"The Lost World of the Late Nineties"

No matter. Over the next eighteen months, Amazon shares went into a swoon. They never descended into penny-stock hell, where quite a few heavy hitters of the Internet revolution struggled to warm themselves around the fire. Still, my options lost more than 95 percent of their value before they stabilized and began to claw their way back upward. In the interim, I sold several blocks of stock at what I once would have regarded as absurdly low prices: hadn't I already lost enough money due to my touching, complacent, loyal, greedy, quasi-religious faith that the company would always bounce back? Would I ever learn? I had been foolish, but now I would be a realist. (In fact, I was being foolish again -- as I write these words, the value of the shares has now multiplied tenfold since they touched bottom -- but this extra, ironic rotation of the wheel of fortune is more than I can deal with at the moment.) In any case, by the time I returned to Manhattan from Seattle in September 2001, my sister was no longer asking me if I was millionaire. But if she had, I could have told her, honestly, that I wasn't.

It's not, as they say, a tragedy. My fortune materialized ex nihilo, without any special effort or ingenuity on my part, and vanished in no less capricious a manner. I made out okay, more than okay: the money I squeezed out of the stock on the way up allowed me to move back East, buy an apartment, and prepare some sort of launching pad for the next stage of my life. From time to time I have these twinges of regret. I find myself staring at those very items I was too superior to covet back when I could afford them: a silver Mercedes-Benz, a black leather chaise lounge, a Rodin -- his famous bust of Gustav Mahler -- that I saw in a shop window near my dentist. I also dream of a little bungalow I thought of buying during my next-to-last summer in Seattle. The entrance took you through a gate and down the steep western slope of Queen Anne Hill, with fir trees and bright green underbrush on both sides of the path. During the dry months, anyway, it felt like an enchanted forest, and at the bottom of this charming declivity was the house itself, compact and cozy. The price of this picturesque dwelling was $500,000: a ridiculous sum, I thought. Yet now that I'm back in Manhattan, where that kind of money gets you an outhouse with cooking privileges, the bungalow seems more and more something out of a fairy tale, one I actually participated in. What, I ask myself, is the moral of the story? Am I overlooking some basic lesson about money and corruption and mild-mannered hubris? I'm not sure. What I have decided is to stop thinking about the golden age -- which turned out to be largely a matter of iron pyrites -- and move on.

Here, too, there are certain lessons to be drawn from my family history, with its patterns of Yiddish-accented peripeteia. What, for example, became of my great-grandfather Abraham Felder, who sewed all that Czarist currency into his clothing? At once he hooked up with his brother-in-law, who had emigrated some years before and set up as a diamond merchant. Together they founded what was then a cutting-edge business, the Roaring Twenties equivalent of online commerce: selling jewelry by mail order. They made pots of money, more than enough to compensate for Abraham's defunct rubles. True, they were living in the midst of a major boom -- President Coolidge himself anointed it a "new era of prosperity" -- when it was supposedly impossible not to make money. So they went with the flow, and became rich men.

By 1925 it was time to move to a tonier neighborhood. They left Queens for Brooklyn: for Flatbush, more precisely, which was then an upper-middle-class citadel instead of an urban eyesore. They bought a mansion on Bedford Avenue, cheek-by-jowl with the country club, and there my father spent much of his childhood. Each morning a chauffeured Packard conveyed them to their offices on Bleecker Street. The driver -- to whom my ancestors, early practitioners of trickle-down economics, gave a motorcycle -- sat in the car all day, wrapping himself in a blanket when the temperature dropped. Then he drove them home again at the end of the day.

Not surprisingly, Abraham and his partner developed a healthy disdain for alarmists, defeatists, the faint of heart. Having escaped catastrophe by the skin of their teeth back in Russia, they now excluded its very possibility. They had traded those rubles -- wastepaper, play money, confetti -- for solid American currency, hadn't they? Their future was assured. They weren't speculators, fooling around with intangibles: they dealt in precious stones, objects you could hold in your hand. ("Were they selling costume jewelry or the real thing?" I asked my father. "Nobody knows," he told me.) Approached by their own nephew to at least buy some life insurance, they declined. "Insurance policies are for poor people," they informed him. "We're set for life." Pragmatists, they also turned up their noses at various other pie-in-the-sky prospects. An opportunity arose to invest in shares of the nascent Transworld Airlines. The whole concept made them suspicious: no whimsical, Chagall-like dreams of flight for these Jews. "Nobody will ever fly from one coast to another in an airplane," was their final judgment.

How easy, in retrospect, to see what they did not! That catastrophe was part and parcel of their universe they should have known, and not only because they left Odessa in such a hurry. Catastrophe was in the air, the water. Even the Berengaria -- the steel-helmed vehicle of salvation that carried them from the Old World to the New, with its swimming pool, Turkish baths, and, on the promenade deck, an actual brokerage office for stock trades --was itself a kind of dividend paid on a previous disaster. It had been given to Cunard by the Hamburg-American Line after World War I as compensation for the Lusitania, destroyed by a German torpedo on May 7, 1915. With a yawning gash in its starboard hull, the ship sank in a mere twenty minutes. That left little time to deploy the lifeboats, and 1,198 passengers drowned in the Atlantic. The calculus of such a disaster is unbearable, the very arithmetic an insult.

Compared to those unlucky souls, Abraham and his partner lost nothing when the economy collapsed in 1929. As they saw it, though, they lost everything. The business dried up. Their investments went sour. The driver was let go. Somehow they held onto the house on Bedford Avenue, but even that functioned as something of a goad, reminding them that it was better never to have money (as they tirelessly noted) than to have it and lose it. As the Depression deepened and grew more desperate, they took to sitting in the parlor every evening with the lights out, silent and embittered. From time to time they broke the silence in order to blame each other: "It's your fault I'm poor now!" Mostly, though, they kept quiet. In such a state they refused to think much about the future, which had seemed to issue them certain promises, certain obligations, and had now defaulted on them. My father, then a boy, observed all this: the dark room, the chastened, furious partners. He may have decided then, on instinct, that cash was a dubious foundation for the good life. In any case, he passed that belief on to me, along with those 100-ruble notes. The secret to keeping money fresh, it turns out, is to never spend it.

As for me: I had other catastrophes to reckon with. A week after leaving Amazon and returning to New York, I dropped my son off at school in the morning, walked east along Great Jones Street, and heard, as I approached the intersection of Lafayette, what sounded like a military jet passing directly overhead, going south. There was a loud roar, the kind you could feel in the soles of your feet. Some stunt, I thought. But it was, as we all know, a passenger plane, and thirty seconds later everything changed no less decisively than it had when that torpedo struck the Lusitania. With tears in my eyes, I stood in the midst of a furious, chastened crowd on the corner and watched the towers burn. In the distance I thought I saw tiny pieces of paper floating in the air like confetti, but this was a trick of perspective: these were big sheets of metal or glass or gypsum board, carried aloft by the updraft.

That evening I found myself at an outdoor restaurant on the Upper East Side. The place was jammed, and the funereal hush of the afternoon had been broken. In fact there was a peculiar energy in the air, a sense of expectancy, as if we were all waiting for a verdict to be announced. People joked, argued, struggled to regain their conversational footing. If you squinted, this could almost pass for normal life. A man at the next table sent back his endive salad as a procession of enormous refrigerator trucks dodged potholes on their way downtown. Anybody could figure out what the trucks were for. I did. And my lost riches, which had already ranked pretty low on the scale of terrible events, dwindled to microscopic size, then vanished.

I wish I could say that I never thought of them again. Yet I do. The ordinary heartbreaks, as Nadezhda Mandelstam called them -- the non-catastrophic ones -- are sometimes trivial, sometimes not. In either case, they're impressively tenacious. In the evenings, as my ancestors did, I lapse into the occasional reverie about my monetary rise and fall. I've made it a habit, however, to always leave the lights on.

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