Tales of a Wandering Jew

There are two things that make me the writer and storyteller I am. That I traveled maybe ten times as much as the average person. And that my eyes were open.

I inherited a curiosity of spirit from my father. He gave it to me, and he honed it. Open eyes, open ears — he was an opportunist and an idealist if there ever was one. When I was five years old, he’d take me two hours on the bus so we could hear a Selichos by a certain chassidic court, a Maariv one night of Chanukah there. He’d hold my hand in the great split-second stillness after the Rebbe’s brachah, before the rumbling “amen” of the crowd. “Do you hear? Do you get it?” he asked me. Sixty-five years later, I remember the way my heart beat faster, how my voice joined and carried with a thousand others.

We were seekers, looking and learning. Extroverts, connecting easily with people, with places. We knew family networks, this one’s grandfather from der heim, that one’s cousin. Mishpachology was a language I learned at the knee. But I didn’t know how far it would go, the places I’d get to, the people I’d meet…

In the early ‘70s, I learned to become a shochet. I had a young family, and I stayed close to home. For eight years I worked in beef and poultry plants around New York and New Jersey.