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More guests keep arriving. There is excitement at the door. A raspy voice rising above the general hubbub sounds like my father, speaking louder and with a heavier Hungarian accent than normally. He keeps asking how much all this cost—the shipping, the rabbi, the mortician, the total sum; he will w…

Getting more Jewish every day. Fooled even Ezra as a freshman in his Hegel seminar. Had a wedding cooked up with a girl from a wealthy Sephardic family. Surprised to discover his star pupil was a pure Polish Catholic (son of a small-town New England pharmacist—corrupted by Marxist piano teacher, Ni…

Weeks before the day when Sophie Blind walked up the ramp into the upholstered belly of a jet prop, weeks before she made her flight reservation, before she wrote her lover what she wanted, back in January when Paris was leafless, a bleak wet wash, and New York as bleakly wind-swept; in January at …

[...] “Consider it as a business proposition,” he pursues with gentle irony. “I am not pleading with you; I will not use force. We are in the twentieth century; you are a free woman and I want you to make a rational choice. I hope one day you will feel some affection for me. I have a right to hope,…

Nice for an afternoon—but too strenuous a business to incarnate some guiding star or even an exotic fish for a floundering millionaire. Has she missed her calling? She recalls backing out of a very attractive offer two years ago: a yacht, villa in Nice, apartment in Paris. Wanted her to fly to San …