They were not unsettled. “Confinement doesn’t bother me,” Naomi wrote me in an email. “My shaky frame can handle more confinement.”

Naomi and Eva were introduced by Grace Paley at a reading of her work in the 1980s. They were well past middle-age, long after the tragedies and social disruptions of the previous decades had touched them each with such intimacy. When catastrophe is sequential, it eventually trains its survivors to greet terror with the serenity of the enlightened.

Both Eva and Naomi experienced anti-Semitism at a young age. Eva, who was raised in a family of wealthy Jewish intellectuals outside Vienna, recalls being beaten by a group of children for being a “dirty Jew’’ when she was 6. During her childhood in the Bronx, Naomi was privy to the fascist radio broadcasts of Father Coughlin, which were always emanating from the open windows of East Tremont during the summer. Her grandparents had escaped the pogroms in Russia, coming to America at the turn of the century when the habits of immigrants — considered filthy and ignorant — were continually blamed for the spread of disease.

The first of Eva’s own upheavals came with war. A year after the Nazi annexation of Austria, in 1939, she fled via the Kindertransport, a series of rescue efforts that placed Jewish children in British homes. Eva, then 13, traveled with her siblings first by train to the Netherlands and then by ship to England.

“The minute we got to Holland it seemed so wonderful that there were kind people there on the station platform,’’ Eva once told an interviewer for a feminist oral history project. “They gave you orange juice and smiled at you.”

At first she had thought of it all as an adventure. “And then, when we were in England,’’ she said, “I very soon realized that I was extremely lonely.” Eva and her brothers were dispersed to different homes while their parents stayed behind. In 1940, the family escaped the Holocaust and reunited in America, landing in Staten Island.

By then Eva’s parents had lost everything, and so her mother worked teaching English to refugees for 25 cents an hour in order to earn the money to become a masseuse. Her father, who had been a prominent architect in Austria, sold vacuum cleaners.