They say we stand on the shoulders of the generations that came before us. Years ago, my uncle Lloyd Rodwin told a story about his trip to Poland in the late 1970s. It wasn’t much of a story, but from its dry bones this novel was born. As head of the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT, he had been invited to speak at Warsaw University. Afterward he was offered a car and driver, a protocol of the Communist era when the government exercised control over the whereabouts of foreign visitors. He asked the driver to take him to łomże, my grandfather’s birthplace, which he assumed was some backwater town. When they arrived at a small city with a cathedral, he realized he didn’t know of a single landmark by which he might recognize his father’s world. Over a lifetime, my grandfather had never described his hometown and my uncle had never asked. At a loss for what to do, he took a quick tour of the cathedral and the city and returned to Warsaw. The story, scarcely an anecdote, suggested to me something so uniquely part of the American experience, the loss of one’s family history once the journey to the New World has been made. I wondered, what if a gatekeeper had remained in the Old World to tell the tale. And so began A Day of Small Beginnings.