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This excerpt from Kate Simon’s Bronx Primitive: Portraits in Childhood explores the controversial and secretive decision many immigrant women made to get an abortions, and the means of obtaining one.
The bathroom looked as though some spiteful thug had left his calling card after having robbed the house. As my father was tended to and he was what counted, I would just as soon have nailed the door…
“I have a partner for the Point St Charles business,” said Pa.
“A partner! Why a partner?” said Aunt Julia. “Why are you afraid to do anything by yourself? And who is this partner?”
“Henoch,” he told…
As I was crossing Alexanderplatz on the first of April, I noticed a crowd of people gathering near the U-Bahn station at the other end of the square. The loudspeakers blared across the open space,…
My father lived to be ninety-eight, and until the end of his life he never failed to introduce my sister and me with a grand gesture as his “two disappointments.” We were, very simply put, an…
There was a rumpled old Polish man who boarded in the apartment of our building’s superintendent. With baggy pants, fraying suspenders, a wrinkled hat, and a wooden cane, he looked like the lovable…
My mother often sent me shopping to 18th Avenue (not a far distance, but for a kid it was unfamiliar territory), the district of Middle Eastern groceries, whose shopkeepers were…
Miriam Steinberg of Highland Park, Illinois, would never think of making her weekly challah without first separating some dough, reciting a blessing over it, and then burning it in the oven, in…
To be in exile, with a religious or historical sense that one is exiled, is to have already a mission and purpose in life. One’s clear project then is to end the exile and to return to…
Photographs shock us in so far as they show us something novel. Unfortunately, the ante keeps getting raised—partly through the very proliferation of such images of horror. One’s first encounter with…