The tobacco executive's son, I told my maternal grandfather on the phone from the hospital, would receive as a college graduation present a pied-a-terre in any city he wished. He was deciding between Paris and New York. My grandfather—raised in a poor shtetl in Romania, a prisoner of the Iron Guard at 17—let out a distant sigh. It was the summer of 2001. I'd completed my first year at McGill University in Montreal, Canada and was an in-patient at the National Institutes of Health (NIC) in Washington, D.C. with a mysterious infection that doctors in my hometown of New York...