I needed a car my senior year at Brandeis, as I would be student teaching at a local public high school first semester. My parents arranged to “sell” me (for one dollar) my mother’s seven year old Valiant (similar to the car in the above photo). Dan, my steady beau, flew out to Detroit to… Read More

Belle Potocsky Beckenstein was married in Bialystock, Lithuania (part of Imperial Russia) in 1902. She was quite lovely, though I have no photos of her from that exact date. I do have the fan she carried at her wedding. She brought it with her when she, my grandfather Samuel and their two small children fled… Read More

Being a somewhat sickly kid, I had been out with the flu the day my class took the Iowa Achievement Test in 4th grade, so on February 20, 1962, along with all the others from my Detroit elementary school who had missed that test, I sat in the small, upstairs art room all afternoon taking… Read More

I don’t know when she came to this country from Kovno, Lithuania. She married Sam Sarason in 1895 in St. Louis, MO at the age of 19. Her name was Freya Leah Prensky, but she was called Lizzie in this country. She was very beautiful with dark hair and eyes. Sam loved her the moment… Read More

It is fair to ask “why do I write”? I ponder that myself. I thought about this question for some time before beginning to write this particular prompt. I never wrote much before being approached by my childhood friends to be a beta tester for their new baby boomer website MyRetrospect. I wrote when an… Read More

My devotion to my cousin Alan Jackson, and great sorrow when he died young, in 1981 was documented in Action Jackson. I was equally devoted to his young wife, Sissi, with whom I tried to stay in touch after Alan’s death, lost for a while, but reconnected for good in 2000. She and her family visited… Read More

My father had a challenging childhood, the youngest of eight children. His mother was bipolar, long before there was effective treatment. She had her last two children to “cure” her because she seemed better when pregnant (something about the hormones that was not understood). She was in and out of mental institutions by the time… Read More

My dad was the youngest of eight children, my mother the youngest of four. They were 39 years old when they had me. I have first cousins whose children are older than me. There is a huge offset in the ages of the generations in my family, so the notion of “generations” is somewhat tricky.… Read More

I was a voracious reader in my day and read many books that had been banned at one some point. I read most of them just for fun, or to satisfy a quota to read “so many” books per card-marking period. I read “Huck Finn” in 5th grade. Perhaps I was too young to understand… Read More

My father taught me to say prayers at bedtime: “Now I lay me down to sleep/ Bless my Lord, My soul to keep. If I should die before I wake/ Bless the Lord, My soul to take. God bless Mommy and Daddy and Ricky.” It was years before I realized that was not a Jewish… Read More