In old age, long after his retirement from the engineering faculty at Syracuse University, my father, Harry Gruenberg, began to have flashbacks about his life in Vienna before he escaped in 1939. He also had recurring nightmares about being buried alive. I realize now the dream was triggered by his discovery of the details of…
I. Living It When a teacher at the Jesuit-run Clongowes Wood College in County Kildare, Ireland, was asked about James Joyce, the school’s most famous student, he is said to have replied: “not one of our successes.” That wasn’t the attitude at my Jesuit high school in Detroit in the early 1970s. There, Joyce’s Jesuit…
Anna is in the orchard wearing a sleeveless housecoat, lifting a stone from the Roman road discovered a few feet away. It was unearthed a week ago during the gas line extension to Taranto. The stone fits a low wall in the garden she’s planted with nightshades—eggplant, tomatoes, firecracker red peperoncini hot peppers whose oil…
In memory of Chinua Achebe 1930-2013 Aupres de toi j’ai retrouvé mon nom. —David Diop I. The first time I read The Portrait of a Lady I was twenty-three and had been married for less than a year. We had been living for only a few months in Nigeria, a country that had become independent…
In the months after my friend R.’s death, I suffered bouts of shame deeper than any I’d experienced before. These were often followed by unreasonable fits of anger, which had me shaking my fist at drivers when I was walking and shouting at pedestrians when I was driving. At least I considered them unreasonable at…
Absent-Minded Professor Joke: A famous mathematician works in the city at a university and lives with his family in the suburbs. One day they make a short move to a three-story, slate-gray Victorian house with red shutters the next street over, a move his wife oversees while he’s at work. He leaves his old house…
I must have been the oldest Jew in America who had never been to Israel. During the Six Day War, when I was eleven, I was determined to defend my people’s homeland. I doubted I would be able to take aim at an enemy who reminded me of my beloved Danny Thomas, the only Arab…
an excerpt from In a Foreign Country The map haunts you. You spotted it the day you arrived, hanging on the back of an office door. The words “Land Mine Areas, Bosnia-Herzegovina” are printed in large letters across the top, and each land mine area is labeled on it with a tiny, pale red dot….
I am not inclined to go off with strangers, yet here I am sitting outside a bar in Miradoux, a village in southwestern France, about to embark on a two-day journey along the Chemin, the Way, with Priscilla, a woman I met just days before. We will walk along a route called Le Puy, which…
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