TBF, mom made killer carob muffins and even a cake for my birthday. Were my friends disappointed, maybe, but she also made homemade piñatas for our birthdays.

They took us to Hershey Park. I got sick, probably sun stroke or something. My mother, who is a fantastic and careful caretaker even today, decided I was allergic to chocolate. Joy receded from my life until I was old enough to vote… and buy chocolate legally.

Wow. In my fever dreams about dissecting what I can’t even credibly call the “weaponization” of Cold War memory—since that suggests guile rather than hubristic delusion—I couldn’t possibly have wished for such a source.

I’m really hoping to design a research room with equipment and books. There just doesn’t seem to be enough space nearby… but I have a vision in formation.

That’s what I am considering. It feels like a lower-stakes version of the phenomenon of “return,” most common among Polish people who learned late in life of their Jewish roots. The etic-emit tensions risk too easy slippages into ethno-essentialism or into a materialism that erases the dynamic self.

I’ve written about the ashes poured into the river and the struggles to install a memorial stone, which would be left of most tours anyway… Those ashes had been Czech to me and in the telling… Are they different now? Should I complain of an erasure in which I am complicit?

This has been rattling around my brain since I read it. I need to find out where this happened!

Hahahahah! I would have loved to have been there for that. I expect that the response was fairly pointed.

It’s everything but a profoundly different generational experience and the availability of more information.

I love how she blamed young Jews’ revulsion at the Holocaust for their opposition to Israel. Did she even read this aloud to herself once? (Yes. She did.$

Yes, please!