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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…
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…
I wasn’t a very political adolescent. I had grown up surrounded by unexplained cautions, by ellipses, and all these silences had sealed off the public world, so that I didn’t really believe in it…
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.…
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…
In twelfth grade I am at the height of my power as a young woman. I am experienced. I am loved. I am excelling in my classes. I am president of my school and lead all school meetings in the gym every…
[…] [I]f suddenly Mexico and Israel went to war, on which side would I fight? My cowardly answer was plain and simple: “I really wasn’t cut out to be a soldier. So on neither one, since I’m a pacifist…
In the hot tranquillity of Sunday afternoons in Lusaka, beyond the shrill whistle of the cicadas and the drone of radio sports commentaries, we could hear the muffled thudding of tribal drums.
The…
I had a very unusual fifteenth birthday. During my birthday week, the end of April, I was traveling with 5,000 high school students from around the world, visiting concentration camps in Poland. I…
Food was important not just as a means of survival, but also because, as Ma repeatedly told me, “it’s made with love that makes it taste so good.” As a toddler, perched on a chair, I watched each step…