Anna Nessy Perlberg was born in Czechoslovakia. Her mother, Julia Nessy, was an opera singer, and her entire family was devoted to the arts. Her father was Jewish, and when Hitler seized Prague in 1939 she and her two older brothers and their parents left their beloved city for New York. Anna met her poet […]

We put the finishing touches on our trip to Scotland this past week, booking a hotel in Edinburgh. In truth, it’s as much a trip to England as Scotland. We’ll first be visiting with our friend Jim at his place in London, then up to his father’s in the North of England, which is how […]

If you’ve followed our blog for a while, you know that Wanda Bridgeforth is a 95-year-old witty and talented writer who has attended the memoir writing class I lead in downtown Chicago for over a decade now. What you might not know about Wanda is that she is an immigrant: she was born in Canada. […]

A number of the writers in the memoir classes I lead are immigrants, and for the next couple weeks I’m planning to feature essays these wonderful writers wrote when I asked them to describe the role food plays in their holiday traditions. Let’s start with Annelore. She was born in Germany and met her American-born […]

Now, here’s a new one for you. A waiter in Mississippi was fired for refusing to wear his fake eye at work. Discrimination? I dunno. But this story strikes close to home. Eye surgeons did all they could to restore my vision when retinopathy set in thirty years ago. One of my eyes is still […]