Bethesda, Maryland, 2025. It took me decades after they died to get to know my parents. The efforts took me far into the world and, as...

Bariloche, Argentina - 1948 and 2008. As I told you in my previous chapter, I found, in my box of memories, a few photos of my parents’...

Buenos Aires, 1947-1949. Two things bring back my parents’ romance and marriage. The first is Mom’s gorgeous engagement ring. The ring is...

Buenos Aires, 1924-1947. Dad had quite a collection of mate  gourds. They ranged from a simple hollowed steer’s horn to ornate silver...

Washington, DC - 1998 to the present day. I have a telling memory of something Gene Gordon said to me thirty years ago, close to the end...

Buenos Aires, late 1980s-early 1990s. After many years of absence, I returned to BA in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It was then that I...

Washington, D.C, late 1980s-mid 1990s. It was my final psychoanalytic session, after almost eleven years on the couch. In the last few...

Washington DC, late 1980s – mid 1990s. My psychoanalyst’s red couch sagged in the middle, weighted down with the sorrows of countless...

Cambridge, Massachusetts – Washington DC, 1974-1994. Here starts a part of my story that I have not yet shared with you. It is the tale...

Vienna, the late 1980s. In the box of memories I brought from Buenos Aires, there is a photo of my parents in their Sunday best taken in...

Vienna, the late 1980s. I visited Vienna fifty years after Mom escaped from the Anschluss.  One evening, on the way back to my hotel from...

West New York, the 1970s. A few years ago,  while wandering online, I found my grandmother’s UK Internment Tribunal papers, dated...

Vienna, the 1930s. The Anschluss  of 1938 unleashed a demon spirit on the Jews of Vienna, one that had been shackled but was now free to...

Galizia, late 19th century - Vienna, early 20th. After I came to the US in 1968, my grandmother gave me a photo of Mom in Vienna, ca....

Buenos Aires, 1961. Mom’s given name was Rebecca, yet everyone, including Dad, called her by her Viennese nickname, Riqui. Everyone,...

Buenos Aires, the 1950s. When I immigrated to the US in 1968, I brought with me two tiny ceramic kittens, each barely larger than a...

Buenos Aires, the 1950s. In this blog, I will try to explain the meaning of two terms of Jewish taxonomy: Yekke Jews and shtetl  Jews....

Buenos Aires, the 1950s. In the box of photos that I brought with me from Buenos Aires in 1968 I found, when I at last rummaged through...

Samos, 2005 and Milan, 2018. I want to tell you two more things before I wrap up the story of the quest to get to know my secretive...

Izmir, 2014. Our cab from downtown Izmir turned left from the seaside Boulevard Mustafa Kemal and started climbing up a hill toward...