MAYBE IT'S ME

Come with me as I hunt for my grandparents' graves in the wilds of Queens, NY ... and discover how close my grandmother might have come to being one of those young seamstresses who died in the Triangle Shirtwaist fire. Let's hear it for Jewish socialists like my grandfather, labor unions, and cemeteries!   My grandparents' engagement photos, Joshua on the left and Pauline on the right

What happens when you fall in love with someone whose countrymen your family views as enemies? What if that person wants you to visit his homeland, which your ancestors fled to get away from his ancestors? Bad enough an American Jew should travel with her Polish Catholic boyfriend to Poland; even worse if she gets deathly ill there.

What do you do if your kid doesn't want to follow the religion that means so much to you? What determines what kind of person your kid grows up to be--who they are at birth or how you try to raise them?

How did a Jewish cemetery end up inside a General Motors Cadillac plant? Why did the city seize the Detroit neighborhood that once surrounded that cemetery, demolish the houses, businesses, and churches in which the Polish Catholic, Jewish, and African American residents once lived and worked and prayed, and give the land to GM? And why were my parents so upset that I was in a relationship with on...

This one is about a truly horrifying sex-ed book that has been chasing me around and trying to bite me for decades. Back in the 1950s and '60s, parents sure did a lousy job of teaching their kids about sex and love. The books are better now ... but our kids probably learn most of what they know from watching porn, which is even more upsetting than if they were given the book my mother gave me.

My parents were obsessive about keeping our 1950s ranch house spotlessly clean, well repaired, and orderly. They seemed to be afraid of everything. But why? Sadly, we often don't figure out the reasons for our parents' craziness until they're no longer with us.  I've included a photo of the house in 1954, the year my parents' built it. Here's a picture of me giving my dad a shave and haircut (with...

Could the Shah of Iran have been Jewish? Maybe. What interests me even more is how family legends get started, what they mean to us, the amazing ways in which our family stories intersect with larger social movements and historical events, and how much we ever really know about our fathers. I've included a photo of Sidney Polivy with Episode 3. Here's a photo of Sidney (on the left) and my father...

Could the Shah of Iran been a hidden Jew? According to my father's old army buddy, Sidney Polivy, he was Sidney's cousin. I'm including a photo of Sidney so you can compare it to portraits of Reza Khan and his son Mohammed-Reza that you can find online. The resemblance is striking. Listen to part I of this episode and see what you think ....  

In "Thin Air," I look back at someone who worked for my family when I was a kid--someone who was murdered--and try to figure out what was really going on in her life, what everyone turned a blind eye to, what they just couldn't imagine being true. Sometimes we need decades to make certain connections--in this case, the ties that connect a parakeet named Ish Kabibble to our family's cleaning lady,...

Who makes it out of high school alive? Why? At what cost? And what do we owe to those who get left behind?  Join me as I read the first essay in my collection Maybe It's Me. If  you want to own a hard copy of Maybe It's Me, you can buy it online at Bookshop.org , at your favorite bookstore, or, if you must, at  Amazon.com . You can find out more about me and my other publications at my website, ww...