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“Y’minah, Y’minah,” c. 1941. Photo credit: The Dorot Jewish Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations.
In a dingy kitchen
Facing a Ghetto backyard
An old woman is chanting Jeremiah’s Lamentations,
Quaveringly,
Out of a Hebrew Bible.
The gaslight flares and falls . . .
This night,
Two thousand…
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…
He carried his camera and case into the dining room, and as he stood there for a moment, peering at the table through the twilight haze in the room, he breathed deeply of the familiar holiday odors…
The first two nights of Passover we had big Seders, which are festive dinners. Everyone wore their best clothes, and Mama cooked special traditional foods like chicken soup with matzo balls and potato…
“It was my fault, Sammy. I aggravate you when you’re tired,” she said, sitting up and drawing his head to her. “I shouldn’t even have mentioned Ev. We ought to go to your family this year. It’s only…
Grandfather scurries from cupboard to cupboard in his black coat; he looks in every corner, checking for bread crumbs in my treasure drawer, under my crystals and shells. He rummages through…
“All vows and oaths we take, all promises and obligations, we make to God between this Yom Kippur and the next we hereby publicly retract in the event that we should forget them, and hereby declare…
I set my table with metaphor:
the curling parsley—green sign nailed to the doors
of God’s underground; salt of desert and eyes;
the roasted shank bone of a Pascal lamb,
relic of sacrifice and…
Right after Passover, with the first rays of the gentle summer sun, a new worry erupted for the Jewish inhabitants of all the small towns—the call-up for military service. The “young toughs” began to…