Category: Memoir

July 3, 2018 Our first full day in Lisbon. This morning I took a long, joyful walk from the Avenida da República to the Cais do Sodré. I go into the city like a swimmer entering the water. On the blank page of a notebook, I...

Perhaps the most moving sequence in Christian Bauer’s gripping documentary film The Ritchie Boys (2004) is that moment when, faced with human ashes in the liberated Nazi extermination camp, one of the Jewish Ritchie Boys tells...

  I   January 6, 2021. The news from Paris: Jim Haynes is dead at the age of eighty-seven; “after a long illness,” as the obituarists customarily say. Jim Haynes was born in the small town of Haynesville, Louisiana,...

Friends called her Anna Vassilievna, according to the Russian custom of having the patronym follow the given name. As evening fell, I often lay in my child’s pyjamas, on the living room sofa, close to my grandmother, my...

  Report Card   I   By the time of my third year at King’s Park Secondary in Glasgow—school motto: Video meliora petoque, I see and aim for better things—I had proved myself to be better than any of my classmates...

Wednesday, February 5, a windy, rainy, chilly afternoon nearer the end of the world as we knew it than anyone seems to suspect. I’m sitting at a little marble table, in a draft from the unaccountably open door of the deli across...

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) won the 1970 Nobel Prize in Literature. He spent the first two years of his forced exile in Zurich, Switzerland (1974–76), and then moved with his family to Cavendish, Vermont, where he...

  1995   February The hardening palm, bone turning to stone; like boulders surfacing in a gentle valley. We become more like rock; the bone begins to manifest itself, to reveal its power and the way it prevails in the...

My friend from kindergarten, Richard Murway, still lived in Lakewood, Ohio, the Cleveland suburb of my childhood. A stranger in Cleveland, who had found photographs from the 1930s of his father in a Silver Legion uniform,...