The New Year is almost upon us, and, funny, what popped into my head is an old ditty I learned as a child in the schoolyard of Public School 104 in Bayswater, Queens. It goes: “Reuben, Reuben, I’ve been thinking what a fine world it would be, if all the men were transplanted, far across […]
Dear Astrid and Nadia: I am writing to let you know that I believe someday, perhaps within your lifetime, there will be a woman President of the United States (POTUS). I hope you will help make that happen. We are living in a world where possibilities for women are expanding. Girls like yourselves are becoming […]
When I think about the epidemic of violence that now grips our country, I reflect on the reign of terror that marked my childhood in the 1950s. It was called infantile paralysis, or polio, for short. It inflicted more than 100,000 between 1952 and 1954. Parents and children were terrified. It was thought that the […]
I had quite forgotten how spectacular the view is at Kykuit, the Rockefeller estate in Tarrytown. This week, it was glorious as Friends of ArtsWestchester shared a visit. (These are our special members whom we take to stellar arts places.) Henry Moore was at Kykuit to welcome us. Not in person of course, but […]
Long after my mother passed away at the age of 96, I still think about calling her on the phone to tell her about something that happened to me that day. The urge, the habit, the fulfillment of reporting a success, a regret, a stumble, a gift, has not left me, nor do I think […]
Spring… Finally! My mother taught me how to tell when a cake is done. You pull out a straw from a broom, insert it slowly into the cake and then pull it out quickly. If it comes out without wet batter, the cake is done. The tricky part, of course, is finding a broom in […]
My grandmother could have been a famous chef. But that wasn’t happening in the early 1900s when Margit landed at Ellis Island with a head filled with Hungarian recipes. These weren’t recipes she memorized from a cookbook, but recipes she devised from the memory of the taste of her mother’s cooking. When she married my grandfather, […]
This is a very simple bit of prose. It has no earth-shattering, moral lesson. It’s just a simple story about how potatoes saved my life when I was a teenager at Far Rockaway High School. Recently, I was reminded of it while observing the usual stresses of adolescence now that my granddaughters are teenagers. No […]
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