In 1962, Kiryat Yam on Haifa Bay was one of many new communities mushrooming across Israel to keep pace with the immigrants and refugees pouring into the country. My grandparents and my mother had arrived in 1958, from Vilnius, Lithuania, by way of Wroclaw, Poland. They set forth on forging a new existence, modest but determined, eyes forward, hands busy — little chance to tempt fate like Lot’s wife and yearn for the world left behind.

One day, into this dusty moonscape of the recently displaced, arrived a sleek black sedan. When the doors opened, Prince Michael Romanoff — the famous Russian royal; Hollywood restaurateur; original member of the Rat Pack with Bogart and Bacall; regular subject of international headlines — stepped onto the roughly-paved sidewalk on Henrietta Szold Street. He asked the stunned onlookers the whereabouts of Nina Papirmacher, my grandmother. He had come to see her while accompanying Frank Sinatra on his Israeli tour.