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I came back and she gripped me in a hard, angry embrace. She did try, but repeatedly her head filled with blood, over what, I think she hardly knew … oh yes, I was marrying a goy. I was elated. I began to feel embattled. Now I wanted to marry Stefan more, I thought, than I would ever again want any…

Stefan was neither stupid nor uneducated, but he was short and foreign and an artist. He groped for words, his English was not fluent, he did work I could not evaluate but could nonetheless be sceptical of. He was also a lapsed Catholic endowed with a missionary zeal for painting that appealed stro…

The men were able to retreat from anxiety into a ready-made identity. They got their PhDs, married Joan, and went off to walk the carefully prepared road that had been assigned them. The women had no such luck. Who were they to identify with? Where were they to go? At Berkeley I know where they wen…

I began leaving home at nineteen and kept leaving until I was married in the living room at twenty-four in a noisy act of faith that announced the matter accomplished. My husband was small (my size); blond (‘insignificant-looking’, as Mama put it); foreign (he couldn’t defend himself in English). W…

Now, of course, the evidence is weighing heavily against me. This man and I had met at a journalists’ conference. Desire had flared quickly, and then happiness had taken us both by surprise. We had spent a month together. Now we had separated, I back to New York, he to the Midwest to finish an assi…