"Next to nothing—but to me, it is priceless, because I had it from Mama. At any rate—getting on with the story—my parents put on the stockings of Villa Diego and ended up in Curaçao and there I was born. Mama died of smallpox, Papa of yellow fever. I fell in with a community of crypto-Jews who had collected there, for lack of any other place to go. We decided to strike out for Amsterdam, which was where our ancestors should have simply gone in the first place, and seek our fortunes there. As a group, we bought passage on a slave-ship bringing sugar back to Europe. But this ship was captured by the corsairs of Rabat, and we all ended up galley-slaves together, rowing to the strains of the Hava Negila; which, owing to its tiresome knack for getting stuck in the head, was the only Jewish song we knew."