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I slept with a murderer every night of my life for two years. The murderer is dead now. He died some weeks ago in Chicago. That is why I am free to tell the tale.
I was a small boy at that time. I…
In Brownsville tenements the kitchen is always the largest room and the center of the household. As a child I felt that we lived in a kitchen to which four other rooms were annexed. My mother, a “home…
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…
The first two nights of Passover we had big Seders, which are festive dinners. Everyone wore their best clothes, and Mama cooked special traditional foods like chicken soup with matzo balls and potato…
She was still upset,
she wanted to tell me,
she kept remembering
his terrible hands:
how she came, a young girl
of seventeen, a freckled
fairskinned Jew from Kovno
to Hamburg with her uncle
and…
Man is not naturally a gregarious animal, though he has become so under the compulsion of circumstances and civilisation. You can see this in the history of his dwellings. In the beginning…
Three weeks before Sammy’s thirteenth birthday Papa came in too upset to eat.“Tonight when I come out of schule the rabbi wants to talk to me. ‘Max, my heart is like lead to tell you this,’ he says,…
Our classroom was on the upper floor and in the rear of the building. Its two large windows opened on a garden which, because it could be reached only by crossing M. Shalom’s apartment, was forbidden…
With the passing of childhood and the waning of the impatient eagerness of adolescence, I was rapidly realizing that this was neither the best of all possible worlds, nor one that the optimism of late…
1. The lives and times of Oedipus and Elektra
began with bloodgrim lust and dark carnality
but I was born next to the Neilson’s factory
where every piece is different, and that’s how I got
my…