What Strikes My Fancy

I chose this template because it looks to me right out of the Lower East Side.

Whether that’s really where it was taken of not, that’s where it is for me.

My dad was born in that neighborhood.  His folks were both Jewish Russian immigrants, who met in New York.  Theirs was such a tight-knit community that my dad never even learned to speak English till he went to school.

And the irony of it, is that one block over in one direction was Little Italy and one block the other way was Chinatown.

And those neighborhoods were little microcosms of their home countries as well.

My grandmother used to get the Jewish newspapers delivered to her home right to the day she died.  She spoke (some) English but according to my dad she was a very educated and literate woman in Yiddish, which , to my regret, I never learned.

My grandmother passed away more than 30 years ago now, and  I find it sad that that entire culture is disappearing from Earth.

In fact, one of the liabilities of our Internet age is the homogeniety it is creating culturally.

But whose to say, really, which will be better in the long run…