Touched by FireBy: Irene N. Watts "Let them burn. They're a lot of cattle anyway." A factory owner's response regarding the use of fire drills in March 1911. Touched by Fire, Irene N. Watt's exquisite new novel, explores one family's journey as they flee from the pogroms of Russia in 1905, where the Cossacks burn villages to the ground, to Berlin, Germany, where Jews have a hard time living and working in peace, to the streets of the Lower East Side in New York.