Twenty-five years after the Twin Towers fell, a reporter working on a story about our family’s 9/11 experience told me something that I had never realized: my son Jacob’s first memory was breathing through a wet sleeve on the morning of September 11th. I had not known this. I believed I understood what he had lived through, but I learned of his first conscious memory, formed in ash and panic, from a stranger..

I thought of my mother’s first memory: being seized roughly by the hands of a Nazi soldier, held in the air, and then dropped abruptly to the ground when her father, my Zayde, entered the room.

My mind drifted back to my own children and I did the arithmetic. A chill. My mother, then called Tania Rabinovitch, had just turned 4 when she walked out of the Kovno Ghetto in Lithuania. On 9/11, Jacob and his twin sister, Sarah, were a few weeks away from turning 4. My mother and my children, just over half a century apart, standing at almost precisely the same threshold of life when history reached in and took hold of them.

Jacob called our appearance on 9/11 –  blanketed in soot and pulverized concrete and all the microscopic debris that had settled into our hair and clothes and the creases of our hands – “crunchy.” My mother, at the same age, was covered in the ash and grime of the ghetto’s burned rubble, dressed in whatever had survived, a child made visibly, enduringly dirty by inhuman violence.

Smoke found its way into the mouths of the generation after me and the generation before. Sarah huddled with me in the mailroom of our building in Battery Park City, the nearest residential building to the towers, and said “I have smoke in my mouth, Mommy.” My mother, at 4, breathed into sand held over her nose and mouth in one of the ghetto’s malinas — the hidden bunkers........

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