Selected Essays

“The Crown of Grandparenting.” Tablet, August 2020

I was not one of those women who spent her days yearning to be a grandmother. Maybe that’s because my own was not a “cookie grandmother” who stuffed us with sweets and offered a bountiful lap. Grandma Ethel had been a beauty in her youth, with waist-length copper hair and sky blue eyes. She loved to tell us stories about herself, how she danced on tables in the 1920s. Grandma smiled too widely in family pictures, making things feel fake and unreal. She paled in comparison to my grandfather, whom I adored.

“How I Learned to Fast.” Tablet, October 2019

I’ve always been terrible at fasting. Sometimes I think it’s because for my mother, who began her family life in the Midwest in the 1960s by rejecting her parents’ Orthodoxy, Yom Kippur was mostly about the break-fast. Mom prided herself on being, in her words, “the hostess with the mostess,” and Yom Kippur was her time to shine.

“Why I’m Marching.” Huffington Post, January 2017

I’m marching because I live in a sweet ground floor apartment in NYC, and the folks behind us just built a four-story glass box addition to their brownstone that juts towards our courtyard and practically my bedroom, too. They have not one, but three balconies that no one ever uses.

“Plating the Warm Vegetable Salad.” Bodega, November 2016

Micah swept into the kitchen, his arms hugging paper sacks crowned with curly topped carrots and bunches of radish. We were in St. Louis visiting his grandmothers and all the others we’d left behind when we moved to New York City. “I’m going to make a collage with Savta,” he said, “a food collage.” Savta is Micah’s paternal grandmother, and he hadn’t seen her in three years, as he’d been honing his skills as a chef at Gramercy Tavern.

“Town at the End of the World.” Ragazine, 2016 (Pushcart Prize Nominee)

The first time I walked the slip of sand that is Wellfleet Harbor, I huddled in the wind against my college professor. He had summered in the town for years, and for our first and only night away together, he wanted to introduce me to its peerless stretches of sandy dunes, its raw, roaring ocean, its timeless fishing village rhythms, and perhaps the whisper of permanence he felt in this place and knew could never be ours.

“Leaving the Nest.” Tablet, October 2016

It was the end of September, and though I knew it was a foolish game, I was counting the lasts: the last autumn. The last Rosh Hashanah. The last middle-of-the-night drive home to St. Louis from Chicago, where we’d spent the last nine Rosh Hashanahs. My husband was asleep in the back seat, the two youngest overlapped in the seat behind, snoring. Next to me in the driver’s seat was my eldest son, Zach. He’d be going off to college in New York the following year, and I was the one who’d have to help get him ready and put him on the plane.

“What’s Left When You Let Go?” NPR’s On Being, March 2014

My mother is one of those twice-a-year Jews, but, for some strange reason during a brief segment of my childhood, my sister and I went to bed each night with a prayer. A lavender elephant and a yellow giraffe that my mom and her best friend had painted on our bedroom walls floated above our heads as my sister and I chanted:

“Now I lay me down to sleep. I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.”

The sing-song rhythm of it, my sister’s voice riding mine, the fact that it came every single night no matter what happened that day, were a balm to me, until the day we lost it — through apathy, or the hectic first weeks of my brother’s life — a token of childhood, gone.

“A Place Called Hope.” Huffington Post, December 2011

It’s at the moment when the plane begins to bump and roll, when it feels as if we’re in nothing more than a tin can, lurching around 36,000 feet up in the sky, that the singing begins. The experts on anxiety teach that distraction works well, so I am religious about bringing my iPod on every flight. And though I have been careful to charge the iPod the night before, somehow I’ve managed to leave it and the tangled earplugs in my bag at my feet, and now the plane is jerking around and I can’t possibly move my head — keep it still and you don’t get nauseous — so I am singing to myself instead.

“Urban Mystic: Finding Holy Sparks in the City.” Huffington Post, August 2011

For much of my life I gazed upon the world through the windshield of a suburban car. Zooming past Midwestern strip malls, parking lots and Taco Bells, I was no mystic. A one-inch pane of glass sealed me from the outside world, and in suburban St. Louis, where the streets are mostly empty of people, it was hard to see the world as One, to feel the animating sparks of the Divine.