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King Solomon, of blessed memory, wrote in Proverbs that one ought not to be too pious and one ought not to do too much evil. [The allusion, however, is to Ecclesiastes 7:16–17.] Accordingly, our sages…
We have a lovely tale at hand,
It’s come to us from a distant land,
That land is West India, and
Many people in the world
Call that area the New World.
Our tale’s about a wife who let her spouse
Leav…
Most of the immigrants came from Italy and Eastern Europe. They were taken in launches to Ellis Island. There, in a curiously ornate human warehouse of red brick and gray stone, they were tagged…
This excerpt from Kate Simon’s Bronx Primitive: Portraits in Childhood explores the controversial and secretive decision many immigrant women made to get an abortions, and the means of obtaining one.
Household of eight.
Beds are two.
When it gets late,
What do they do?
Three with father,
Three with mother:
Limbs
Over each other.
When it’s night
And they go to bed,
Mother begins
To wish she…
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…
My day—
Is punctured like a sieve,
And ridiculed like a whim.
May winter whiteness blossom,
May autumns turn gray,
May summers whistle—
Become nightingales.
When a rye-wind
Would have twisted my…
He remembers well how for the first time in his life he tried to cross the big street in Baghdad. With one hand his mother held onto him and with the other she held her long and wide cape, looked…