This is the memoir of a Sephardic Jewish girl living among Ashkenazi neighbors in the Bronx. She comes down with polio just before her eighth birthday. She begins a fight against immobility set within a cultural realm where Catholic and Jew and Turkish Moslem once met. Where a beautiful aunt could be abducted into a Turkish harem and another aunt could still keep the 400-year-old iron key to the family house in the Cordoba of the Spanish Inquisition.