My beautiful and glamorous great-aunt Miriam Elias lived a rather scandalous life, or so goes the family legend! Miriam was born in 1897 in Kamenets Podolski, Ukraine, a small village near Odessa. Her village, she once told us, was very much like the fictional shtetl Anatevka immortalized in Fiddler on the Roof. In fact her father was the village rabbi and like Tevya in Fiddler he had five daughters. Miriam was the adored youngest of those five Elias sisters, and my paternal...