The story of Tootsie Rolls began in 1896, when Leo Hirshfield opened a little corner candy shop in New York City. Although he made many candies, having come from a confectionary family in Austria, his most successful penny candy was a cylinder-shaped uniquely chewy cross between fudge and caramel, in a wrapper twisted at both ends, which he named for his five-year-old daughter Clara, nicknamed Tootsie. By 1922, the company was listed on the New York Stock Exchange. Joseph Rubin & Sons, originally box suppliers to Hirshfield, took control in 1935, with Bernard D. Rubin masterminding a plan to move manufacturing out of New York. When Bernard died in 1948, having expanded the company’s locations and increased its annual profits 12-fold, he was succeeded by his brother William, who headed the company until 1962. Headquartered today in Chicago, Tootsie Roll Industries is run by William’s daughter Ellen Gordon, 77, who has been president and CEO since 1972. Her husband Melvin Gordon, 81, has been chairman of the board since 1962. Neither seems ready to step down, which is just as well, given that among their four daughters there is no obvious heiress apparent. (One daughter, Karen Mills, clearly has administrative capability, having recently been appointed by President Barack Obama to head the U.S. Small Business Administration.) Over the years, Tootsie has acquired Charleston Chews, Andes Mints, Junior Mints, Sugar Daddies, Dots & Crows, Nik-L-Nip Wax Bottles, and Dubble Bubble. With plants around the world, the company produces more than 62 million Tootsie Rolls every day.

In 1880, David Goldenberg arrived in Philadelphia from Romania. (Born David Seltzer, he heard on the boat from Europe that Goldberg is a good name to have in America, and embellished it with an added syllable.) After working for a decade making candies for carnivals and fairs, he opened a store, where he sold a popular chewy walnut and molasses candy, and in 1917, the walnut roll mutated to a peanut confection since peanuts were cheaper. Goldenberg’s Peanut-Chews won government contracts as nutritious, non-melting ration bars for American troops in World War I. When David Goldenberg retired after the Second World War (during which the company won more military contracts), his children Sylvia and Harry bought the very successful Peanut-Chew division of the business. Goldenberg’s Peanut-Chews stayed in the family for two more generations, with Harry’s sons Carl and Ed expanding the varieties of Peanut-Chews to include Chew-Ets, smaller bite-sized versions of the original. In 2003, David Goldenberg’s great grandson, also named David Goldenberg, sold the business to the Just Born Candy Company, which continues making Peanut Chews and Chew-Ets, now minus the Goldenberg name.

Just Born’s founder Sam Born arrived in New York from Russia in 1910. He invented the process for hard chocolate coating of Eskimo Pies, created a machine that mechanically inserted sticks into lollipops, and came up with a chocolate-sprinkle producing machine, whose yield—Jimmies—were named for the employee who operated the apparatus. Born opened a shop in Brooklyn in 1923. His brothers-in-law, Irv and Jack Shaffer, became partners in the business and in 1932, they moved to an empty printing factory in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Just Born introduced the popular Mike and Ike candies in 1940, whose name was likely inspired by the 1937 song “Mike and Ike,” which in turn was based on a 1920s Rube Goldberg comic strip. In 1953, Just Born acquired Rodda, a jelly bean company which also made a small line of marshmallow sweets, among them an Easter Peep. It took 27 hours to produce the Peep by hand. Sam Born’s son, Bob, invented a machine that reduced that time to six minutes, and today the company is the world’s biggest manufacturer of marshmallow confections. While Mike and Ike and Hot Tamales are kosher, Peeps, made with gelatin to achieve its signature squishy texture, are not. “We see no conflict in offering a non-kosher brand or one that is so associated with Easter. We are a candy company for everyone,” said Ross Born (Bob Born’s son), an observant Jew and co-CEO of the company. The 86-year-old family business “is most definitely influenced by being Jewish,” says Ross Born, who will be inducted into the Candy Hall of Fame this fall. “Like many people, much of our philosophy about operating our business emanates from our background: the importance of family (caring about others, appreciating who they are), the importance of education (how to learn from each other and also from our mistakes), and the importance of values (our statement of philosophy that supports our vision).”

Dubble Bubble ruled the bubble gum market when Abraham, Ira, Philip, and Joseph Shorin developed Bazooka Bubble Gum, recognizing, as World War II ended, that the wartime slogan for their spearmint-flavored Topps Chewing Gum, “Don’t Talk Chum, Chew Topps Gum!” (a variation of “loose lips sink ships”) was about to become obsolete. Topps was established in 1938 by the four Shorins, after their father’s American Leaf Tobacco business (founded in 1890 in Crown Heights, Brooklyn) faltered during the Depression. (Their father, Morris Chigorinsky, changed his name to Shorin after he arrived from Russia in 1888.) Wanting to take advantage of his tobacco distribution channels with a product they could sell to those same outlets, the brothers relaunched the family business with a name—Topps—which echoes a Cole Porter lyric. When sugar was rationed during World War II, Topps bought up small candy companies in order to close them up and use their sugar quotas. Topps thrived even while larger gum brands went out of business. In 1950, Topps changed focus with the introduction of celebrity trading cards, starting with Hopalong Cassidy, but turning to baseball players a year later. Originally developed as a clever means of getting people to buy more gum, the baseball cards quickly turned into a lucrative centerpiece of the business. Serious collectors don’t want the value of the cards compromised by gum residue, and gum is no longer packaged with the trading cards. In the ensuing decades, Topps went from a publicly traded company to a privately held one, expanding all the while, with Ring Pops (the Topps bestseller, introduced in 1977 and certified Kosher just this year), Push Pops, Baby Bottle Pops, Pro Flip Pops, and the just-introduced Wazoo. Arthur Shorin, 74, son of Joseph (on whom Bazooka Joe was modeled), was CEO at Topps from 1980 until 2007, when Michael Eisner’s investment firm, the Tornante Company, took over. Eisner is reportedly planning to make a movie based on Bazooka Joe, whom he regards as an American icon. “Bazooka Joe is my new Mickey Mouse,” the former Disney CEO has said.

The Annabelle Candy story began when founder Sam Altshuler arrived from Russia in 1917, though he arrived via China (with forged identity papers), beginning his new life in Seattle instead of New York. He worked various food-related jobs until he found his way to San Francisco, where, in 1950, he developed his chocolate-and-cashew-covered marshmallow bar, which he called Rocky Road, made in his kitchen, and sold from a pushcart on Market Street. Rocky Road was so successful Altshuler opened a factory, naming the business for his daughter Annabelle. Fifteen years later, the company moved to Hayward, California, and in 1971, when Altshuler died, Annabelle Altshuler Block took over. The following year, the company acquired the Golden Nugget Candy Company, makers of Big Hunk and Look, and six years after that, it also purchased the Cardinet Candy Company, bringing U-No and Abba Zaba candy bars into the Annabelle family. Altshuler’s grandson Gary Gogol ran the company for several years and then in 1995 handed it off to his sister Susan Gamson Karl, a former deputy district attorney in Los Angeles, who is the company’s current President and CEO. “My mother’s name was actually Hanna Basha on her birth certificate,” Karl said. “But she started calling herself Annabelle because it sounded more American.” Although most of the Annabelle candy bars are kosher, that is “a business decision, not a choice about any personal religious belief or identification,” Karl said, as many consumers consider kosher certification to signify a high standard of quality control.

The first generation Jewish immigrants scrabbled for traction in the land of opportunity. The next generation built on the foundations laid down by those entrepreneurs who parlayed determination and ambition into success and prosperity. Subsequent generations, born with so much opportunity, have the privilege of pursuing entrepreneurial ambition while making the world a better place.

Deborah Schimberg founded Verve, Incorporated, makers of Glee Gum, in 1992. A motivated community organizer who founded a community land trust and a dual-language immersion elementary public school, Schimberg is also the Executive Director of Social Venture Partners of Rhode Island, a consortium of donors devoted to entrepreneurial philanthropy. Verve is a family business “dedicated to linking world communities and creating environmentally and socially responsible products and activities.” Their first product, still in production, is a Make Your Own Chewing Gum kit, was inspired by a visit to an economically depressed chicle-producing village in northern Guatemala. Chicle, the sap extracted from the Sapodilla tree by workers called chicleros, was once used for all chewing gum, but has been replaced by cheaper and more efficient synthetics. Glee Gum, the only American brand made from chicle today, is the natural next step on a path of what Schimberg calls a Jewish social conscience, “Doing well—making money while doing something you love—and also doing good.” Katharine Weber is the author of several books, including the forthcoming novel, True Confections, to be published in December from Shaye Areheart Books.

Both the interviewers and the survivors would lapse into silence for long periods, and the tapes are filled with the uncomfortable and laden silences those of us who have experienced a classical psychoanalysis know so well. (Many of the interviewers were in fact psychoanalysts from the New Haven community.) Often the survivors wept with relief as they told their stories, once they got past the usual sort of summary and were invited to contemplate what they had experienced. Others seemed less moved by their own testimonies. They spoke without hesitation, rarely pausing to grope for the right phrases: This was clearly a story they had told over and over in just these words. Some were ashamed by the choices they had made, by the things they had done to survive. Others revealed acts of cruelty or violence in understated tones that startled and intrigued me. Did they really lack a sense of guilt? Did they simply regard their actions as inevitable and beyond remorse or regret? It seemed possible. My first novel, which would be published almost fifteen years later, would feature an Auschwitz survivor who feels entitled to whatever he desires, and says of himself, “I do not believe in guilt.”

Eyewitness accounts give us texture and nuance and the possibility for greater understanding. They make history human, and personal. The most extreme experiences especially require that we listen to those who bear witness. In early 2001, when I was writing my third novel, the death of Rose Freedman, the last living survivor of the 1911 Triangle Waist company fire, caught my attention. In the days following her demise, I heard her voice on the radio several times and, in her obituaries, I read quotes from the many interviews she had given over her impossibly long life. She had been famous for 90 years for surviving that fire, and she had told her story over and over through the decades. I found my writing energies being diverted by the idea of a novel that would take up the Triangle fire, which had long intrigued me because of the way it felt like part of my personal family history.

My father’s mother, Pauline Gottesfeld, worked at the Triangle Waist Company in 1909, finishing buttonholes. By 1911, she was safely behind the counter of a Brooklyn grocery store, having married my grandfather, Samuel Kaufman, a fruit peddler, in January of 1910 (my father arrived just three months later). I grew up feeling that the Triangle fire was a close call, that I owed my existence to Pauline having, in effect, survived that fire. Had she not gotten pregnant, had she not married, she could have been there on March 25th, 1911, when the eight, ninth and tenth floors of the Asch Building, a block east of Washington Square, went up in flames. She could have been among the young women she had worked beside only months before, all of them packed behind those dense rows of sewing machines in that converted loft. They didn’t have a chance. Fresh off the boat, their panicked voices raised in Yiddish and Italian, they died in fifteen minutes, burning, succumbing to the smoke and heat, trapped on the wrong side of doors that were locked or opened inward, crouching in stairwells. Some sixty of them jumped from the ninth floor to their deaths on the cobbled street below.

Throughout my childhood my father told me the story of the Triangle fire, always prefacing his remarks with the words, “Your grandmother was a great lady.” Pauline herself died when I was 12, and I have no memory of her ever talking about the fire, though she did occasionally sew buttons and mend my clothes with astonishing speed and skill, and I knew she had worked this way, sewing, from the time she was a child. After her death, my father brought her ancient sewing machine in its wooden cabinet into our house, and it sat undisturbed for years in a nook on a stair landing, a poignant reminder of the tiny woman who arrived at Ellis Island in 1900 and earned her living at a similar machine so long ago.

A few years ago, when I began work on my Triangle novel, I decided to use testimony to tell the main story—the story of the fire—to use a voice the way Rose Freedman’s testimony made the Triangle fire vivid for so many years. From the outset I knew that the central character of Triangle—whom I named Esther Gottesfeld—would be, like Rose Freedman, the last living survivor of the Triangle fire. Esther, I decided, would die at the age of 106, having been famous all her life for not having died on that day in 1911. She would have told her story again and again, the story of the day she survived the Triangle fire. Her story would form the organizing spine of the novel. But at the heart of her story—her testimony—would be a lie.

Having been very close to two accomplished and creative women who lived well into their nineties, I witnessed firsthand the phenomenon of the “Important Story” that has been told and retold. It was my privilege to observe both of them —my other, maternal grandmother, the Broadway composer Kay Swift, and my friend and employer, the artist Anni Albers, widow of Josef Albers—telling their stories over and over to the many scholars and journalists who came to sit at their feet. Though accomplished in their own right, both Kay and Anni—contemporaries who knew (and admired) each other—were associated with men of legendary, even iconic status. Both outlived these men, and for the rest of their very long lives, they were destined to be visited by a steady stream of scholars, journalists, filmmakers, biographers, and knowledgeable and persistent aficionados who came to call. I spent years listening to the way these visitors asked their questions, and I became finely attuned to the way the familiar stories were told and retold, with patterns of variations and discrepancies that I began to listen for.

A distinguished textile designer, weaver, and printmaker, Anni and her husband, painter and color theorist Josef Albers, met at the Bauhaus, in Weimar, Germany. Theirs was a romantic courtship, and they were soon married. They remained at the Bauhaus through the moves to Dessau, and then Berlin, where the Nazis shuttered it in 1933, just as the Alberses were offered a fortuitous opportunity (facilitated by Philip Johnson and Edward M.M. Warburg) to teach at Black Mountain College, the experimental art school in North Carolina, where they remained until 1950, when Josef became chair of the Department of Design at Yale. I met Anni in 1976, two days after Josef’s death. My soon-to-be husband, a cultural historian, was involved in the administration of his estate and soon after became the Director of the Albers Foundation, which he continues to administer today.

In the years after Josef’s death, I worked on several projects involving sorting and curating in the Josef Albers archive, and I assisted Anni, who, at 77, was wheelchair-bound within a few months of being widowed, in a variety of practical ways. Often I would meet the trains of scholars who came to interview her, and sometimes I would be present throughout their visits. Over time, I heard a great deal of repetition in the interviews, whether they were about Mies and Gropius and Kandinsky and Klee at the Bauhaus, or about John Cage and Buckminster Fuller at Black Mountain College. I became fascinated by the narrow focus of these scholars’ inquiries. No matter how intriguing or provocative Anni’s remark, if it didn’t match the interviewer’s agenda, it was disregarded. One Black Mountain scholar, planning a publication and an exhibition, didn’t even want to look at the front of an extraordinary painting I pulled out of storage, once she saw, from a date inscribed on the back, that Josef painted it a year before he arrived at Black Mountain. Similarly, certain Bauhaus scholars swiftly changed the subject back to Bauhaus if Anni mentioned her friend Bucky Fuller during a break for coffee and the slightly stale Entenmann’s pastries she had me buy for guests at the local thrift outlet.

In this same time period, I often served a similar role in an apartment an hour and a half south, on East 59th Street, where my grandmother Kay Swift —for whom I was named, and with whom I was quite close —received an equally steady, though less academic stream of questioners. Well past her 90th birthday she was still telling biographers and journalists and filmmakers about George Gershwin, with whom she had been romantically involved for a decade, from 1925 to 1935, in an affair that ended my grandparents’ marriage. It is hard to know if Kay and George would have married; though they had separated when George went to Hollywood for the last months of his life, they were not finished with each other when he died of a brain tumor in 1937 at the age of 38. (Oscar Levant was among those cynical about George’s intentions for the future of this very public relationship. “Look,” he is reported to have said when Kay and George made an entrance together at a nightclub. “Here comes the future Miss Kay Swift.”)

Kay was the first woman to score a hit Broadway musical, the 1930 show Fine and Dandy, which included the enduring standards “Fine and Dandy” and “Can This Be Love?” with lyrics by her husband, my grandfather, the banker James Paul Warburg. But like Anni’s, my grandmother’s own significant accomplishments were often overshadowed by the greater triumphs of the man with whom she was linked, although the more tactful visitors usually asked a dutiful question or two about her music. Some of my grandmother’s callers were musicians reviving Gershwin musicals, who came to extract her detailed knowledge of tempi and keys for all the numbers in the original productions (into her 80s she could still play Porgy and Bess, in its original entirety, from memory). Some were singers, looking for guidance about Gershwin’s original intentions for the performance of certain songs. And many were journalists or biographers with questions about George Gershwin himself.

The scope of her visitors’ interests, as with Anni’s callers, was remarkably limited. More often than not, those Gershwin-obsessed visitors foreclosed any new or surprising revelations by ignoring or cutting off her non-Gershwin chat, about, say, her friend Harold Arlen or her stint as staff composer at Radio City Music Hall writing musical numbers for the Rockettes, or her job as director of light music at the 1939 World’s Fair, or her marriage to a cowboy which resulted in a book, and then a movie starring Fred MacMurray and Irene Dunne. The Gershwin questions were so predictable that I could feel my grandmother’s response dropping into the cadences and well-worn grooves of certain stories, just as when Anni would draw a breath and once again begin a story with the familiar words, “At ze Bauhaus….”

Anni Albers and Kay Swift were both forceful, opinionated, independent women of significant accomplishment who preferred to live in the present and to look ahead, not back. (My grandmother was once extremely irked by a young journalist who gushed, “You must have had such an interesting life!” “Yes, and I am still having it,” she retorted.) But each was most in demand for what she had seen and experienced all those years ago. Anni clearly resented living in the shadow of the great master, even as she pretended to be surprised and humbled when a visitor’s eye was caught by one of her screen prints, though our preparation for the interviewer’s arrival had invariably included strategically propping this very print in the visitor’s path. My grandmother certainly wanted recognition for her role in George Gershwin’s life, and also for her role in preserving his legacy, work she did tirelessly for decades, often at the expense of her own musical output. Yet she was also very private about what went on between them, and generally unwilling to discuss any intimate aspects of their relationship. Soon after his death she destroyed all of his letters, much to the irritation and dismay of numerous Gershwin scholars.

Anni and Kay both edited and revised the stories they were compelled to repeat. There were the conscious elisions, of course, and there was, no doubt, all kinds of unconscious censorship and alteration of history as well. Especially when confronted by researchers who felt entitled to full access to any information on their chosen subject, both women were capable of withholding just a few more details, changing the story just a little bit more. Their stories were essentially true—I am not suggesting otherwise—and they were both witnesses to significant events in twentieth century cultural history. But their testimony had been channeled and shaped by so many things, from their own ambivalences to the inevitable lapses of memory over time, to the expectations and agendas of those asking the questions.

In my novel Triangle, Esther Gottesfeld tells her story of the Triangle fire over and over. Her account is essentially true, but it also contains a very significant lie. This lie, told for 90 years, echoes through all of the transcripts and recordings of her testimony. At the beginning of The Plague, Camus writes that a narrator’s “business is only to say: ‘This is what happened’ when he knows that it actually did happen.” Esther has told her story for 90 years, and while her story is not quite what she says it is, her secrets do not make her story less emotionally true. Over those 90 years, her story has grown in power as she lives with the consequences of her choices—both on the day of the fire and all the days after that, too, when she tells her story the way she chooses to tell it.