by Julia Wolf Mazow
I had always thought my mother-in-law was called “Little Lefty,” because (1) he was short, and (2) she had been a lefthanded seamstress in the garment industry. But in the Yiddish-speaking left-wing family I married into, I learned the story was more complicated. Until the day she died, when speaking of the communist newspaper Frayhayt, she whispered its name.