Archive | Ebisu Publications

For the last few months, I’ve been irritated by four particular phrases—shibboleths, really—that liberal readers post in the comments section of The New York Times. The annoyance grew, like a boil, until I finally decided to skewer it. Here are the four: 1) No one is above the law. I’m sure that those who parrot […]

My father, Jacob Joseph Altman, was born in Brooklyn in 1912. His family moved to the United States before the change in immigration laws that prevented my mother from coming here. Jacob’s father, Reuben, was from Kishinev, an Eastern European city that was founded in 1436 as a monastic village. It became part of the […]

In this spring of convergent disasters—a global pandemic and collapsing economy—it may be useful to remember how our forebears survived the calamities of their time. My mother, Gitl Dina Bojankosky, was born in 1914 in Nowy Dwor, a town 24 miles from Warsaw. I couldn’t find the census figures for that year but in 1921 […]

A friend has urged me to post about the current health crisis. I’m not a medical professional or politician, but I can offer a little historical perspective. What I’ve seen in the last six decades is an empire in decline, and I think the combination of the Coronavirus pandemic and our hell-for-leather environmental destruction will […]

Here’s a story for those of you who’d like to read something other than the latest plague news. It’s the first of three episodes about odd jobs for an odd girl. We begin 57 years ago, in a world that no longer exists… After I left home in 1963, it took two years, working full-time […]

Once I was back in my parents’ home, Laura became more available. She let me make love to her once or twice and again urged me to leave home. She’d started seeing a Sullivanian therapist named Ralph Klein and said I should get into therapy as well. I don’t remember why I agreed to do […]

This is the second of three parts. But first, a happy astronomical note: In a recent post I mentioned that astronomers expect that the star Betelgeuse, which has been dimming of late, will go nova and burn out sometime between tonight and the next 100,000 years. Now they think that the dimming is the result […]

In an earlier post I wrote about my first job, as a clerk-typist with the federal government. It was the summer of 1960, and I was 17. That September I returned to my sophomore year at City College of New York, having learned two things: I could earn enough to support myself, and I wanted […]

  One characteristic of humans is the urge to leave a record of our existence, a talisman against mortality. We hope that others will see whatever token we have left and remember us—perhaps our children, if our ambitions are limited, or perhaps the entire world, if we’re as arrogant as emperors. The oldest such mementos […]

On December 16, in response to the murders in Jersey City, I posted about anti-Semitic violence in the New York metropolitan area. On December 31 I spoke about the conflict between certain elements of the transsexual community and radical feminists. There is a connection: angry people tend to strike out at whoever is lower in […]