Author Archives: Ben
Mister Dog
My father was a gentle, quiet, swarthy man, slow and decisive, both with logic and love. It was Summer-time, 1957. The day at a close, he’d read me a picture book. Sitting beside me on my trundle bed, Daddy was all mine. The four others could wait. My favorite story, for the umpteenth time. Once […]
Posted in Essay Categories, Faves, Lost New York
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Glossolalia
Did Sci-Fi ever appeal to me? Not that I can remember. Even as a kid growing up in the town that built the first atom bomb, spaceships never grabbed me. Real life was strange enough, thank you, and not for the reasons you might guess. In the 50s and 60s, many of the local folks […]
A Miner’s Lantern
***** Why? People constantly ask me this question: Why are you learning modern Hebrew? Why did you learn Yiddish? Why is it so enticing to you, that old newspaper article, that strange lantern slide? I listen, and then I stare off into space, speechless. All I can think of is that corny phrase my superannuated […]
Posted in Essay Categories, Found Objects
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All Cars Transfer There
It happened just the other day. One glance up on a tenement wall, five stories above East Harlem’s Lexington Avenue. Two seconds was all it took. The shock of recognition rushed through my soul. It’s 2006, right? Not. 1912 is more like it. A ghost image, a palimpsest, caught my eye, high above the 116th […]
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Dressed to Kill – Part 1
A giant bronze sculpture of a bull elephant having a happy dream stands in the Peace Garden at the northwestern end of the New York City headquarters of the United Nations. Shrubbery at the base hides the beast’s massive equipment, a gesture dictated by local sensibilities, not the artist. Two gargantuan rocky mountain oysters and […]
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Dressed to Kill – Part 2
Growing up in post-War Oak Ridge, Tennessee, a Jewish boy like me struggled in a perpetual state of anomie. Namelessness has many sources and many reasons. Living as an other in a homogenous community reinforces the sensation of unrecognizability. One’s surname might be Smith, but where everyone else’s name ends in Armenian infinity, the search […]
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What If God Were One of Us
A wonderful day was drawing to a close, and I headed towards the Culver line elevated with my French actor friend, our hearts and minds full to the bursting. Rafy and I suffer from the same delicious exile, secular Jews entranced by Yiddish. The two of us never tire of crossing and re-crossing the border, […]
The World To Come
Though hardly ever at a loss for words, a pair of adenocarcinomae have got me thinking earlier than usual about the Jewish high holidays. The yomim n’orim, the Days of Awe, are still months away. But it’s never to soon to start preparing. A holiday scene from a recent year will be my guide. Erev […]
And now, a word from our sponsor
The MSN homepage during the week of October 2004 featured a small ad line for visitors in New York City to take bus tours of sites where popular television shows have been filmed over the past few years. For a considerable sum, customers would be treated to double-decker accommodations on diesel fume spewing motorcoaches that […]
A Hunt’s Point Hymnal
On a solitary bike trip years ago, I suddenly and unexpectedly found myself on the edge of Joseph Rodman Drake Park, 2.49 manicured Bronx acres, bounded by Hunt’s Point, Longfellow and Oak Point Avenues. The site of Joseph Rodman Drake Park in Hunt’s Point was part of an Indian Village. In the late 17th century […]
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