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Gary
Shteyngart
The
Mother Tongue
Between Two Slices of Rye
When
I return to
Russia, my birthplace, I cannot sleep for days. The Russian language
swaddles me. The trilling r's tickle the underside of my feet. Every
old woman cooing to her grandson is my dead grandmother. Every glum and
purposeful man picking up his wife from work in a dusty Volga sedan is
my father. Every young man cursing the West with his friends over a
late morning beer in the Summer Garden is me. I have fallen off the
edges of the known universe, with its Palm Pilots, obnoxious vintage
shops, and sleek French-Caribbean Brooklyn bistros, and have returned
into a kind of elemental Shteyngart-land, a nightmare where every
consonant resonates like a punch against the liver, every rare
vowel makes my flanks quiver as if I'm in love.
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Lynne Sharon Schwartz
Wheelchair Yoga
"The yoga teacher is coming this afternoon at two. Why
don't you try it?" the physical therapist suggested to my friend Marian
as he settled her back in her wheelchair. Marian had just taken ten
small steps with the therapist standing in front holding her arms and
an assistant standing behind, pushing the chair in case she needed to
sit down in a hurry. I walked alongside.
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Leonard
Michaels
My Yiddish
In Paris one morning in the
Seventies, walking along rue Mahler, I saw
a group of old men in an argument, shouting and gesticulating. I wanted
to know what it was about, but my graduate-school French was good
enough only to read great writers, not good enough for an impassioned
argument or even conversation with the local grocer. But then, as I
walked by the old men, I felt a shock and a surge of exhilaration. I
did understand them. My god, I possessed the thing-spoken French! Just
as suddenly, I crashed. The old men, I realized, were shouting in
Yiddish.
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Lisa Michaels
Near and Deer
The day my husband and I moved into our home, the deer
came like a neighborhood welcoming committee. We were unpacking boxes
in the living room, which looked out on a gravel walk that bordered our
yard. Suddenly three deer came into view, stepping by single-file, as
if on a forest path. “Look,” Mau said, touching my arm. We both froze,
newspaper wadded around our feet, stacks of bowls in our hands.
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