Activity

She had a way of walking up the block that had made me uncomfortable from the time I was ten years old. She walked like no other woman in the neighbourhood. A woman’s walk might be brisk or lazy, but inevitably it was the errand-bound walk of a housewife; her legs were attached to her torso for the…

The shabby tenement streets below our windows were transformed by darkness and silence. There was in the nighttime air a clarity, a softness and a fullness, indescribably sweet, that intensified the magical isolation I sought and that easily became a conduit for waking dreams. A hungry fantasizing …

Sometimes, after an hour or so of this, she would say to me, ‘Now you say what you’d like to have happen.’ And I would say, ‘Wouldn’t it be wonderful if there was a flood or an epidemic or a revolution, and even though I’m this little kid they find me and they say to me, “You speak so wonderfully y…

Everything about Nettie proved to be impossible. She was a Gentile married to a Jew like no Jew we had ever known. Alone most of the time and apparently free to live wherever she chose, she had chosen to live among working-class Jews who offered her neither goods nor charity. A woman whose sexy goo…

‘I bought her, I bought her. You know, Jews believed that if someone you loved was in danger you sold them and that warded off the evil eye.’ She laughs. ‘If they weren’t yours what could happen to them?’

I stare hard at her. She ignores my stare.

‘Roseman came to the door and she said to me,…