A Palace of Strangers

It is always nonsense for us that says some are chosen and others left to die. If that should be, it is better not to be chosen.'

'You mean, we're all chosen.'

'No,' Dadda said. 'I mean, we are all left to die.'

A Sunday evening in 1921: open house at the modest Liverpool home of Benjamin and Mary Rosenbaum, where Isaak Rosenbaum, visiting from Germany, has been shaken to discover that his brother no longer attends synagogue.

Solly Gruenblum sits down at the piano, and six-year-old David watch...