Bozsi introduced us over Skype to her granddaughter, who lives in India with her Sikh husband. Now Bozsi’s French granddaughter was having to make her way in a new country just the way Bozsi had. The man’s family were refugees, migrants from what became Pakistan. He told us that his wife is more Indian than he is, something I don’t believe Henri would ever have said about Bozsi and France. We remained in the bedroom where she has her computer. Sitting on a guest bed, holding hands with Hannah, Bozsi spoke of her memories of her early years in Royan.

She described how she had no decent clothes and told us she had looked like a vagabond. How troubled she had been by the “USA Go Home” graffiti she had seen. How she had taken the opposite tack and encouraged an American family to move in on their street. How she felt like she didn’t have anything to do. How Henri didn’t want her to have a piano. How he was going out every night with his friends. How it wasn’t the life she wanted, alone at home. How, before her boys were born, she had left Henri, and run away to Switzerland, where she had cousins. And finally, how Henri came after her, promising things would be different and brought her home.

Hannah had noticed right away that Bozsi’s house felt like the home of her grandmother. Formal, but lived in. Full of colorful glass and ceramics that seemed to contain memories. Wood bookshelves, flowers, framed family photos and ornate table lamps. Our conversations with Bozsi revealed how similar in so many ways the lives of my parents and the lives of Henri and Bozsi had been after the war, even though they never saw each other or spoke again.

The biggest similarity may have been something that you couldn’t see. Both couples lived in a space in between. Their identity was never straightforward, as individuals or as families. As a boy, I felt I lived in a different world from my parents. I would hide clothes I wanted to wear to school in a paper bag in our garage. I would change from the collared shirt and sweater my mother liked to see me in to a sweatshirt or t-shirt with cut off sleeves, hacked with scissors in my room. I adored baseball. But my mother would tell me how much she hated the game. It bothered her that GIs had played catch after the war in Budapest squares. She thought it was undignified, disrespectful. Then she saw her own son put on his baseball uniform and jump on his bike for the ballpark, a place they never visited, even for the biggest game.

The life of an immigrant is a life of two places, two identities. And maybe that’s especially so for those who feel they have no choice but to leave their native land. In my parents’ youth, identity was a matter of life or death. In the world they sought for their children, they hoped it could be a choice.

That night, after Bozsi had rested, we returned to her house so Hannah and Nathalie could say goodbye. It was painful for Bozsi. She called Hannah “adorable,” and said she didn’t want to lose her. I hadn’t imagined what it would mean to have one of my children with me as I met an old, old friend of my parents. We had experienced a family bond together, and I could imagine how even after I’m gone my daughter would be able to tell her own family about the friend of her grandmother, how the story could live on, connecting generations.