You are currently browsing the stories about the The Catskills neighborhood

Bronx Pinocchios of the Borscht Belt

by 12/10/2022
Neighborhood: Bronx, The Catskills

My home base in the 50s was Wyatt Street, essentially, a one-block middle class Jewish enclave in the East Bronx. Theirs was a few miles away, on Fox Street in the South Bronx, then a tough area of mostly poor Jews, Italians, Blacks and Puerto Ricans.  Our paths were unlikely to have ever crossed, except […]

Settling

by 08/11/2019
Neighborhood: Long Island, Queens, The Catskills

I broke up with my first boyfriend one month, two weeks, and four days after I found out he was fucking his neighbor. I never told him that I’d overheard them.  He never wanted to fight; he didn’t want us to be the couple who fought. It was important to him that we maintain a […]

Monkey In The Middle

by 02/28/2011
Neighborhood: All Over, Rockaway, The Catskills

“You from Long Island?” Danny, from Brownsville, Brooklyn, grilled. Before I could qualify myself, he turned to face the rest of the kids on our bus, and announced, “The skinny kid is loaded.” We had just left Chinatown and were cruising north, along the Hudson River, to sleep-away camp in upstate New York. My fellow […]

Natural Selection

by 12/30/2002
Neighborhood: The Catskills

It’s dawn and I’m fighting with a bobcat. For a raccoon, I’m doing pretty well. The sun is burning through the misty clouds, slowly warming up the forest – the forest, my home, that I love so well. Small birds sing loudly from the branches of trees, their lungs filled with sweet yearning. Crows, who […]