Stories,photos

131 results total, viewing 121 - 130

Aunt Edith

I took my aunt Edith pretty much for granted while she lived just a few houses uphill from ours. We both eventually inherited our family homesteads and stayed put there. When I was but a boy, Edith would babysit me. Throughout the war years, she … more

Mike Fink | 1/30/14

Tu Bi-Sh’vat

“Humanity is a tree of the field,” declares Deuteronomy. There was an old song that sighed, “Spring will be a little late this year.” (I think it meant, “she said no.”) In Israel, despite last month’s snowstorm, spring comes a little … more

Mike Fink | 1/3/14

We make our own Eden

“Frenchman’s Creek” has “gotten’ to be a habit with me,” in the phrase from an old song. I know the turning of the roads around the creek with the fountain and the golf-cart traffic at the curves. more

Mike Fink | 12/19/13

Minnie and Moe

My eldest aunt had been, in the womb, a twin: I wonder if she was seeking her other, vanished, half, all through her 90 years and more and beyond. Minnie first appeared in Providence when she was – oh, my! –fifty! She stood on our front steps … more

Mike Fink | 12/5/13

Ruthless

I guess her turn has come up. Not like a yahrtzeit candle that welcomes a departed soul to your household. Just because, she figures on the landscape: I’ve been squinting through the blur of memory at profiles of my uncles and aunts, my cousins … more

Mike Fink | 11/22/13

The wrong cup

I met my aunt Stella for the first time when I was a bar mitzvah boy, I mean a young teen-ager. Why? She came down to our cobblestones from Montreal, now that the war was over and travel bans were lifted. You could take a train or drive on your … more

Mike Fink | 11/7/13

A mystery left unsolved

“Evangeline” – the romantic, tragic, poetic epic by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow we used to read in the Providence public schools – is depicted on postcards, posters, clips from the eponymous Hollywood movie with Dolores del Rio in the title … more

Mike Fink | 10/25/13

An angel amidst the autos

I walked down Third Street to The Highlands to check out the pictures I had set up on easels in the lobby, displaying some old photos of the neighborhood, explaining the history of the landscape before the assisted living quarters were built. On … more

Mike Fink | 10/10/13

American literature owes a debt to the Jews

Jacob Crane, the Touro National Heritage Trust Fellow who spent this past summer studying at the John Carter Brown library, presented his research topic at a RISD Brown Hillel luncheon with a focus on “Ararat.” more

Mike Fink | 9/12/13

Celebrating creative spirits – here and in Israel

My story begins with my student Max Levi Frieder, who came from Colorado to the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). more

Mike Fink | 8/16/13