A woman's paternal grandmother was named Gittel. The woman's father always insisted that certain dreamers like Gittel, who are doomed because of their dreams, run in the family and are bound to be born once every few generations. The woman finally tells the story of Gittel to her adult archaeologist daughter named Rachel. Rachel had asked about the story many times in her youth, but the woman always told her daughter to merely read the newspapers and keep up with current events so she would not end up a dreamer like Gittel. Gittel Shapiro was a Jewish woman with red hair who was born in Germany in the early twentieth century. Though they were Jewish, the Shapiro family was well-respected because of their non-semitic physical features and their academic talents. When Gittel was still a teenager, her professor father, who worked at the University of Berlin, married her off to a fellow academic, who was thirty-five-years-old at the time. The two moved to Latvia against Gittel's wishes, and the whole marriage, Gittel dreamt of moving back to Grunewaldstrasse. She had seven sons in ten years with her husband Horwicz, one of whom is the father of the woman telling the story. In the 1940s, when the woman's father Bernard was only five-years-old, Horwicz died. Gittel stopped taking care of her children after Horwicz's death; she asked the merchants who had taken in the three oldest to take in her sons for another year. They reluctantly agreed. Bernard, the fourth and favorite son, was to stay with Gittel, but Gittel began making him uncomfortable, always telling Bernard how he resembled his father. Bernard left home to be with his three older brothers, who were planning to go to America. Gittel took the three youngest children and got on a train to return to her hometown in Germany. On the train, a conductor asked Gittel for her passport. When she provided it, the conductor told her she would report to the Bureau of Immigration as soon as she arrived in Germany.