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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…
The American Jewish community is only beginning to come to terms with the meaning of this prostitution of Judaism to the status quo, and it is doing so…
On a day transparent with light
like a landscape by Monet,
my childhood broke away
from a small Jewish town
and glided on ice
blue in the distance—
while a small cloud hovered in me
like a cloud of a…
You’ve grown
but not
grown up
You’re ripe
as earth is raw
where roots probe deep
Like all roots
you probe
in deep darkness
Translated by Marcia Falk.
I remember the moment when it dawned on me that my father did not impress the world at large as a powerful figure. We were at a camera store on the Plaza—a faux-Andalusian shopping district that…
My mother and I are out walking. I ask if she remembers the women in that building in the Bronx. “Of course,” she replies. I tell her I’ve always thought sexual rage was what made them so crazy.…
“Meanwhile months and years disappeared. At twenty-eight I was still without a husband, still an eligible virgin . . . It was spring—free, warm. My heart ached so, I thought I’d go crazy . . . the…
Another week had passed. The two men had just gone off together. With something of an annoyed laugh, his mother went to the door and stood fingering the catch of the lock. Finally she lifted it…