Author Archive | Martha Shelley

I hadn’t thought about Akou in years—decades, maybe. We were friends in the early 60s, over half a century ago. This past week, however, he appeared in a dream. The person in the dream didn’t look at all like the man I remember, yet somehow I knew it was him. The Milieu I met Akou, […]

At the airport in North Jakarta, a woman made announcements over the public address system. Billboards and signs in Indonesian, incomprehensible. Worse than incomprehensible: Since I didn’t expect to understand Chinese in Hong Kong, anymore than I did in New York’s Chinatown, I wasn’t uncomfortable there. Here, though, the signs were in the Roman alphabet […]

We Set the Night on Fire is the title of my forthcoming book. The official publication date is June 13, right smack in the middle of Pride Month, but it’s already getting great reviews, including an excellent one from Kirkus. According to Aspiring Author, Kirkus is the “gold standard” of the publishing industry. “While notoriously […]

The face was grey, color of dough mixed with ashes, flaccid, sex indeterminate but tending more toward female. Dark sockets where eyeballs had been. She—or was it me?—said she was so glad to have gotten into masochism, wished she’d started years ago, and now only wanted it to go on for a thousand years. I […]

In my previous post, I discussed articles by Helen Elka Meyers that justified police practices targeting the Black community. On her LinkedIn page, Ms. Meyers says she was with the New York Police Department (NYPD) for over five years, and also worked with the FBI for six months. Currently, she is a “fellow and director […]

In Response to “An American Pogrom” After I posted parts 1 and 2 of “An American Pogrom,” a reader sent me links to a couple of articles by Hannah Elka Meyers. Opposing Criminal Justice Reform The first of these two articles was published on 2/16/2023 in the New York Post, a right wing paper owned […]

As I wrote in Part I, what struck me about the cruelty that Black people experience in America, from slavery times to today’s police murders, is its resemblance to the pogroms my forebears fled. The Immigrants My parents and grandparents emigrated from Eastern Europe to the United States hoping for both safety and prosperity in […]

Recently I received an article by my friend Carolyn Martin Shaw about the life and death of her brother—a young Black man murdered by police. I was profoundly moved by her account. The news media deliver us almost daily stories of such murders, along with mass shootings and updated earthquake casualties, to the point of […]

I just finished reading a book that brought back some pretty bad memories, both my own and those of others I knew. First, a little about the book, which is scheduled for publication this month: Erase Her In her gripping memoir, Erase Her, Cassandra Langer talks about being a tomboy and budding intellectual in the […]

This week I discovered an op-ed piece by a woman doctor that gave me much food for thought. I’ll refer you to the article later. But first, a little personal history: Like so many Jewish immigrants, my mother wanted at least one of her children to enter the medical field, and now and then I’ve […]