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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,…
Gootie, my grandma, was a short, large-boned woman who made the kitchen her kingdom. She entered the living room only on special occasions—like Monday night to watch “I Love Lucy.” She had to think…
Few children know the stories of their parents. During my childhood, I knew only that mine were an impossible match—which did not prevent my mother from spending day and night at my father’s bedside…
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…
The day he was gone her suitor arrived. I don’t know what else to call him. He advertised himself as my uncle, but he didn’t have our famous cheekbones and Tatar eyes. He couldn’t have belonged to…
There are two things I ought to make clear. First, almost as soon as she starts telling me about her career (as we wade through the sleet from the bus stop to the market), my grandmother declares 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.…
I was born, I have lived, and I have been made over. Is it not time to write my life’s story? I am just as much out of the way as if I were dead, for I am absolutely other than the person whose story…
My parents had been married for five years when I was born, the second child after my sister, and, as far back as I can remember, I never heard them quarreling. It is possible that they…
Things were looking pretty bleak, when my wife’s prewar acquaintance brought a ray of hope into our small room.
If you too were an artist, you might be able to appreciate how impatiently my wife and I…