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On the twelfth of the month of Elul in the year five thousand four hundred and eighty-nine, Menaḥem the scribe and teacher of young children in the community of Dessau, became the father of Moses,…
The new Rabbi pleased everybody, because he was beyond all doubt a righteous man. I was then a boy of twelve. My father received two letters from Rabbi Yukel on the subject of a good match for me in…
He felt a gnawing sensation. He knew it was hunger. Nothing in his mouth since morning except for those slops, the slops from the Judenrat kitchen, a watery soup that was almost free, just fifty…
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…
I was the fourth [child] born and the first son, a tender darling to my father and my mother (cf. Prov. 4:3) after my mother had given birth to three daughters. My parents were worriers and trembled…
However modestly my parents lived in the country, however little I was used to luxury and every comfort, at least at home I was used to cleanliness and order…
Even after the mourning period was over, when the flat was finally empty and my father and I locked the door and were alone together, we hardly talked to one another. Except about the most essential…
Jewish children grow up quickly. If only their bodies ripened as quickly as their hearts and minds! Were this an artist’s crayon in my hand instead of a pen, I would draw the following caricature of…
Thus there began to form, or to show itself within me that heart so proud and yet so tender, that effeminate and yet indomitable character which, constantly vacillating between weakness and courage,…
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,…