What happens when you fall in love with someone whose countrymen your family views as enemies? What if that person wants you to visit his homeland, which your ancestors fled to get away from his ancestors? Bad enough an American Jew should travel with her Polish Catholic boyfriend to Poland; even worse if she gets deathly ill there.

What do you do if your kid doesn't want to follow the religion that means so much to you? What determines what kind of person your kid grows up to be--who they are at birth or how you try to raise them?

How did a Jewish cemetery end up inside a General Motors Cadillac plant? Why did the city seize the Detroit neighborhood that once surrounded that cemetery, demolish the houses, businesses, and churches in which the Polish Catholic, Jewish, and African American residents once lived and worked and prayed, and give the land to GM? And why were my parents so upset that I was in a relationship with one of the Polish Catholic guys who grew up in that neighborhood (not his parents were any too happy that he was dating ME)?

If you're interested, here's a link to the Chene Street Project that is mentioned in this episode, as well as its Facebook page.

My parents were obsessive about keeping our 1950s ranch house spotlessly clean, well repaired, and orderly. They seemed to be afraid of everything. But why? Sadly, we often don't figure out the reasons for our parents' craziness until they're no longer with us.

I've included a photo of the house in 1954, the year my parents' built it. Here's a picture of me giving my dad a shave and haircut (without a blade in the razor or a pair of scissors, of course).

Could the Shah of Iran have been Jewish? Maybe. What interests me even more is how family legends get started, what they mean to us, the amazing ways in which our family stories intersect with larger social movements and historical events, and how much we ever really know about our fathers.

I've included a photo of Sidney Polivy with Episode 3. Here's a photo of Sidney (on the left) and my father (on the right) in India during WWII.

Could the Shah of Iran been a hidden Jew? According to my father's old army buddy, Sidney Polivy, he was Sidney's cousin. I'm including a photo of Sidney so you can compare it to portraits of Reza Khan and his son Mohammed-Reza that you can find online. The resemblance is striking. Listen to part I of this episode and see what you think ....

In "Thin Air," I look back at someone who worked for my family when I was a kid--someone who was murdered--and try to figure out what was really going on in her life, what everyone turned a blind eye to, what they just couldn't imagine being true. Sometimes we need decades to make certain connections--in this case, the ties that connect a parakeet named Ish Kabibble to our family's cleaning lady, Helen, and my discovery of what it really means to become a writer, whose stories we are called upon to tell, and why.

I mention two stories you might want to look up, Gustave Falubert's "A Simple Heart" and Sherwood Anderson's "A Death in the Woods."