Growing up in the 1950s, part of a tightly woven Portuguese family who had migrated generations earlier to  South America, I often thought about the little boy in that photo in my father's album. I lingered over his round face and serious gaze as he faced the camera, and the fervent look of the woman with the boyish haircut crouched near him, his mother Ena. 

I knew very little about them. I lived in a happy home, my brother George and I nurtured by loving maternal grandparents, and I never asked myself why my mother had moved a continent away or the reason that little boy, who grew up to be my father, had died just a few months after I was born. Nor did I know why, having been brought up Catholic, I had a Jewish last name. Later, living in Canada, I began to explore the complex issues that my family history raised.