Free Electric City: A Novel by Elizabeth Rosner

what American fathers believed about fairness and “liberty and justice for all.”
    She was born on December 31, 1949. Instead of getting to call herself a New Year’s baby, the first one born just after midnight in the new decade, she had come to enjoy saying that she was born on the last day of the ’40s. Sophie Esther Levine.
    Both she and her brother, Simon, had been named after relatives who were murdered. When she was four and Simon was seven, their mother had a third pregnancy that ended prematurely with a stillbirth, another daughter who would have been named Lily, also in memory of some ghostly person who now seemed to have died twice.
    Not that Sophie understood any of this at the time. All she knew was that her mother’s once-charming and vivacious spirit seemed to fadeand disappear, at least for a while after the lost baby. Miriam would sit for hours on one straight-backed chair or another, weeping and pale, the kitchen empty of its usual fresh-baked aromas, the many kitchen appliances cold and unused. Friends came and went, filling the table and countertops with their signature dishes, the ones for which they often preferred not to share recipes. The music of their gentle condolences wafted everywhere, accents from long-lost pockets of Europe.
    That must have been when Sophie first began to recognize that all of her parents’ friends were immigrants, all with strange names they either did or didn’t choose to Americanize for their new lives. They assimilated at various rhythms, proud of their own cultural backgrounds but wary of how much to show on the outside. With rare exceptions like that mention of Kristallnacht on the night of the blackout, and the brief account of Masha Bernstein, Sophie hardly ever heard any specific stories about the lost Old World. There appeared to be a tacit agreement among their tightly knit circle not to compare notes about what had been left behind.
    Especially after the stillborn baby, Miriam’s periodic and occasionally prolonged waves of sadness spoke louder than anything she might have explained about those losses. Her shifting moods alternately darkened and brightened the house like the movements of the sun on a cloudy day. When Sophie came home from school she became accustomed to testing the air when she walked in the door, wondering if she’d find her mother recovered and talkative, her hands and apron dusted with flour, or brooding on the couch, absorbed in a book of poetry.
    “I’m home!” Sophie would call from just inside the front door, listening with all of her senses. “Where are you?”

    In the seventh year of their marriage, when Miriam was pregnant with Simon, she and David had found themselves hosting a family very much like themselves who came as traumatized refugees from Holland to the United States, having survived not one but two concentration camps, and enduring half a year in a French displaced persons camp after liberation. The house was thick with conversations that didn’t happen; no one able to say out loud what they had witnessed, and how lucky they were to be alive, penniless but saved.
    This, Sophie was later told, was how good people behaved: you took each other in, no matter how marginal your own circumstances, and you shared what little you had. Her parents’ couch became a bed, the baby (the refugees had one already) slept in a shelter of pillows on the floor, and at mealtime the table simply filled up with a little more food that stretched onto more plates and fed extra mouths. In fact, David’s favorite admonitions against selfishness seemed to relate directly back to the years when he and his wife had survived on practically nothing. Miriam had worked as a keypunch operator while he finished engineering school, and then he found his first job in Electric City just in time for the birth of their only son.
    Sophie couldn’t resist it, sometimes, the impulse to peer down the path of an alternate universe. If the car hadn’t