Contemporary Stories

"Listen to me, Mrs. Rosenberg," her heavy face was flushed with excitement. "Let me take her. Why should she die, the innocent babe? I will care for her as if she was my own. I never had children, you know. Give her to me..."

Yisroel stood in the doorway, cheeks and nose bright red from the cold, snow crusting his thick brown bangs. "My mother is still not here, and I'm frozen. Can I wait inside?"

Do you know where Kano is? Look it up on the map of Nigeria in West Africa

Could others see the countless tiny strands of their separate anxieties silently knitting them together? Did anyone notice how, though they sat on separate chairs not touching, they sat as close as two people could without touching?

"It's just not the same anymore without him..." She bows her head. I nod in agreement, but inside I'm singing

Morgenstern drove slowly, carefully surveying the suburban neighborhood. Night was when a creature's true colors were revealed. If they were a predatory species, these humans would use the cover of darkness for their darkest deeds...

After fifteen frenzied minutes, the Finkel cousins returned to the living room. Kevin turned in the report. "Sorry, Dad. For a small house, there's a lot of places to hide a matzah"

The sole method we had for giving blood was a direct transfusion from one person to another

One morning, when Paul was 7, I received a stat call to the emergency room... "Oh G-d," I pleaded in my thoughts, "Please not this one. Not him."

My best friend was a girl of my age named Jeanette. One morning when I came to play, I saw her family being forced at gunpoint into a truck. I ran home and told my mother. "Don't worry," she said, "Jeanette will be back soon..."

Here was genuine culture, a living tradition, a way of preparing for Tisha B’Av that I had never experienced before. It was an awakening, a discovery of origins. This is where hotdogs come from

The death of a thousand cuts would have been preferable. I briefly considered crawling, until I realized that everyone would be able to see me anyway.

In those days there was only one car service in Crown Heights and it was run by Chassidim, a class of people for whom time means nothing

At the conclusion of the seder meal, the cup of Elijah was filled and my six year old son, candle in hand, was sent to open the front door, an old fashioned, ponderous wooden structure that was secured with a heavy iron latch...

"Why," pondered the sad little accountant, "couldn't I get into a government refund loop, instead of a Shmurah Matzah loop? Just my mazel," he said to himself, "everyone else gets money when there is a mistake, I get Matzah."

I first heard of Sammy Rosenbaum in 1965, when a Mrs. Rawicz from Rabka came into my office in Vienna to testify at a War Crimes trial

We were all looking away; we had not known that he was severely afflicted with Parkinson's disease. Then we heard this big bang on the table: "Gentlemen, look at me, and look at me right now. Who can tell me what the lesson of the Holocaust is?"

The soldier stared at the boy, fighting back tears. "Over these four terrible years, this is the first live Jewish child I have seen..."

At first, I was awed by his courage. But the next day I realized, to my horror, that this man was 'renting out' the siddur to people in exchange for bread...