, who told my father that he was born in Brooklyn. I learned that he had actually been born in Brest-Litovsk — then part of the Russian Empire and now located in Belarus. My research revealed that he had traveled through Ellis Island alone in 1904. He was a nine-year-old orphan and was taken in by his maternal uncle. Census records showed that, upon arriving in New York, he went to live with his uncle’s family at 96 East 7th Street. It was directly across the street from the apartment I had chosen, out of all the possible apartments and streets in New York City, seventy-six years later.