My Father's Bonus March
Prologue
Stories I Know
People are so soon gone; let us catch them.
Virginia Woolf, The Waves
2007
My daughter is two years old, and she and I are sitting on the front steps outside my mother’s house on Mozart Street in West Rogers Park on the North Side of Chicago. The sun has long since set and it’s way past Nora’s bedtime, but she shows no sign of falling asleep anytime soon, so I’ve been telling her stories about the neighborhood.
This is the same stoop where I would sit with my dad when he was still alive, I say, the same place where the two of us would watch and greet the neighbors going by—Loping Leemie on his way to the Jewish academy; Mr. Primack with his briefcase, off to work; Rabbi Michael Small, cigar in hand, heading for his shul on California and Albion.
A peaceful neighborhood, I tell Nora, a good place to grow up. In the 1970s, we never locked our doors. When we went out, we wouldn’t even take our house keys along—until the night we returned to find our side door open, the dresser drawers upturned, clothes and papers everywhere. Our lockbox was gone, th ...
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