Who knew? For years, we thought that chopped liver was ambrosia, a direct gift from God to the Chosen People. The years of cooking everything in schmaltz has not been so good for their arteries. Both of my parents are having trouble with their hearts. He’s been orchestrating our parents’ health care since he and his family moved back to Pittsburgh from Israel. Jerry’s a doctor, an ophthalmologist by trade. “It’s no longer a question of ‘if’ Mom has an operation,” Jerry, my older brother, had explained to me on the phone, “it’s a question of which kind of operation she has and when.” Air lounge come midnight waiting for the red-eye flight back to my hometown of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania…but there it is…and here I am. When I woke up in the morning to begin another marathon Saturday of taking care of the kids, I didn’t dream I’d be sitting in the U.S. I am forty-four years old, married, with kids ages ten, eight, and six, living in Berkeley, California. Then, a generation later, in the year 1992, a family emergency called me back. It was time to Return To Squirrel Hill. Our biggest problem seemed to be where we were going to go to college. Our parents generation had beaten back the Nazis and we were being programmed to take on Sputnik and the Russians. We wrote about our tween and teenage things, which parties we were going to, who was dating whom, and how our sports teams were doing. I got my start as a writer there working as a columnist with Lloyd Segal and Howard Fineman for the Jewish Community Center’s weekly newspaper. The intersection where the avenues Forbes & Murray crossed each other was the unofficial capital of Squirrel Hill, a predominantly Jewish community in the middle of 20th Century Pittsburgh. I used to think that Forbes & Murray was the center of the world. Touching, Hilarious, Heartbreaking & Upliftingįrom the Publisher: “A touching and hilarious memoir about an Orthodox Jewish boy growing up in Pittsburgh in the mid-20th Century, returning as an adult to help his family…”
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