Epilogue

At best, a personal view is only that, a view encased in the flow of time. As moments in time become past moments, it is the flow of time that lets us see the personal for what it is. My parents came from Eastern Europe to the United States more than a century ago. My mother would complain for the rest of her life about American sugar cubes, which melted in her mouth before she could finish drinking her tea. The sugar that she remembered eating in Belarus was broken off a sugar loaf with a hammer; one could hold it under the tongue while drinking a cup of tea, and it would not melt entirely until the last swallow. (In Iran in 1966 we sampled loaf beet sugar produced for export to North Africa, where up until recently sugar loaves were preferred in the countryside. We brought back samples, to my mother's delight.)