Category Archives: Essay Categories
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 […]
Also posted in Lost New York
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 […]
Also posted in Faves, Lost New York
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 […]
Also posted in Lost New York
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, […]
Also posted in Yiddish Land + Jewish Themes
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 […]
Also posted in Yiddish Land + Jewish Themes
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 […]
Also posted in A Walker in the City: Flaneur Pieces
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 […]
Also posted in Lost New York
A Crime of Specie
It’s always been interesting to me how something quotidian from another land can take on a quality of wonderment in another. The erasure of that which is day-to-day may be innocent and unlamented at home, yet constitute an act of thoughtless cultural violence in a different country. This was and still is the Crime of […]
Also posted in Personal Politics
Just Around the Corner
It wasn’t exactly a blind corner, the one I just encountered. I saw things coming. For years a voice inside me has whispered, Soon it’s gonna be your turn…My late uncle, who fashioned himself S. Newton Feldman, looked a lot like me. Slender, soft-spoken. Same eyes, same face, same disease. What is it with people […]
Also posted in Personal Politics
Into The Promised Land
From a sign on a former warehouse in Williamsburg, now used as a religious academy: “Danger to Life and Limb” – It is Absolutely Forbidden to Park Here From 800 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. – It is reserved for the Busses of the Talmud Torah” The Torah says that the land of milk and honey […]
Also posted in Yiddish Land + Jewish Themes
