That summer, I had completed grade 7 and was well on my way to becoming a fully-assimilated American teen. My family had gained some stability, too, with my father being employed at a local dental office, my mother becoming more and more acclimated, and my brother having survived his first year in school, too. Unfortunately, my brother’s experience wasn’t great. My parents, following the advice of well-meaning new acquaintances, had enrolled my brother in the Hebrew school offered through the local Jewish Community Center. Apparently, his classmates weren’t as kind to him as mine had been to me. They referred to him is “that Russian kid” and teased him about his clothes. I think my parents had sent him to school overdressed too, not having learned from my sixth-grade sartorial disaster. But they saw that he was miserable and were planning on public school for him for the next fall.

As part of their attempts to more fully integrate into the small Jewish community of Louisville, my parents had signed me up for Hebrew language classes, as well as for a day camp operated by our Jewish Community Center. The Hebrew language classes were a bust, as I refused to learn a whole new language again, since I had no plans to ever use it. I also didn’t have much interest in religion, and it didn’t look as if my parents were intending to become observant Jews, anyway. They tried going to Temple a couple of times, but as adults for whom being Jewish was a matter of ethnicity, not belief, becoming observant in their 30s was more than they wanted. But I did go to the day camp.

One of the trips the day camp offered was a weekend visit to the lake cabin owned by one of the families. Approximately thirty of us, aged 12-13, were driven out to the lake in the school bus for the occasion. When the bus pulled up to the structure that would shelter us for the weekend, I experienced something similar to what I had felt upon seeing all those gigantic cars in the parking lot of JFK airport.

I had read enough and spoke English well enough by then to know what a cabin was, so I expected a small, one- or two-room house about the size of our apartment. This was no cabin. It was a palace in the woods, a two-story mansion with huge windows that faced the lake on one side and the forest on the other, several living areas with comfortable couches and chairs and killer stereo systems, five or six bedrooms, several bathrooms, a large deck, and of course, its own private boating dock. The fact that it was, on the outside at least, made of logs, did not qualify it as a cabin, in my opinion.

Not that I was complaining. There was plenty of junk food, swimming in the lake, wandering around in the woods, a bonfire, and music! I’m sure there was adult supervision, but frankly I don’t remember seeing a whole lot of adults. I do remember having a lot of fun swimming and wandering around, and just hanging out.

The second evening of the trip, I was out walking the trails with a couple other girls. You couldn’t call it hiking, but we did manage to get pretty far into the woods after about thirty minutes of wandering. We found a clearing with some tree stumps and decided to take a break. We were sitting around, chatting about not much of anything, when a group of boys materialized out of the woods. They weren’t part of our group, but what difference did that make? They joined us, and we sat around in the clearing, not really talking, as the afternoon turned to evening, and it got kind of dark.