Sarah Shapiro is the author most recently of An Audience of One, and other stories [Mosaica Press/Feldheim] from which All the Way Home is excerpted; and is editor of All of Our Lives: An Anthology of Contemporary Jewish Writing.
by Sarah Shapiro
How a survivor of the atom bomb stopped hating the pilot who flew the plane.
Being accosted by a missionary of happiness only served to deepen my gloom.
Am I incapable of thinking the unthinkable?
When giving doesn’t come naturally.
On being a tourist in the land of the disabled.
Even the terrifying enlightenment bestowed by Shigeko couldn't teach me that we're most human when we're most divine.
Gone are Iran, and Gaza, and Syria. All out of sight, out of mind, for one night and one day.
Was it only in my imagination that I was smarter than my father?
I've carried an idea of him in my mind. Who, for him, was the young girl with scorn in her eyes?
It wasn't really a bomb, don't worry. You are safe. We were safe. Then we laughed.
When I first heard "the word" in my hometown.
A Seder in Bergen-Belsen.
You're happy, aren't you?
We'd lost Mommy and Daddy; we didn't want to lose each other.
I wished that somehow they had known how to make me feel included, that cold and rainy Sukkot night, rather than ostracized.
What is the film "March of the Penguins" really about? A penguin speaks out.
My parents succeeded in creating a wonderful Christmas - yet inside me something was amiss.
We were in an old world together, that's for sure, but not the one they expected.
Why did our family, like American Jewish families everywhere, recognize Passover as the one thing we would never forget?
Death has never been an infrequent occurrence. But I wasn't in the know.
How can we get free of the petty tyrannies of our own female vanity?
Anger, which can work so powerfully against happiness, is the very tool we've been given to get a handle on our invisible, elusive inner selves.
It's not the unconventional weapons I'm getting ready for.
When the doctor delivered the news, we were abashed and afraid. How much time did we have?
The world is divided into two kinds of people: those who fear getting older and those who do not.
An evening's encounter with a handicapped couple overturns misconceptions that have crippled one woman over a lifetime.
On a bus in Jerusalem, all eyes followed the girl who suddenly broke down and cried.
Raising happy children sometimes depends only on a kind word and a moment's extra attention.
I was a Jewish kid who didn't know what it meant to be Jewish, who was painfully, earnestly trying to fit in by concealing the Jewishness I knew nothing about.
Appreciating the immense impact of those little words we utter.
Something was missing, which turned out to be myself
How six words transformed my world.
It's no accident that we should be repeatedly compelled to explain our presence, to have to figure out what we're doing here.
The metamorphosis of Ahuvah Gray, a black American who was once a Christian minister and is now an Orthodox Jew.
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