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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 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…
I was born on Saturday, 7 March 1936, towards nine in the evening, in a maternity clinic located at 19 Rue de l’Atlas, in the xixth arrondissement of Paris. My father, I believe, was the one who…
Among the very few possessions my parents were permitted to take with them when they emigrated as refugees from Austria to Bolivia in June 1939 was a box camera and two family photo…
[ . . . ] The two worlds, in my childhood, were not really separate. The synagogue in Graham Street, to which we walked across the Meadows every Saturday morning, was as much a part of the Edinburgh…
Bread
Very early in the morning we went to pick up fresh bread at Doña Blanquita’s. However, before arriving at her house that resembled the generosity of her hands and clay ovens, we had to cross a…
The filthy train lurched along the tracks, jolting my spine through the slats of the wooden seat.
I was thoughtful, my happiness mixed with vague regrets. Happiness? No, a deserter’s sense of hard-won…
Now whatever else may be involved in a nondeliberate change of accent, one thing is clear: it bespeaks a very high degree of detachment from the ethos of one’s immediate surroundings. It is…
Egyptian Jewish American author André Aciman describes celebrating his last Seder in Egypt with his bags packed to leave his homeland for good.
