Grandma Sadie lived long enough to hold her great-granddaughter, Alison Clark.

Young Sadie Shoengold, about 10 years old, stands between her brother Moe and sister Anna. The photo dates from about 1908, when the Shoengold family lived in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, one of the largest Jewish centers in the world. Moe grew up to be a furrier like his father. When Sadie was shunned by her father for marrying a man who was Italian and Catholic, Anna was said to have arranged secret meetings to stay in touch with her sister.

She was born in 1898 and given the name Sarah, the third and youngest child of Kalman Shoengold and Bertha Windisch. She came to America with her family in 1901 from Cracow, then part of Austria, now part of Poland.

At the time of her birth, there were 25,670 Jews in Cracow, 28 percent of the population. This Jewish community would more than double by the time of the Nazi occupation in 1939, an epoch described in the book and movie Schindler's List.

There was also a long history of anti-Semitism in Cracow, as well as Polish and German nationalism. These forces paved the way for the Holocaust. By the end of World War II, there would be few Jews left in the city. Those who did not get out in time would be murdered on the spot, deported, or transported to extermination camps.

Surely, it was the growth of anti-Semitism at the end of the 19th century that turned the Shoengolds into Jewish immigrants seeking a life of promise in Brooklyn. Sarah's father, Kalman, worked for a furrier, a craft he could easily have learned in Cracow. He was, by all accounts, a stubborn man, too proud to stand behind a pushcart. During hard times, his family paid the price.

An old photograph of the three Shoengold children shows Sarah, nicknamed Sadie, the youngest at age 10, as a pretty, peaceful child. She took for granted the crowded poverty of the European immigrants. Although she loved learning and had a quick mind, she left school after the seventh grade and went to work to help the family.

After a breakfast of bread and coffee, she would walk across the Williamsburg Bridge to save the three-cents trolley fare. At the age of 14, she did heavy manual labor in a lithographer's shop.

There, she met my Italian grandfather, Peter Marino. The Marinos, new Americans from Naples, settled in the land east of Chinatown, where, it was said, the rats chased the cats.

In 1918, against the wishes of her father, who valued the cultural integrity of the family above all else, she married outside of the Jewish faith. Perhaps it was a cruel thing for her to do, given the mores of the time. No doubt, it was a painful decision for Sadie because her father disowned her. In the language of the time: She was dead to her family.

But Sadie had another family now, a clan of Italians: Marinos, De Lucas, De Feos, Maffies. She became fluent in Italian in less than two years. Simply put, Sadie Marino became the matriarch of this Lower East Side family, the Jewish mother of about three dozen cousins who lived within a single city block. She served them as doctor, midwife, interpreter, lawyer, marriage counselor, and social worker.

When one cousin, Fortunata De Luca, tried to register for grammar school, her teacher, who did not understand Italian, inscribed the name "Fortune Teller De Luca" on the registration form. Sadie lectured the teacher on her thoughtlessness, restoring Fortunata's good name.

In a crisis, to protect her family, Sadie could swear with great skill, in English, Italian, and Yiddish. And sometimes, she would swear just for fun. I once heard her tell a young woman, fresh out of a convent school, one of the earthiest stories I'd ever heard.

Sadie cooked huge Italian meals, washed hundreds of dirty heads, kept people out of jail, and delivered children. She also served the city, took the census, volunteered for jury duty, and registered voters. "Stars and Stripes Forever" was her favorite song.

Her favorite activity was to heap praise on her offspring with that sublime hyperbole perfected to an art form by Jewish mothers. She once bragged to her neighbors that her grandson, a student in England that summer, was a "professor at Oxford."

She also knew great suffering. She lived to see her twins die: Vincent of pneumonia and Beatrice of cancer. Like many other New Yorkers, she learned the violence of the city up close. One time, she was mugged at knifepoint in an elevator.

Sadie, a smoker, always seemed in shaky health. She was said to hold the Beekman Hospital record for most appearances (more than 50) by a Jewish grandmother. High blood pressure, heart trouble, arthritis, bad feet, cataracts, lung disease, a plague of brittle bones. She survived all these as if pain were a part of her heritage.

Having bounced back from a serious attack of pneumonia in 1966, Sadie discussed her recovery with a priest who was visiting the hospital.

"Well, Sadie, Jesus almost took you from us that time."

"Yeah," she responded, "but then he thought, 'She's my cousin! I'll let her stick around a little longer.' "

Said her nephew Morty Roberts: "She was the warmest person I ever knew."

Sadie stuck around long enough to celebrate her 50th wedding anniversary, and long enough to see her oldest grandson take a bride.

She gave me one of her several wedding bands. One was not enough for a woman who loved jewelry with such a passion. It had to be cut smaller to fit me. I'm wearing it now.

Sadly, Sadie was too weak and fragile to make the 200-mile journey to the wedding, and, in all the excitement, we forgot to call her after the ceremony. When I finally telephoned, she gave me an earful: "You sunavabitch bastid (one of her favorite constructions), how come you didn't call? And me sitting here waiting all day."

She wasn't angry for long. And she hung around long enough to bounce her great-grandchild on her fragile knee.

She died in 1975 at the age of 77.

It's hard not to imagine the what-ifs.

What if the Shoengolds had stayed in Cracow? Sadie's uncles did. Their names were Sol and Meyer Windisch. Sol was a bachelor who stayed in Poland until the 1930s, when he came to New York and went to work on Wall Street. The family remembers that he wore pince nez glasses and was a frugal man, bringing his nieces and nephews gifts of hotel soap and matchbooks.

Sol's brother, Meyer, was a furrier who lived well in Cracow and traveled often between Poland and America. He married and begged his wife to come to the United States. But she refused.

By 1939, Nazi leaders had vowed to make Cracow judenrein -- cleansed of Jews. The Holocaust Museum is filled with artifacts of the machinery of death required to fulfill that evil promise.

In one exhibit from the Auschwitz concentration camp, not far from Cracow, the visitor confronts a wall of mug shots of Jewish prisoners. These are taken from three angles: front, full-profile, and half profile. They wear prison uniforms and Stars of David. The heads of many, including the women, are shaved.

These are the faces of the doomed, yet the visitor cannot help but be inspired by the traces of human dignity. A young girl holds up her chin. The eyes of another, so light they look blue even in a black-and-white photo, gaze longingly to heaven.

But just before all this came to pass, Meyer Windisch persuaded his new wife to flee their home and escape to America. Like so many other Jewish families of that terrible time, they would tell the next generation, "We made the last boat."