Showing Results 1 - 10 of 11
Our house was gloomy—one reason why, since childhood, I have preferred the street to the home.
One cause of this gloom was the Torah…
I always thought
I had been here before.
Each year of my patched-up life
I mended the fabrics
of my decrepit, tattered world.
In memory I recognized faces and smiles,
even my father and mother…
In Brownsville tenements the kitchen is always the largest room and the center of the household. As a child I felt that we lived in a kitchen to which four other rooms were annexed. My mother, a “home…
In April 1942, after months of probing and letter writing, Mother and Mrs. Gerber received letters telling them that Father’s troop was in a Russian prison camp. However, no word came from either of…
I would be a traitor to these poor burned bodies if I came here to talk good fellowship. We have tried you good people of the public and we have found you wanting. The old Inquisition had its rack and…
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…
The shtetl, lost here among Polish fields and groves, might be called Turek or Przasnysz, Konin or Maków, yet what one remembers is not the name but the old marketplace reeking of tar and dung where a…
“All right,” someone will say, “granted you are a Pole. But in that case, why ‘we jews’?” To which I answer: because of blood “Then racialism again?” No, not racialism at all. Quite the contrary.
Th…
The sunset lit up the sky, splashing the drab tenements with gold, bringing memories of Sabbath candles and the smell of gefüllte fish. When I had lived on Hester Street, I would…
Apples. That’s what New Yorkers of the 1930s remember. Apples of the Hesperides, neatly stalled on corner after corner, sold on the last trembling line of decency by men who were unwilling to beg…