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Did you go to a meldar as a child? Have any of you been so lucky and blessed? I am sure that, seeing these two questions, you will all object that you had no idea what a meldar was and that you went…
At the Realschule fathers and mothers were lined up in single file in the director’s room. Parents who took the occasion very seriously appeared in couples with their young hopefuls. The director…
They buried her into the darkness itself. As Miko was leaving the cemetery an old Jew took him by the hand. The man called out to his wife from the door: “I’ve brought him home . . . I couldn’t…
Assimilation in our day has spoiled and distorted the essence of our festivals. It has turned Rosh Hashanah into a day of festivity filled with the sound of music and song. However, the first day of…
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…
There are two sorts of biography: the biography a famous person writes for his admirers, because the public likes to know everything about celebrities, and [the] autobiography, usually written because…
[ . . . ] The two worlds, in my childhood, were not really separate. The synagogue in Graham Street, to which we walked across the Meadows every Saturday morning, was as much a part of the Edinburgh…
Let not Ambition mock their useful toil,
Their homely joys, and destiny obscure;
Nor Grandeur hear with a disdainful smile
The short and simple annals of the poor.
—Thomas Gray, “Elegy Written in a…
“Reb Hersh,” I finally said, “as I sat here listening to you, I sometimes thought I was listening to myself. And since it’s harder to lie to yourself than to someone else, I will answer you as though…
For the first fifteen years of our lives, Danny and I lived within five blocks of each other and neither of us knew of the other’s existence. [ . . . ]
Danny and I probably would never have met—or we…