March 2010
4 posts
Excerpt from Capricorn Rising
Below is a brief excerpt from the story Capricorn Rising, which will appear in the spring issue of the American Literary Review (http://www.engl.unt.edu/alr/Home.html). I am working on a collection of stories very loosely based on the lives of my parents (see above), Americans who lived in Israel from 1949 to 1958. I was born in Chadera, Israel, in 1957 and although I did not grow up there, the...
Twiggy and the Gang
My mother was not a regular reader of high end fashion magazines when I was girl in the 1960s, but my friend Diane’s mother—a cool, soignée blonde with an alluring French twist and a lily-of-the-valley infused cloud of Diorissimo hovering perpetually about her—was and whenever I visited, Diane and I would pore over their slick, bright pages together in a companionable reverie that needed no...
February 2010
2 posts
Traveling Light
A dear friend invited me on a girls-only jaunt to Palm Beach in March. Sounds like fun, right? Well, although the plan doesn’t leave for another month, I have already broken out in a cold, clammy sweat. No, it’s not fear of flying, though I confess to being afflicted with that too. Instead, it’s another, perhaps less commonly discussed travel related anxiety: fear of packing. While I love...
WHERE ARE THE SHOES OF YESTERYEAR?
From the time I was very young, my mother let me choose my own clothes. This resulted in some rather outlandish attire: cobalt blue pants splattered with daisies as big as my face, a hot pink, polka dot tent dress, white fish net stockings (which had to be painstakingly attached to one of the most irritating garments of all time, a garter belt), worn with a black and white op-art trench coat. I...
December 2009
3 posts
Let Them Eat Cake
I’ve been a devoted Francophile since the age of 12, so I was delighted when it became apparent that my daughter Kate, now 14, is following along in my footsteps. French is her favorite subject at school, and together we swoon over French food, clothes, shoes and chocolate. It has been my dream to take her to Paris to sample la vie française first hand but malheursement, our finances dictated...
CHRISTMAS IN THE CITY
Throughout my childhood, being Jewish was defined in terms of what we did not do: go to church, wear a cross, celebrate Christmas or Easter. None of this was unusual: of course Jews don’t do these things. But for most Jewish families, at least the ones I knew as a child, such negatives were balanced by the positive things they did do: attend Hebrew school, celebrate bar and bat mitzvahs, observe...
November 2009
6 posts
Material Girl
“When I’m working on a novel, everything is material”, says my friend, the writer Christina Baker Kline. Christina, author is the author of four novels, including, most recently, Bird in Hand and The Way Life Should Be. She is co-editor, with Anne Burt, of About Face: Women Write about What They See When They Look in the Mirror and co-author, with Christina L. Baker, of The Conversation Begins:...
The Believers
Many thanks to my new Canadian pals at FASHION MAGAZINE, (www.fashionmagazine.com) who recently ran this piece… With a nod to Blanche Dubois, who believed in the kindness of strangers, I have placed my own faith in the magic of clothes. More than protection or adornment, clothes have the power to bewitch, exalt and transform. I still remember a particular dress—white, scoop neck, pleated skirt,...
LOVING A LAPDOG
You’ve heard the term, that’s for sure. Maybe you’ve even said it. As in, “Oh, she’s just a lapdog” or “I would never want a lapdog.” Like it’s an insult of some sort. Or even a curse. Sorry to say, lapdogs have gotten a bad rap, and it hardly seems fair. Full disclosure: I’ve owned a lapdog for the past four years. She’s a purebred Pomeranian, with tiny paws, tiny teeth, and a tiny, foxy...
SISTERS UNDER THE SKIN
Wanda and I come clattering down the stairs of the subway station at 7th Avenue and Flatbush in Brooklyn. It a little after three o’clock on a winter afternoon and we’ve just gotten out of school. We reach the turnstiles and put in our tokens before descending a second set of stairs, this time to the platform itself. A train has just left the station; the people who have gotten off pass us on...
October 2009
7 posts
2 tags
PURE PLASTIC
Natural fibers. Remember them? Big buzz words from the late 1970s, they were probably coined in reaction to the tidal waves of polyester, and acrylic that had flooded the market just a few years earlier. I was quick to jump right on that particular bandwagon, and would no more wear a sweater with five percent nylon than I would a dress made of 100% Saran Wrap. My persnickety standards...
NOT FUNNY TO ME
The only girl in my sixth grade whose parents were divorced was my friend Caren B. This was back in the 1960s, when unlike today, divorce still held a whiff of taint and sorrow. Caren’s biological father was no longer in the picture, but her stepfather—a detective with the police force—possessed a certain dangerous and disturbing glamour. A couple of years later, Caren got into some...
BIRDS OF A FEATHER
Did you know all these terms? I didn’t but now that I do, I feel enriched by the knowledge. The little miracle of language, revealed right here… congregation, dissimulation, flight, flock or volery of birds sedge or siege of bitterns chain of bobolinks wake of buzzards brood, flock or peep of chickens brood, chattering or clutch of chicks chattering of choughs bury of conies cover of coots...
1 tag
WORDS I WISH I HAD WRITTEN
Hamilton Holt, who had been editor of The Independent, a liberal weekly, before 1925, when he became president of Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida, spoke out on virtually everything that crossed his mind. His most daring pronouncement—the legend on a 1938 war memorial guaranteed to provoke just about everyone—was inscribed on a bronze plaque under a heavy-caliber naval artillery...
2 tags
September 2009
9 posts
1 tag
WATCHING HIM GO
My son has been gone not quite a month; his first year in college started on September 3. I’ve been trying to adjust his absence; it has not been easy. Here are some first thoughts on the experience. Today we dropped our firstborn off at college. Hardly a remarkable event in the scheme of things, but one that to me is both seismic and powerful; it will reconfigure both the family structure and...
DEAD AGAIN
My father abandoned me more than twenty years ago. This was not an act that came without warning: he had divorced my mother in a spite-filled, accusation hurling frenzy some years earlier, and in the process I had gone from being an adored girl who found constant favor in his eyes to a bewildered young woman who realized with dismay that I would never find favor there again. Still, it was a...
1 tag
BARBIE AT 5-0
Some time back in the early 1950s—that so-called golden age of American post-war affluence with its lushly saturated Technicolor movies, spanking new suburbs, and cars as large as beached whales—an observant mother watched her daughter’s fascination with a group of paper dolls. Unlike the girl’s three-dimensional playthings—bald babies or chubby toddlers—the paper dolls depicted attractive young...
JUST THE FACTS
Memoir has become, in the words of NYT columnist Randy Cohen, a kind of literary kudzu: persistent, pervasive and enveloping. And like all parasites, it survives—and thrives—on the lifeblood of its host, which is in this case the poor beleaguered novel. We are living—and reading in—an age when the currency of the novel has been devalued, and made, if not worthless, then certainly small change.
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1 tag
SMALL MIRACLES
Until I was 35, the only house my family or I had ever owned was 30 inches high. A white wooden doll house with a black roof, it had two large rooms on the ground floor and three smaller ones above. The front door opened; window boxes adorned the façade. I loved that house with a passion that I can still feel more than remember, and the hours spent playing with it offered an endlessly...
1 tag
SILVER, NOT SALT
It began predictably enough: the first gray threads I found in my hair when I hit my thirties. The threads soon turned to ribbons, but I had just had a baby (my second) and was in no shape to deal with the gray. Gray was interesting, I reasoned. Gray was subtle, intellectual and hip. Soon enough the baby became a toddler and her older brother started school. I woke up one morning and decided...
August 2009
3 posts
SPLASH!
It’s 91 degrees in Brooklyn today; August is strutting its stuff. I haven’t been swimming yet this season. But the heat has me thinking about a summer several years ago. My photographer husband lucked into a great gig teaching a class in Lucca, Italy, a gorgeous, sun-drenched city smack-dab in the middle of Tuscany. Because he was given an apartment—gratis—in which to live,...
Speaking In Tongues
More on the subject of college…My son’s imminent departure is bringing it all back home, and I find myself thinking a lot about those years. Here’s a story that began when I was a senior, but whose ending is still unfolding.
By the beginning of my final year as undergraduate, I had decided not only to major in art history, but to apply to graduate school as well. My advisor encouraged me to take...
By Heart
This past June, my son both graduated from high school and turned eighteen. In the fall, he will head off to college, just as my daughter enters her freshman year of high school. These milestones—and they are major—in their young lives have nudged me into recalling my own high school and college years, with all their attendant highs and lows. Teachers were major players in that drama because...
July 2009
1 post
My Inaugural Blog Post
Confession: this is my virgin blog. I have been resisting blogging for a good while now. So many of the blogs I have read seemed sketchy and improvised and the whole idea of writing one unsettled me, as if I were planning to take a stroll in my underwear. Since I am the sort of person who puts on red lipstick before stepping outside to take in the newspaper (more on this in a minute), such a...