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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,…
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.…
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…
I was present at the last birth. My wife and I had done the natural childbirth exercises. We were ready. The doctor was kind and easy.
The child was born, my fourth child, a boy. After three girls…
Even after the mourning period was over, when the flat was finally empty and my father and I locked the door and were alone together, we hardly talked to one another. Except about the most essential…
The bathroom looked as though some spiteful thug had left his calling card after having robbed the house. As my father was tended to and he was what counted, I would just as soon have nailed the door…
There was a rumpled old Polish man who boarded in the apartment of our building’s superintendent. With baggy pants, fraying suspenders, a wrinkled hat, and a wooden cane, he looked like the lovable…
The parting was not long in coming. My father died two months before I turned six.
To this day, I go to him at difficult times. Mostly to complain that he abandoned me. The handful of memories that he…