Smyrna, 1910-1922. Entry 345 in the “Book of Certificates of the Community of Smyrna, 1915-1920” says that on July 27, 1919, my father...

Transylvania to Smyrna, 1860-1922. Through a series of unexpected events, Grandpa Leon’s postcard arrived at home in the US in 2005, more...

Buenos Aires, the 1950s. “A proper English school student needs to learn how to secure a necktie into a Windsor knot,” declared Dad the...

On the plane back to the US, 1976. I had plenty of time to reflect on Dad while on the plane back from Europe to the US. My visits to...

Trieste, Italy, 1976. My Aunt Carola and I were sitting at her kitchen table in Trieste talking about our family’s history when,...

Samos, Greece, 1976. Upon graduating from Harvard and ahead of my postdoctoral stint, I went back to Europe and stopped in Samos for a...

Trieste, 1971. I was still coming to grips with learning that Dad had been one of seven siblings, three of whom were murdered by the...

Trieste, Italy, 1971. It was a bright summer afternoon when I arrived in Trieste on the Orient Express. Back then the famous train was...

Buenos Aires – Troy, NY,  1961-1971. Losing my parents at an early age messed up my life for decades, although you would not know it by...

Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1968. My brown valise, the one you met in one of my early tales of immigration, kept quiet for a long time. It...

Washington D.C. 1983. One morning in 1983, I found myself sitting at the Immigration Office in downtown D.C. for my required citizenship...

Cambridge , Massachusetts, 1977. It was the Fall of 1977 and I was back at Harvard to talk to Frank Westheimer, my thesis advisor. I had...

Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1972-1976. Within a few weeks of starting in Westheimer’s lab at Harvard, I had a baseball crisis. It had all...

Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1971. Soon after arriving at Harvard, I went to the office of Professor Frank Westheimer for the obligatory...

Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1971. Being accepted at Harvard for my PhD in chemistry was perhaps the best ticket I could receive for entry...

From: “The Recollection: Bringing Back my Long-Gone Parents, One Object at a Time” By Jorge Goldstein In my last blog, Bad Habits, I...

Troy, New York, 1968-1971. It did not take me long after arriving in Troy in 1968, to start developing misgivings about the hegemonistic...

From: “The Recollection: Bringing Back my Long-Gone Parents, One Object at a Time” By Jorge Goldstein In my last blog I mentioned in...

Troy, N.Y., Fall 1968. One of the first things I had to do upon arrival at Rensselaer Polytechnic was deal with the foreign language...

Troy, N.Y., Fall 1968. The Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Student Union, at the top of the hill, was a modern building, a big contrast...