"My father was a professor of economics at the University of the Pacific in Stockton, California. I would go to class with him on occasion and sit in the back row while he paced in front of the lectern, stopping every few minutes to wipe his sweaty forehead with a folded handkerchief. His students seemed terrified of him, but to me he just looked strong and handsome--like an Italian tenor--with his generous gut and his thick black hair swept into a pompadour."

"My parents may have wanted a child, but they didn't really need one. Still, when I was born, they opened their magic circle to let me in. And if my mother was the queen of that household, I was nothing less than the crown princess. To the rest of the world I was the doctor's daughter, with all the material benefits and reflected glory that title bestowed."

"The vodka burned her throat. She drank and waited, hearing the rain. It was a quiet old house; it wasn't hers. She was a stranger here.

Sometime later, maybe an hour, she felt someone's hand on her shoulder. She'd fallen asleep at the table. It was early still, the sky white, nude. The rain had stopped.

'You fell asleep,' a woman said in a Jamaican accent. 'I've made the assumption you're not a criminal.'

Still, she felt caught. Ashamed, she pulled her sweater around her. 'I'm his daughter. I grew up in this house.'"

I am the daughter of an Orthodox rabbi, the granddaughter of a Chief Rabbi of Israel. This religious world is familiar to me. I already know that only an animal that chews the cud and has cloven hoofs is kosher and that’s why pork is forbidden. I know Jews can only eat fish that have both fins and scales. I know how to read Hebrew and recite the prayers by heart. Yet I am also learning that there is far more to this world than I was aware of. I certainly never imagined the intensity of the spiritual pursuit of holiness or the extent to which keeping one’s minds on the godly requires shunning modern thought and culture. I always thought that my father’s approach of straddling both the secular and religious worlds and integrating contemporary concepts with ancient customs was the Jewish way. But here at the yeshiva this kind of synthesis is frowned upon, as the ultra-Orthodox believe any outside influences will contaminate their carefully circumscribed and protected world.

Even though most of the girls studying here have a past, I would not want them to know about the memories of Chris that are flooding my mind. I have never told them that I had a non-Jewish boyfriend or that he was someone I met at the backstage bar of the Hammersmith Odeon when he was taking photos for Melody Maker magazine and I was tagging along with a groupie who had backstage passes. And I would certainly never let on that he picked me up that night and cut crystal lines of cocaine on a mirror and offered them to me and that I sniffed one up each nostril and pulled him off the bar stool and led him to the ladies’ toilet, where he entered me from behind. I shudder at the memory and breathe a sigh of relief that I have found this cocoon of purity in which to let go of the past.

"It was hot and humid on this August night and Judge Britton tossed in his bed. A heavy court schedule had kept him on the go and thoughts of his only child, Fanny, lay as lead in a corner of his busy mind. During her years away at boarding school, he was often jerked up short by a letter from a headmistress recounting some disconcerting trial with the stubborn child. Now, at seventeen, she seemed to be making little progress."

"WHILE WE waited for the news to arrive, we played dice. I felt the small ivory cubes stick in my palms as I rolled a pair of ones. "Snake eyes," I said, fanning myself with my hand. Even the stir of a sea breeze though the marble halls of our palace did little to relieve the searing heat that had settled across the city.

"It's your turn," Alexander said. When our mother didn't respond, he repeated, "Mother, it's your turn."

But she wasn't listening. Her face was turned in the direction of the sea, where the lighthouse of our ancestors had been built on the island of Pharos to the east. We were the greatest family in the world, and could trace our lineage all the way back to Alexander of Macedon. If our father's battle against Octavian went well, the Ptolemies might rule for another three hundred years. But if his losses continued..."

"She's glad I'm her daughter ('I'm proud of you,' she says with some frequency), but for this I'm required to play my role, to be the Writer."

"I knew only two things for certain of his past. The first was that my father had been a soldier during the civil wars of the old England. He had a red coat, old and battered and faded to rust, which he had brought with him from London. One arm was torn, as though slashed through with something sharp, and Richard told me that, but for the padded lining in the sleeve, Father would have lost an arm for sure. When I pressed Richard for more of the story as to how and where Father had fought, my brother would purse his lips and say, 'Ah, but you're only a girl and cannot know the ways of men.' The other thing I knew was that men feared him."

Papa's favorite

"Anyway, after he'd finished he eased off the condom, and she reached out and lifted the lid off for him out of good manners. It was packed to the brim with used condoms, like a great cake of pink and brown rubber."

"He brushed ashes from his hands and sat on the sofa beside his wife, her feet propped up on pillows, her swollen ankles crossed, a copy of Dr. Spock balanced on her belly. Absorbed, she licked her index finger absently each time she turned a page. Her hands were slender, her fingers short and sturdy, and she bit her bottom lip lightly, intently, as she read. Watching her, he felt a surge of love and wonder: that she was his wife, that their baby, due in just three weeks, would soon be born. Their first child, this would be."

"My father was the literati-scholar-artist, the calligrapher Han, much respected, and my mother was the scholar's wife."

"For nine hundred years, Precious Auntie's family had been bonesetters. That was the tradition. Her father's customers were mostly men and boys who were crushed in the coal mines and limestone quarries. He treated other maladies when necessary, but bonesetting was his specialty. He did not have to go to a special school to be a bone doctor. He learned from watching his father, and his father learned from his father before him. That was their inheritance. They also passed along the secret location for finding the best dragon bones, a place called the Monkey's Jaw. An ancestor from the time of the Sung Dynasty had found the cave in the deepest ravines of the dry riverbed. Each generation dug deeper and deeper, with one soft crack in the cave leading to another farther in. And the secret of the exact location was also a family heirloom, passed from generation to generation, father to son, and in Precious Auntie's time, father to daughter to me."