t was an ordinary weekday in August. I had registered at the medical school in the morning. Walked around downtown a little (I was a powerful walker in those days).
I walked to the synagogue, not knowing if I would find anyone From the history in Wikipedia, the long tradition of the synagogue of Amiens is immortalized for all time. Read more on My First Day In Amiens…
Filed under Family, life, News by on Jan 23rd, 2019. Comment. 
I remember my French apartment, next to the market-place in Amiens, a small town a hundred miles north of Paris. A woman and her husband ran one of the larger produce booths, just a few steps from my window. She was one of those diminutive nut-brown Frenchwomen — not as pale as most of us were in the frozen north. She told me that near the Mediterranean, where she came from, I would be called “white as an aspirin tablet.” And when I visited there briefly, that is exactly what they called me. Read more on The Pleasure Of The Table…
Filed under News by on Mar 19th, 2017. Comment.
Probably, a lot of people would claim that they were my mentor if I was famous enough to be worth claiming. I had some great teachers, especially early on, and I had a bunch of wackos, too.
My-Father-Of-Blessed-Memory had to take up the slack when my first Hebrew teacher in a Yeshiva — now defunct — was a highly insecure (and probably gay) man who even got chalk all over himself. As a teacher, he was neither condemning nor very helpful, knowing no way to teach except repetition, both oral and written.
One of the reasons that I had no real mentoring when quite young was that I really did not know exactly what I wanted to do with my curious life, aside from “something in the arts and sciences” which covered pretty much anything I liked, or didn’t. Read more on The Fortunate Few Have Mentors…
Filed under Education by on Oct 27th, 2011. Comment.