Somewhen in the 1970s we stopped eating things that our parents ate of frugal necessity: my mom and dad were mid-teens, then young adults, in the UK during the war years; my own childhood diet included many wartime recipes until their death knell was sounded by the beep of the microwave oven and convenience.

In England, a country which imported sixty per cent of its food in 1939, rationing was rapidly introduced and lasted in some forms until the mid-fifties. There were some…

Rachel called the lamb 'Menachim' (she told me when she was much older) because its fleece was as white as her grandfather's hair but because of the way she said it, or perhaps did not say it, I figured it was just because Menachim was an utterly gentle man. Moshe, Menachim's second son, who was a paratrooper and had a proudly fierce and utterly ungentle disposition, found the whole business highly offensive:

"Safta," he would complain to Menachim's mother, "how can you allow Ruchie…

The murder of Proudy Hoare was only half the most exciting thing to happen at The Daffodil Bar that summer, and it wasn't that the slaying itself was a considerable coup de théâtre (which it was), or that the ex-sanguinary effects  weren't both colorful and projective (which they were)—it was just such a bloody marvel the whole thing might have been orchestrated by a Broadway impressario.

"Effin' hell," shouted Pickle (he was visiting London on…

Curt Broger joined the union when he was 21, which was a big deal because a union job meant his hourly wage was several times the average in that town for what was, by pretty much anyone's standard, unskilled work;  by the time he was twenty-three he had grown a beard, a T-shirt-banded gut and wore a Local-71 overjacket with the demeanor of a man who didn't give a damn for a world dressed otherwise. So that morning after he dropped its tiny hex screw, he didn't even think about options but…