Nonfiction

1. It’s usually a lone figure, backlit so as to seem anonymous and therefore universal, because if we don’t know who a person is, we’re more likely to think it could be us. No one seemed to consider the animosity of strangers or the threat we might associate with the unknown. The people are poised…

Romania, 1983   The curette is a stylus, my mother says as she wraps it gently, the way she wraps strudel, but in white linen and tighter. The stylus, my mother says, is a typewriter. That one we keep in uncle’s house, under floorboards in the pig shack. Uncle is illiterate and a drunk so…

Gourds cover everything, even spilling onto the sidewalk, practically falling into the cobblestone street. Orange, green, white, even pink gourds, everywhere on my block. I see them, of course. I just don’t think too much about them. It’s autumn. Gourd season. Then one day, I’m sitting in my car for an hour and a half…

My Tante Hilde lived for over fifty years in a moshav across the road from an Israeli Arab village north of Acre. After every war, suicide bombing, and assassination, she would shake her head and say, “If it weren’t for the leaders, this wouldn’t happen!” She was talking about what she knew personally: the Arab…

That Sunday morning, long ago, a golden light trickled in through the window of my basement apartment and stung my boyfriend and me. It stung our eyes and stung our hearts to see our predicament sharply outlined: It was late October in Reykjavik and the sun had come to say goodbye. We’d be left in…

It’s a small mark, quick cut, a single stroke. An incident, not the main event, on the page—more flicked than drawn, starting at the top and moving, diagonally, down to the left. A diacritic. It’s a diacritic. I don’t want to use the word accent. (That question, which plagues me in the francophone world: D’où…

I think I first really became aware of the word “beautiful” when, as a young woman, I lived for a while in New York City. The adjective was everywhere, so it seemed, describing anything from a club to an oyster to a state of mind. “Oh, you’re going to that party? Beautiful.” “You won’t believe…

As the war droned on, my wife’s Saigon university finally paid her salary after we threatened a lawsuit, paying her all at once at the end of the school year in so many packets of devalued piasters that we had to carry it away in two suitcases, making our motorcycle trip back to our apartment…