Jakob Josephson, the deceased occupant of the modest Fairfield house, had been born in 1896, in Munich, Bavaria, the youngest child—and only son—of Joseph Konrad Josephson, an atheist, anarchist, and fervent German nationalist, who, for most of his life, dismissed the anti-Semitism of his neighbors and comrades with a shrug. In the Munich book business Joseph Konrad Josephson called himself Konrad Joseph, which he thought sounded more German, and kept the Judaica in a back room, hidden away, as if it were pornography.

"Superstition!" he told his son. "I keep only it for your mother's sake."

In the early morning of November 9, 1923, after the Beer Hall Putsch had spilled into the streets of Munich, during those few foreshadowing hours when the young National Socialist German Workers' Party held control of the municipal government, Joseph Konrad Josephson ventured out into the street to barricade the windows of the Konrad Joseph Book Store. He was shoved from behind, knocked down, and kicked repeatedly by three young men, until Jakob chased them away.

"We know you're a Jew..." they said. "We know!"

"In one way, we were lucky," Jakob would later tell his daughters, "We learned the truth early on."

When Miriam Josephson Cohen heard Roger McAllister tell a version of this story on TV, she called her sister, Leah.

"Turn on your TV," said Miriam.

"Dorothy just called me," said Leah. "I'm already watching it."

Joseph Konrad Josephson's broken ribs began to heal, but his spirit did not. He had recognized the Jew-hating toughs who beat him: they were the sons of one of his closest friends, an organizer of the bricklayers union. "A good communist family," he muttered sadly to his son. Jakob Josephson also knew the young men—he remembered vividly how they they had treated the other children in the school yard.

"They're no good," he told his father. "They've always been rowdies. Brutes. Ordinary bullies."

But that was no consolation to Joseph Konrad Josephson, who each day dragged himself down to his desk in the bookstore, and sat there sullenly reading Schiller, ignoring the customers.

"He has no right!" said Miriam on the phone to her sister.

"Well, it's not actually... false..." said Leah.

"Hold on," said Miriam. "I've got another call..." She clicked a button on her handset. "Dorothy? Are you taping this?"

After the beating, Joseph Konrad Josephson never regained the vitality needed to run a small business, and it fell upon his son to keep the shop open. After several months, with his mother's support, Jakob made the heart-wrenching decision to close the bookstore and leave Munich. His mother had relatives in the Pacific Northwest, the sons and daughters of traders who had the followed the various gold rushes. From these distant cousins Joseph borrowed the passage, and brought the family to Canada: his mother, his father, his young pregnant wife. His four older sisters were already married—"Not to Christians," his father would proudly say, "but to Socialists!"—a distinction that did not matter to Jakob, who offered to bring them all with him. But his older sisters decided to remain in Munich. Neither they nor their children survived the coming decades.

"Did you tell him that?" said Miriam.

"Leah—she must have told him." said Dorothy.

"He never told me anything about his sisters..." said Miriam.

In leading the family to Canada, Jakob also led them back into observant Judaism, except of course, for his father, who never lost faith in the perfectibility of human society through human agency alone, even as his own engagement with the world around him grew more and more tenuous. During the long train journey across the plains, Joseph Konrad Josephson became disoriented. He forgot about the beating and the Beer Hall Putsch, and told the other passengers that he had been kidnapped by dwarves, and was being taken to the Andes Mountains, to work there as a slave in the silver mines, a life of endless subterranean work without pay, until his hands and feet would wither into claws and nothing would be left of him but a blind featherless underground bird, squawking in the depths of the earth. In more lucid moments, Joseph accused his son of being a capitalist, a monotheist, and a victim of constipation. Fortunately, no one else on the train, as it rolled from Saskatchewan into Alberta, could understand a word of German. Joseph Konrad Josephson died on May 12, 1925, one week after his first glimpse of the Pacific Ocean, on the same day that Paul von Hindenburg became President of Germany.

"Well I didn't... tell him," said Leah. She and her sisters had gathered at Dorothy's house, to watch the tape of McAllister's interview. "He must have found it and read it."

"Found what?" said Miriam.

"A college paper I wrote," said Leah.

"You wrote a college paper about this?" said Miriam.

"I know it was a bad idea. I got a C-minus. The professor wasn't interested in personal narratives."

"Now don't be silly!" said Dorothy, "I remember that! It was the best paper of the year! And it was published in the Jewish Center newsletter. Father was so proud."

"You were very young and gullible," said Leah. "Father's the one who got it published. To make me feel better."

"I don't remember any of this at all," said Miriam.

In Victoria, Jakob wanted to start another bookstore, but first he needed work, any work. He took every job his cousins offered him, often several at once. He learned the business of hotels, the business of lumber and hardware, the business of dry goods, the business of printing. After five years, Jakob had paid off his debts. He bought a small printing shop from a cousin who could no longer afford to keep his employees—this was 1930, and the Depression was deepening. For years, Jakob ran the shop by himself, until his daughters were old enough to help him. Later, his sons-in-law joined him. With admirable industry, aided by a few well-timed strategic decisions, the extended Josephson family built the tiny print shop into JKJ Graphics, the largest, fastest, and most efficient producer of four-color mail-order catalogues in Canada. In 1985 Jakob, the majority shareholder, approved the sale of JKJ Graphics to the Swedish conglomerate. His competency in making that decision would later be the subject of many lawsuits among his quarreling descendents.

Two years later he died, at the age of 91. He never moved from the modest house in Fairfield, which he bought in 1934, when the print shop first turned a profit.

"Well, Father never wanted to start another bookstore," said Leah. "But otherwise... what he's saying is true... mostly. What can we do?"

"It just sounds so horrible," said Miriam, "coming from that Irishman's mouth."

"McAllister's not Irish," said Leah. "Scottish maybe. Or is he English, from Manchester?"

"He's not anything," said Dorothy. "When it suits him, he's a fisherman's son from the Maritimes, or he has oil money, from Edmonton, or he grew up in a diplomatic family in Botswana. It's all bullshit. Especially the parts that happen to be true."

"How do you know so much?" said Miriam.

Dorothy shrugged. "I slept with him," she said. "That fucking pervert."

At the time, her sisters refrained from asking what Dorothy meant by that last remark.