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The new Rabbi pleased everybody, because he was beyond all doubt a righteous man. I was then a boy of twelve. My father received two letters from Rabbi Yukel on the subject of a good match for me in…
I was the fourth [child] born and the first son, a tender darling to my father and my mother (cf. Prov. 4:3) after my mother had given birth to three daughters. My parents were worriers and trembled…
The tale of the Generation of the Land is a sad tale. Reflecting about the source of the depression that the situation in Israel instills in me, I can only ascribe it to expressions of ethnocentric…
Bread
Very early in the morning we went to pick up fresh bread at Doña Blanquita’s. However, before arriving at her house that resembled the generosity of her hands and clay ovens, we had to cross a…
Even after the mourning period was over, when the flat was finally empty and my father and I locked the door and were alone together, we hardly talked to one another. Except about the most essential…
If I had to pick one defining moment in my Iranian life, it would be 5:00 a.m. one Friday in the fall of 1968. I was fifteen. Normally I woke to the sounds of a peddler selling green almonds and fava…
Ruschuk, on the lower Danube, where I came into the world, was a marvelous city for a child, and if I say that Ruschuk is in Bulgaria, then I am giving an inadequate picture of it. For…
Stanislaw often told me how much he liked my company, and sometimes he wondered about my Jewishness: “Look at yourself! You cannot be Jewish!” he would exclaim. And yet whenever he spoke to me about…
Jewish children grow up quickly. If only their bodies ripened as quickly as their hearts and minds! Were this an artist’s crayon in my hand instead of a pen, I would draw the following caricature of…
I was born on 19 February 1758 in Nový Bydžov [in Bohemia] of well-to-do parents who destined me at birth to be a rabbi, a common practice among the Israelites then. For at that time, when all…