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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,…
Had I fastened
The cradle on a rafter,
And rocked it—and rocked it.
My little son, my Yankl.
But the house has vanished
Into a fiery dome,
How then can I rock
My little son, my own?
Had I…
During the bitterest days of my European exile, I turn to the photo album where I keep, along with more recent memories, a few images from my childhood—images that enlarged and corrected, come back to…
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…
The university was closed the day before yesterday, 9 December, in anticipation of the 10th. Quiet days, however: the occasional scuffle and an unremarkable street demonstration.
In any case, things…
At the time for words, father, my adonai, leave it in my hands, the
shame that I don’t feel, and assign to me the job of justification,
what they call history.
The fact is that every land has its…
When the bus disappeared, taking away their child, the Bensaïds remained on the empty sidewalk, their souls as barren as if their daughter had been carried off by death.
With a…
Hester sat down quietly next to her mother, whose sewing went on and on, a mild substitute for conversation. For a while, Hester watched the long, important-looking shadows that encroached upon the…