This is Feige and Moshe Melamed. Feige was the sister of my great-grandmother. In the picture they are standing on the balcony of the hotel they owned in Kremenets, which at the time was Poland, and today is Ukraine. The hotel may have been called the Bristol Hotel or...
I did not have strong feelings when Queen Elizabeth II died. I understood the people who celebrated the end of the last remaining vestige of the British Empire. I understood the people who mourned the end of an era. But I did not have strong feelings of my own. I do...
Once, when my grandfather was a little boy, he walked with his grandfather, the exquisitely named Shlomo Zalman, from one shtetl to the next. On the way there, Shlomo Zalman gave my grandfather half a banana and then carefully wrapped up the other half. On the way...
(fiction) There is a kind of summer evening, just after the sun starts to go down. Children run around looking for fireflies. Neighbors slowly move away from their airconditioned houses, eager to feel the air while they can. They sit on their porches and in their...
I rode the El yesterday. It was the first time in a while. When I first moved to Chicago and worked downtown, the El was my reading time. It was part of my fantasy life of living in a big city, getting dressed up for work, wearing sneakers for the commute with a pair...
I’ve been seeing a chiropractor for a couple of months now. I have chronic neck and back pain, which was aggravated by my 18 months of a frozen shoulder and my implant. My chiropractor is a gregarious guy, full of stories. I know about his family, about funny things...