Category: Stories

  My father wore suits his father had made on a treadle sewing machine.  His first language was Yiddish. My mother was born on the run, her parents fleeing the overthrowing of the Ottoman Empire and the ensuing anti-Jewish oppression.  Her father was a coppersmith.  She typed seventy words a minute on her black Royal manual typewriter.  Her…

Here is the beginning of the cabinet, a single plank of European pear wood, almost twenty inches wide, two inches thick and ten feet long. Sawed near the center of the log it contains the full diameter of the tree. The truck driver and I unload the plank onto saw horses under the portal. It…