What should I do? What should I do? What should I do? Those four words went around in my head in the spring of 1973. I was 28 years old, wife, mother of two sons and I was pregnant. Being an only child, my dream was having a house full of kids with all the…
One of the most popular and enduring shops in the Bronx’s Little Italy is a third-generation family business run by a Jewish immigrant family — not from Italy, but from Austria. Teitel Brothers Imports, opened in 1915, does not sell kosher goods, but rather all kinds of Italian items from salami and balsamic vinegar to…
It all started with my grandfather, Sidney Goldstein, and his Korean War memoir. I found it several years ago while helping clean out my grandparents’ garage. I was 26 when I read it for the first time, and he was 27 when he wrote the letters his memoir was based on. I knew he’d written…
Grandma Rose, aka Texas Rose, was mean until the day she died. She was as stingy with love as she was with money, and saved her greatest affection for the San Antonio Spurs, hats with sparkly rhinestones, and anything that could be categorized as a good deal. Even into her 90s, she started each day…
Lior Zaltzman illustration At the Passover Seder, we read about the four sons of the Haggadah, distinguishing them by the things they say. But the wicked and wise sons say essentially the same thing. Both ask: “What are these practices you keep?” The family of the wise son respects his question, while the family of…
● Happy Are the Happy By Yasmina Reza Other Press, 160 pages, $20 Yasmina Reza’s specialty is the excavation of long-simmering violence from underneath placid bourgeois surfaces. In her two best-known plays, the Tony-winning “Art” and “The God of Carnage,” the French-Jewish writer shows, to great comic effect, how quickly respectability gives way to offense….
I am related to author and Esquire editor A.J. Jacobs. In fact, I am his first cousin twice removed’s wife’s nephew’s wife’s first cousin’s wife’s brother wife’s second cousin’s wife’s uncle’s wife’s second great nephew. As he says, we’re practically brothers. The reason I know this is because Jacobs is in the midst of creating…
“At the end of the world, there is a high mountain, and on that mountain, there is a huge rock, and from that huge rock a pure spring comes gushing out. And at the other end of the world, there is the heart of the world… And the heart of the world gazes and gazes…
100% of profits support our journalism
