Category: non-fiction

Episode I: Summer, 1999…… It is a hopeful time in the Middle East. A new Israeli Prime Minister has promised to make peace between longtime […]

  ‘What soap is for the body, tears are for the soul.’                                       Yiddish Proverb   The new direction of the train woke me. Vertical. I looked out […]

In 1995 I visited my cousin Vera in a London hospital, which struck me as a pleasant and welcoming place, despite it being a hospital, […]

Several children at the John D. Runkle Elementary School in Brookline, Massachusetts in the 1950s used to make fun of our classmate Claire. Her eyes […]

1. Orphan Long Island, 1998 During the summer of 1998, two major things happened that shaped my decision to find grandparents for Rachel:  during that summer […]

Don’t be a JAP. That was the clear message I had been given my entire childhood. It seemed like the most important thing NOT to […]

   “I don’t understand why, why they meekly went to their deaths!”           These words surfaced in my memory for the first time recently, five years […]

The Origin Story of Death – Chapter 7 After my daughter died, people asked whether I had received any signs from her. I initially was […]

  For the past few years, I have been leading a memoir workshop via Zoom for 12 daughters of Holocaust survivors in the DC area […]

“I’m afraid to wear this,” I told my fiancé. We were emptying Christmas stockings, and Matt had given me a delicate Jewish star.              “That’s fucked […]