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THE VILLAGE
I’d like you to tell meabout the village in whichyou grew up, and how oddit must have been for youto have met my grandfatherso far from any villagein the heart of Lithuania.I suspect you leftwith your parents, exhaustedby pogroms, exhaustedby the Jewishnessthat to them defined you.I’d love to knowabout my mother whoI never got to…
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TIDAL SHIFTS
It’s difficult enough, Mom, that Inever got to meet you, to see your facesave in a college yearbook, to haveonly a few relatives acknowledgemy existence despite the DNA testthat clearly links us, one to the other.What makes it more difficult istrying to figure out my heritage,my geographic roots before our familyarrived in West Virginia, backin…
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MITOCHONDRIAL
I always imagined it would somehowbe romantic, not in the Hollywood sort of way,but in an idyllic, picturesque manner,even if that denied basic reality.Reality, when it comes to origins discoveredis overrated, for the normal percolation timeis denied, and the impact is suddenwith no restraints to temper the blow.Way back when, you learned by storiestold by…
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REMEMBERING ANOTHER FATHER
It was scrawled on the back of a grocery receipt, barely legible. Charles H. Boustead Tunnel, fryingpan river. The river is lower case, its capitals dangling by serifs in one of the tunnel grates that constricts the water’s flow. Outside the full moon is ensnared in the gnarled, barren branches of the white birch. She…
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STATELESS
I suppose it is oddly fitting that I was born in the continental U.S. but can claim no state as home. I was a Federal child, and that meant nothing at all to me, a child who left town at two after a father’s death, a sister reclaimed by the government, which was no State,…
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FINDING
Even when I was briefly in Edinburgh I dreamed of walking the streets of Lisbon or Porto looking into the faces of older men and wondering if this one was my father. the father I had never seen, never known. Was the one my Jewish mother described in detail to the social worker who took…
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A MESSAGE HOME
What I want to tell her is this: it’s fitting, perfectly, that you who so assiduously hid the past from me, your past and mine, now bars your entry, refusing you even the briefest glimpse. You want so to grab onto it to have it carry you to a place removed from here by time…
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ADOPTION FOR DUMMIES
There is one thing that none of the books on discovering who you are when you are adopted bother to tell you. If they did, it wouldn’t change anything, but it is a burden you assumed you’d easily bear that grows heavy with time. What they don’t warn you is that you will discover yourself,…
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SELF?
There is one thing that none of the books on discovering who you are when you are adopted bother to tell you. If the did, it wouldn’t change anything, but it is a burden you assumed you’d easily bear that grows heavy with time. What they don’t warn you is that you will discover yourself,…
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A CHILDHOOD
I have fond memories of a childhood I never lived. Those are the best childhoods from for they reflect life as you meant it to be lived. In this life my father is in his late nineties, still smiles when he sees me, not didn’t clutch his chest sixty-one years ago, didn’t fall to the…
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an old writer and his words 