We call ourselves the Lady Bunch. One of our nine members named us after the iconic TV show The Brady Bunch, which introduces its cast members in a rectangular format. As we begin our monthly Zoom meetings, each member pops into view like a Brady kid, and we fit snugly into our triple-line grid.Here's the Story . . . is our first compilation of the writing that emerged from our Zoom meetings since 2020 at an online course called "Writing about Your Mom without Guilt," for ...

A novel inspired by a true story of survival.Esfir Manevich is a young Jewish girl who lives in the Polish town of Kobrin in 1936. Facing antisemitism in public school, Esfir moves in with her charming aunt who runs a boardinghouse in the bustling city of Brest. Being younger than the other boarders, Esfir struggles to find a place in her new life, all the while worrying about her diminishing role in the family she left behind.As the years pass, Esfir exper...

Anita Rappaport is dogged by the question: Did you have the life you wanted?Life begins for Anita in 1968 when she graduates from college, leaves her family home in Brooklyn, and moves to Greenwich Village, stepping into the revolutionary heyday of her times. Against the turbulent backdrop of racially charged school strikes, the Stonewall Inn and Attica uprisings, and the nascent feminist movement, Anita grapples with gang violence, job restrictions, gender stereot...

Haunted by her grandmother's Old World stories and bigger-than-life persona, Andrea Simon undertook a spiritual search for her lost family. Her sojourn, a quest for truth, gave her tragic answers.On a group tour of ancestral Jewish homeland sites that had been crushed in the Holocaust, she makes a riveting detour to her grandmother's village of Volchin, in what is now Belarus, where the last known family members had lived. There, she followed the trail of the death march taken by t...

This autoethnographic account of the author’s Japanese as a second language learning trajectory is an important and unique addition to diary studies in SLA and applied linguistics qualitative research circles. In-depth ethnographic details and introspective commentary are skilfully interwoven throughout Simon-Maeda’s narrative of her experiences as an American expatriate who arrived in Japan in 1975 – the starting point of her being and becoming a speaker of Japanese. The book joins the re...

Haunted by her grandmother's Old World stories and bigger-than-life persona, Andrea Simon undertook a spiritual search for her lost family. Her sojourn, a quest for truth, gave her tragic answers.On a group tour of ancestral Jewish homeland sites that had been crushed in the Holocaust, she makes a riveting detour to her grandmother's village of Volchin, in what is now Belarus, where the last known family members had lived. There, she followed the trail of the death march taken by t...