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I. In the beginning, there was canned corned beef. More ac­curately, in the beginning, there was a war, World War II; the siege of my hometown, Leningrad; the Great Hunger, which claimed more lives than all the bombs, shells, and bullets together. And toward the end of the siege, there was canned corned beef from America. Swift, I think, was the brand name, although I may be wrong; I was only four when I tasted it for the first time. It was perhaps the first meat we had had in a while. Still, its flavor was less memorable than the...