When my mother died, my father went to live with my sister and her family in Howard Beach, Queens. Although he was in good health, he was of the generation of men who didn’t know how to boil water, which made it impossible for him to stay on in his otherwise perfectly fine apartment overlooking the boardwalk and the ocean in Rockaway, a short drive from my sister. There were several problems with...
Note: About two years ago, I posted a piece with a title similar to this one. It was called “It’s All About Relationships.” The context was very different. Teachers were struggling to teach remotely in the absence of all the opportunities to build strong relationships with their students in a two-dimensional world. This posting is another cut on the same theme which is at the heart of so much of...
I still subscribe faithfully to the Monadnock Ledger-Transcript, the small-town newspaper published in Peterborough, New Hampshire which covers the area of the state where we raised our daughters and to which we’ve returned every summer for almost fifty years. Last week Jane Eklund, a columnist with a keen interest in the region’s history, reprinted an article called “Recollections of a District...
Despite the fact that I was a Holocaust baby, antisemitism was never at the center of my identity as a Jew. In fact, I was often impatient with Jews who saw antisemitism lurking in every dark corner of public and private life. Growing up in an almost entirely Jewish world, I was insulated from Christian hostility to my kind, at least until much deeper into my adult years, and those few incidents...
If you’re of the right generations, just the mention of a blue book is capable of triggering waves of anxiety. For the uninitiated, it’s the bound, soft-covered notebook that college instructors distributed in which students wrote their answers to final exam questions. To kick the anxiety level up several notches for me, one professor told me that because he didn’t know me well, he would base his...