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It was a wonderful place to make noise.  The large, high-ceilinged, lobby had a tile floor and hard surfaces everywhere, so every noise echoed beautifully.  We loved to come up the outside steps with our roller skates on and skate across the lobby making a fabulous racket.  That tile floor was so perfectly smooth, it…
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Ooops! This should have been published between Dad – part 2 and Prolet. I inadvertently left it in draft status. I suppose that coming to terms with my parents’ humanity and frailties has been an essential part of my own maturing. My Dad was, in so many ways, a wonderful father, and I am deeply…
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One of the great pleasures of living in Pleasant Hill (in California – where we will be for another 19 months) is walking along the canal-side trail that intersects our street.  It’s a lovely trail, full of friendly walkers, many, like me, with their dog companions.  Just a few days after we moved here in…
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A lot of my mother’s story is in her name, Prolet.  My grandfather, David, named her for the proletariat. He was a passionate man, not unlike the man she would grow up to marry, and his passion for a just world was built right into her name.  Mom was born in 1922 in The Bronx,…
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My older sister Shayne, of blessed memory, was born in 1946, and I was born in ‘48, early Boomers. Our parents, Shayne and I shared the single bedroom of my mother’s parents’ one bedroom apartment, and my grandparents slept in the living room. That was the arrangement from the end of the war, when Mom…
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He was the best of dads, he was the worst of dads.  It’s an appealing line, but not quite true.  My Dad was, simply, a great dad. His failings were not as a father, but as a husband and as a friend. It isn’t his failings I remember when I think of him, nor are…
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We had dinner at Serevan on the last night of my trip to New York in October 2021, my sister Tamar, her beau, Ryder and I. It’s our favorite restaurant.  We ate in the lovely, warm, low ceilinged dining room.  It’s a room where I can still hear my father’s booming laugh. We had so…
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On Friday morning Jewish women around the world prepare for the Sabbath, cooking, baking and cleaning at double time to get ready for a day of rest. My grandmother, Goldie, having joined the Communist Party as a young woman had long since given up religious practice.  But some habits persist, and on some Friday mornings…
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A small, unnamed alley comes to an end on the other side of our backyard fence. Don and Karen live in the second house south of our fence on the west side of the alley, a pleasant ranch house with an inviting front porch.  On the side of their house closest to us, just inside…
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The oak leaves are dried and curled.  They float along sedately without, as far as I know, any purpose or any destination other than wherever the canal will take them.  They obey only the laws of gravity and physics. Their passage seems peaceful, unhurried, until they come to the little weir where they are pulled…
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