His father died in 1924, when he was a little boy, because there was no money for proper medicine. Then came the Holocaust, in which his mother was shot and buried in the local mass grave in 1941. And when he was finally accommodating himself to the Soviet regime after the war, Stalin intensified his repression. "We were afraid to be caught with a Yiddish book in those years. Finally, better years came under Brezhnev." But just when he should have begun enjoying his standing in town as the master barber, independence came, the shop was privatized and he was unceremoniously ejected from the going concern he had built (i)over nearly half a century. "But that was not the last straw." He had been saving half a century for his retirement - all in Soviet roubles, of course. The money became worthless just when he was forced out of his shop.

   The state pension does keep him alive, but little more than that. He depends on friends in the West to send him razor blades and other hairdressing equipment. But what has any of this to do with the Titanic? "I was just getting to that. You see, this is not the first time that all the money suddenly became worthless. But forget the money. If that ship hadn't hit that darned iceberg -'My luck!' my mother would say- we would all have moved to America when I was a little boy." How can he be so sure? "Well, it's like this..." the master barber begins, sitting himself down in his own makeshift barber's chair, almost as if it were an analyst's couch, the visit of strangers prompting a recitation of innermost regrets. "After the failed revolution of 1905, the two families - my father's, the Shapiros, and my mother's, the Gilinskys - decided that things will never be stable in these parts. We had to make it to America, the golden land. But how? "Those years, there was a simple formula. Find the most able young man in the family, and send him there first.. He will bring us all over as soon as he prospers, and, of course, in America someone who is able prospers. "So whom did they send?" Mr. Shapiro asks out loud. After a long expectant pause, he comes out with the name - "my uncle Leyzer" (rhymes with "razor").

   Leyzer was a master locksmith who invented a pick proof lock and developed innovative new locks for local branches of the tsarist government. But the earnings of the young locksmith only sufficed to pay the fare to London. He turned up in Whitechapel, London's equivalent to New York's Lower East Side. Leyzer rechristened himself Leslie Gilinsky and began to work for a locksmith on Whitechapel's Old Montague Street. A few months later, he struck lucky. Or so it seemed. "One acquaintance told another who told a third about the young genius locksmith," says Mr. Shapiro, recounting the version his parents passed on to him, "and Leyzer was offered passage to America on the greatest ship ever built in return (ii) for working as a locksmith on board. He would sleep with the workmen and would soon be in America. The ship was called Titanic." When the family back home in Ignalina received the letter with these tidings they were overjoyed. "And then one fine day in April 1912, news (iii) of the shipwreck came through on the wires. They were broken hearted and ridden with a kind of guilt. Why didn't he just stay here?"

   But that is not the end of the story. In 1913 Mr. Shapiro's grandfather Shlomo Gilinsky, the ill-fated locksmith's father, received a letter from the Lloyd's of London insurance office in St. Petersburg, informing him, first, that his son's body was recovered on an ice floe and taken to America for burial, and second, that he had purchased 35,000 roubles' worth of life insurance (iv)before embarking. That sum of money should have made the frugal family secure for generations. Mr. Shapiro's grandfather hitched up his horse and wagon (v) and made for St. Petersburg. The people at Lloyds told him he could have the money in gold coins or banknotes. "Naturally," says Mr. Shapiro, with a sudden return of the wry smile, "my grandfather was no fool. With all the bandits lurking in the forests, you do not drive a wagon full of gold!" "He carefully wrapped up the banknotes in sacks and made it home safely. For about a year, the family's poverty was alleviated, although the hero locksmith lay in a New Jersey cemetery (vi), having enriched his family back in the old country in an unexpected, macabre way. All on account of an iceberg. Feh!"