It's been a while, but I can still picture the little apartment on the west side of Chicago. The year is 1947. I'm 23 years old, married about a year and a half, and still trying to decide how to address my mother-in-law.

  My wife and I occupy a tiny room under a staircase in her parents' home. Just enough room for a bed and a crib for our new baby boy. The building is a small old two-flat on Albany Avenue in what had been an Italian neighborhood. Some of the old Italian families elected to stay on as the area turned Jewish, and to everyone's surprise it turned into a solid, warm community. The Jews planted flowers in their front yards and the Italians planted tomatoes in their back yards. Most of the stables had been turned into garages, but a few, including ours, were rented to peddlers who still used horses to peddle ice and fruit and vegetables down the narrow alleys.

  Now, here I am, very lucky to be playing my guitar in a fancy Rush Street restaurant instead of working for a living, and becoming more and more full of myself every day. The only thing I need to accomplish is a natural way of addressing my mother-in-law. Not that she's standoffish or hard to talk to in any way, but Jews of her generation expect to be addressed when spoken to, especially by a young person. I can't call her Nettie or Mrs. Fox, and I don't feel right calling her "Ma." Not yet. I know I will eventually.

  Right now I'm hungry. I've just come in from gabbing with a neighbor. It's midsummer, five in the afternoon and the neighborhood is beginning to smell like an international kitchen. Backyard barbecues, Mrs. Rossi's pasta sauce, my mother-in-law's borscht.

  Ma's always singing. I know every one of her songs. The Russian ones, the Jewish ones, the labor songs, the broken-English American songs. All except the one she's singing now. I bite the bullet and address her.

  "Ma, what kind of song is that?"

  "I don't know, a song."

  "Ma, it's not a Russian song. It's not Yiddish. It's not Hebrew. It's not Polish. What is it?"

  She turns away from her cooking, wiping her hands and looking for all the world like a little girl trying to remember something important. She's a very pleasant sight. A small, trim, strong, happy woman. Tan face, gray eyes. Just enough of Asia in her cheekbones to remind you of the hordes and armies that swept back and forth across her part of Russia every so often. Sort of like a Scandinavian from a little too far north.

  "You know, now I remember. It's a Tatarish song. From long ago."

  "Where'd you learn it?"

  "In the war. Not this one. The one before."

  "There were Tartars in Lanowitz?"

  "Tatars. Soldiers. You know. Every house had to take in one or two. They had horses. We were afraid at first, but it was okay. I was maybe fifteen and uncle Morrie was twelve. A smart-mouth little shrimp. He would go around the camps and pick up cigarette butts and bring them back home and make them back into cigarettes and sell them back to the soldiers. Where he got the paper I don't know. Real cigarette paper. He looked about eight years old. A little shrimp. Smoked like a bologolchik (teamster). The soldiers would laugh and give him the same cigarettes he sold them."

  "Were the soldiers a problem overnight in the houses?"

  "No. Every evening they would get lined up and the fancy officer give a speech. A tall man in a fancy regalia. A Russian, not a Tatar. He gave them orders for the next morning and all that, and then he would say, 'Anyone who does not behave himself with the women and girls will be shot in the morning.' That took care of it."

  "How was it to have a strange soldier in your house. What was he like?"

  "He was real quiet. About as big as you. A dark face like a brick. A long, skinny moustache. Little tiny eyes like a Chinaman. Strong as a horse.

  "One night, all of a sudden, there was a big bombardment. The bombs and shells were bursting all around. The horses were screaming and the soldiers outside jumped down in their ditches and I looked around and Morrie wasn't in the house.

  "I started to run outside to look for him and the soldier in the house grabbed me by the arm and said, 'You can't go out there.' I was crying and told him about Morrie. You know? He went out with me to look for Morrie. What was the little snot doing outside the house at night? We found him and the soldier carried him home like a sack of potatoes and I gave him a good beating.

  "The Tatars used to sing when they practiced on the horses or dug the ditches.

  "That's the song."