Me, about 3 months old, with parents. I was a lymphatic. My mother was told that a thin, spidery, pale eight-year-old like me couldn’t be anything else. At that time, in the mid-nineteen thirties, the belief in body types was as ingrained in Europe as it currently is in some... Continue reading

Milan cathedral. Source. First, let me recap a few facts. I was born in Milan in 1928 and lived there until I was eight, when we moved to Turin for three years. In 1939, we traveled to Genoa, intending to go to Australia. Here’s why we never got there. Our... Continue reading

We left Italy September 1940 going by ship from Genoa to Barcelona, which now seems now like a nervy thing to do because Italy and France were at war at the time. Sure enough, we found out eventually that on a subsequent trip the same ship was torpedoed and all... Continue reading

A couple of years ago Edith and I took the ferry to Ellis Island, to revisit the place where my parents and I had spent five days on arrival to the United States in January of 1941. Nearly sixty years had passed but some sights were still familiar. I best... Continue reading

No sooner had I arrived in Quito that I had to deal once again with questions of identity, as if I hadn’t had enough of this. I had already assumed a bunch of identities: I had been an Italian, a Central European, an Eastern European; a traditional Jew and an... Continue reading

One should be thankful for being able to participate in any culture, but I have a special liking for my Latin side. When I am being Ecuadorian, I feel tender towards others, more willing to laugh, more light spirited. It’s a joyful and liberating feeling, one that does not come... Continue reading

Life in Quito We were quite poor, but this is a relative statement for residents of a city where the majority of the population lived at or below subsistence level. We were surrounded by abject poverty, and few of the inhabitants of Quito could be called middle class. However, compared... Continue reading

Galapagos Redux In 1948, at the age of 20, I got my first taste of the Galapagos, under peculiar circumstances. In those days, there was no hint of tourism, no scheduled ships, planes, or organized tours to the islands of the sort that are common now. In fact, going there... Continue reading

One Departure Left In 1945, after the end of the war, many of the members of the Jewish community left Ecuador. Some went back to Europe, a few to Israel, the majority to the States. They were driven by a desire for better study or work opportunities, plus, they wished... Continue reading

In one’s crepuscular (now, that’s a word I’ve never used before) phase of life, writing memoirs seems mandatory. Actually, I wrote these some ten years ago, but I was already reaching old age then. My apologia pro labore mea relies on my belief that my first twenty or so years... Continue reading