On January 4, 1942, Blanche moses was sitting in her “high quarters” at 415 West 118th Street in New York City, writing yet another letter to Rabbi Meyer, the librarian at the American Jewish Historical Society. At eighty-two, the reclusive heiress was losing her patience. Her collection of daguerreotypes—“one of my precious possessions”—had been lost while on loan, and she was unable to get into the library to look for the family keepsakes. She begged Rabbi Meyer for assistance. As she noted, she hoped to have his help, as she preferred “not to court personal publicity.” This was something of an understatement. As Moses explained when she gave the rabbi the number for her newly installed phone, she could be “reached at any hour—day or evening, as I do not go out.”1