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…
South Diego says we must caffeinate before the Satanic tour. In a French press, he pours boiling water over coffee grounds, grown and roasted in his village outside of Tulancingo, Hidalgo. We’re sitting at his dining table in a nondescript flat in the guts of the Centro Historico in Mexico City. He says it’s his…
1793 It begins when a three-year-old girl, the daughter of a doctor, dies at her family’s home in Philadelphia. Within a week, yellow fever infections have been reported throughout the city. “Tis a sickly time now in phila.,” the diarist Elizabeth Drinker notes on August 15; “there has been an unusual number of funerals lately…
“. . . home is where our stories are, and that’s not just a question of ethnicity or even country . . .” —Joy Kogawa, Itsuka Alberto Fujimori caught the world’s attention in 1990 by becoming the first person of Japanese descent elected to lead Peru—or any nation outside of Japan. His extravagant campaign and…
1. I couldn’t tell you what we saw in Tod O’Neil, or what we feared. Maybe it was a matter of timing: Tod had that lion-tamer’s knack for knowing just when to crack the whip, a blunt force of personality with which he kept his friends in line. Not that we were his “friends,” exactly—we…
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