Chapter One

In the Beginning

"Write the easy part first," said my perceptive friend William Safire. "Then you can go back and do the hard part."

This is the hard part — a jumble of long-submerged memories of childhood poverty, a polio-stricken young brother and a struggling widowed mother, memories of how I felt fat, unattractive, Jewish, an outsider struggling for a way in. I had a strong temptation to skip the early years and cut to the career chase. But then you would not understand why I became a journalist and the kind of journalist (combative? abrasive?) that I became. It was, in the end, the journalist in me that demanded that I fill in the early background.

Part of that background is the immigrant experience. While writing this chapter, I went for a visit to Ellis Island, trying to imagine the bewilderment my parents must have felt when they came to this country. They came from Telechan, a shtetl (village) in the Pinsk area of what is now Belarus. I would have gone back to the shtetl, too, but it no longer exists. It was wiped out, and all my remaining relatives were murdered in the Holocaust.

In September 1912, my parents married in Telechan, my father then twenty and, I think, a y ... read full excerpt from Staying Tuned ebook