Nads is a diabetic? Did anyone know that?
No, but it doesn't surprise me.
Again, I have to point out this is the tragedy of nadin, her stunted, out-of-proportion growth and all that, which reminds me of what I saw in the socialist paradises of the workers and peasants.
Generally, those of eastern European derivation who emigrated to the United States, over two or three generations grew up healthier and larger, due to the fruits of liberty and a free-market system, which allowed them to flourish and prosper.
Those who stayed behind, enduring the wars and famines and persecutions of socialism didn't fare so well, growing and developing only little better than their long-ago medieval ancestors; hunchbacks, dwarves, giants, the cripples, the deformed, the grotesque, the curiosities.
Things such as what I saw in Kiev (a male with a full adult-sized head but the body the size of an infant), or in Kishinev (a male with both eyes on the same side of his nose), or in Rostov (a little girl with full legs but no knees), among a multitude of lesser, but still pretty bad, deformities (such as those whose jaws melted into their necks, they having been born with no chin).
And that was just the physical deformities, not to mention the mental ones.
I am not ridiculing such people, as each person is of the same value to God--the very short nadin and the appropriately-sized franksolich are the same in the eyes of God, no more, no less. And besides in the eyes of God, the only eyes that matter, better to have an ugly body and a beautiful soul than an aesthetic body and a hideous soul.
So, bringing this back to nadin. Her father and her father's parents didn't stay in Poland to be sucked up in the maws of the socialists (first the Germans and then the Russians), but they didn't make it to America either, ending up instead in another third-world pesthole, the only place that would take them, because the overwhelmingly-Democrat White House, Congress, Supreme Court, and State Department back in 1939 didn't want them here.
People in third-world countries don't grow very well.
Normally, one is compelled to be compassionate towards the ill-fated, but nadin is an exception.
Because of her overwhelming arrogance, know-it-allism, and voluntary ignorance, one feels no pity for nadin.
If she comes across as "ugly" in the physical sense, it's because she's ugly in the spiritual sense. If she were more modest, more humble, more gracious, more accepting of others, her physical ugliness would be minimized, if not utterly erased, in the eyes of those who behold her.
