The following six-part series is excerpted and adapted from The God and the Ghost: Two Grandfathers, a work in progress.*** The author's grandfather, Edward M. Gertz, c. 1949.My father dreams about his father. Dad’s ninety. Poppy’s been dead for thirty-four years.In these dreams, Dad and Poppy, both adults, have a great, feel-good father-son relationship, man to man, as equals. Things were not, in reality, quite that way. Poppy’s shadow fell over my father like a sheet of lead. A long sheet, too: I’ve spent most of my life wearing it as a suit that felt great to have on but when...
My (sort of) Fourteenth-Century Bar Mitzvah
And so it came to pass that on the 27th day of Tishri in the year 5725, young Stephen ben Kenneth ben Edward ben Morris ben Aaron of the House of Gertz (formerly Gershowitz, “Horse Traders to the Czar Since 1826”), who dwelt in the land of Queens in the province of New Judea also known as La Ciudad de Nueva York, reached his majority and was accepted into the congregation as a man because God, blessed be He who bestows savings bonds, apparently figures that when a boy’s sperm squad is mature enough for successful reconnaissance and friendly fire...
On The Road With Minnesota Fats
“I’ve been shooting pool since I was four years old. No con. By the time I was six I was playing for stakes. My first sucker was a neighborhood kid in Washington Heights. I spotted him coming out of a candy store with an enormous bag of gumdrops. He was about five years older than me but I shot him straight pool and I won every last one of his gumdrops. He went home crying. When I was ten I started playing for cash” (Minnesota Fats, The Bank Shot and Other Robberies).My introduction to Minnesota Fats, legendary pool hustler: It’s...
The Scarce First Edition in Yiddish of “Hashish” (1911)
In a recent column, This Is Your Brain On Books, I briefly discussed Fritz Lemmermayer’s Haschische (1898) and the Yiddish translation published in 1911 with its stunning and evocative cover illustration. It is the only drug-themed book to ever appear in Yiddish.Book people of all faiths and faithful tongues have since been hounding me to reproduce that illustration. The original is in color; all I could access was an image in black and white. It remains, however, an intoxicating feast, made all the more dramatic by Yiddish's use of the Hebrew alphabet, which visually lends itself so well to this...
This Is Your Brain On Books
There has been a spate of recent books covering new research upon how our brains work and the human decision-making process. Madeleine Bunting, at the Guardian, nicely sums up the science and its implications. It turns out that just about all of our assumptions about free-will, autonomy, and rationality in our choices and decisions are chimerical.I was reminded of this just the other day when I received the following note from a close friend and rare book collector with a Ph.D,, and who has been certified as sane. His first note limns an extraordinary find in which serendipity smiled upon...