To my mother, in her perplexity over the cookstove, the woman who showed her how to make the fire was an angel of deliverance.

A fairy godmother to us children was she who led us to a wonderful country called "uptown," where, in a dazzlingly beautiful palace called a "department store," we exchanged our hateful homemade European costumes, which pointed us out as "greenhorns" to the children on the street, for real American machine-made garments, and issued forth glorified in each other's eyes.
With our despised immigrant clothing we shed also our impossible Hebrew names.

A committee of our friends, several years ahead of us in American experience, put their heads together and concocted American names for us all.

Those of our real names that had no pleasing American equivalents they ruthlessly discarded, content if they retained the initials.

My mother, possessing a name that was not easily translatable, was punished with the undignified nickname of Annie.