The Devil She Knew [February 15, 2007]

Hoping not to be slaughtered in a pogrom, Celia Kaufman’s family brought her to Minnesota from the environs of Odessa, Russia, sometime around the turn of the last century. By age 20, she’d married her cousin John Ned Kaufman and had my mother, the first of her four children, one of whom died in infancy.

The Kaufmans were pretty nearly penniless through…