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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,…
With the passing of childhood and the waning of the impatient eagerness of adolescence, I was rapidly realizing that this was neither the best of all possible worlds, nor one that the optimism of late…
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 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 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…
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…