Louisa’s daughter also married when she was nineteen. Two years later, she died in childbirth, leaving her little girl in her grandparents’ care. (Offering no financial support, the child’s father had left for an ostensible job in St. Louis and was not to be heard from again for the next twenty years.) Louisa’s son proved a remarkably able scholar, excelling in Talmud and Mathematics. He remained sickly, however, until his high school years when, for lack of money, Louisa was forced to place him in a public school instead of a yeshiva. Hence the boy — despite her deepest yearnings, prayers, and admonitions — never became a rabbi.

Louisa kept house on Clara Street, played the piano Solomon brought home from the junk shop where he now worked, and joined the Ladies Auxiliary of the synagogue next door, which, in addition to the six windows and two tree-lined views, had been another major reason for choosing the apartment. But she soon quarreled with the other Auxiliary ladies, finding them “petty and illiterate” despite their blue-tinted hair, fine clothes, and unaccented American English. Adding to her isolation and — though Louisa would never admit it—her loneliness, she developed asthma. Claiming that only gold-tipped imported Turkish cigarettes provided relief for her condition, she insisted to all who commented on her newly acquired smoking habit that it was “strictly for medicinal purposes.” This took place at roughly the same time she developed an interest in health food and imposed a strict fresh air and exercise regimen on her granddaughter, feeding her grapefruit with wheat germ and a glass of milk for breakfast every morning. (In spite of — or perhaps because of — this diet, the girl would suffer from goiter trouble for the rest of her life.)

In the evenings, with Solomon working overtime, Louisa read the American classics (she was particularly fond of Melville) and wrote poetry in English. When the Second World War broke out, she took to writing long, amazingly prescient, letters to the Daily Forward about the genocidal fate of the Jewish people — supporting her argument with many impressive biblical references in Hebrew.

In her melancholy… she stopped attending Shabbat synagogue services. After putting on her black silk holiday dress and best jet earrings and dousing herself with lilac perfume, she’d sit staring out the window all day instead.

On his fifty-eighth birthday, Solomon was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease and placed in the Chronic Home for the Disabled. With only his workman’s compensation check, and her dwindling secret savings to count on, Louisa nevertheless managed to keep the apartment on Clara Street and her son and granddaughter in school. But she had gotten used to having Solomon around, and his absence made her cranky, which resulted in more frequent asthma attacks requiring gold-tipped Turkish cigarettes for relief. Around this time, Louisa also noticed that she was having trouble seeing. When she could no longer read without developing violent headaches, she went to the doctor and was told she had glaucoma. Giving in to her gradual loss of sight, Louisa stopped reading and writing poetry and long letters to the Daily Forward. She had been closely following the ongoing debate over the true identity of the author of Shakespeare’s plays (some even going so far as to claim they were written by a woman) but now lost all interest. In her melancholy (“depression” wasn’t a word used in those days), she stopped attending Shabbat synagogue services. After putting on her black silk holiday dress and best jet earrings and dousing herself with lilac perfume, she’d sit staring out the window all day instead.

When her son, now married, took her out on Sunday drives in his new Oldsmobile, Louisa inevitably got carsick. Once, to her horror, she even vomited all over the back seat before she could get out of the car. Convinced that the Sunday outings were part of a conspiracy hatched by her son’s in-laws to turn him against her, she grew increasingly morose (“paranoid” wasn’t a word used in those days) and difficult to deal with. At the supermarket one day, she tossed a can of Campbell’s Tomato Soup at the head of an Italian woman who’d yelled “Dirty Jew” when the near-blind Louisa ran into her with her shopping cart. The woman suffered no injuries and lodged no complaints, but Louisa, fearing arrest, locked herself in her apartment for two weeks after the incident.