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“What my father saw in those early days was the part of Islam that reflects love and mercy. What he didn’t see, what he perhaps has never yet allowed himself to see, is the other side of Islam.”
― Son of Hamas: A Gripping Account of Terror, Betrayal, Political Intrigue, and Unthinkable Choices
― Son of Hamas: A Gripping Account of Terror, Betrayal, Political Intrigue, and Unthinkable Choices
“There was one pharmacist in town, a Polish man. He was a friend of my father. I risked my life to go to him for medicine. Two, three times a week, I took off my armband and went. If the Germans would have seen me they would have shot me. I told the pharmacist I couldn’t pay, I had no money. He said, “Miriam, take it and go.”
― Miriam's Kitchen: A Memoir
― Miriam's Kitchen: A Memoir
“In 1942, somebody came back to our village from Treblinka. His name was Spivak, he escaped by hiding in a wagon full of clothing. He described what was going on there, and said he got crazy from what he had seen. We didn’t believe him, we didn’t believe in the crematoria. We thought he was a madman telling an unbelievable tale. How could such a thing be happening in our world, our modern world?”
― Miriam's Kitchen: A Memoir
― Miriam's Kitchen: A Memoir
“I knew that my parents were civil rights partisans. I was proud of the night my father had spent in jail in the 1950s, arrested and charged with “inciting to riot.” He and a buddy had stood on a front porch in a white part of town, trying to protect the new black homeowners within from a rock-throwing mob on the lawn. It seemed the Jewish thing to do.”
― Miriam's Kitchen: A Memoir
― Miriam's Kitchen: A Memoir
“Being oppressed doesn’t make people hate oppression.” This was my father’s tart take on things. “It only makes them know they don’t want to be the ones to be oppressed.” The sad part was, that Jews and blacks were lumped together in everyone else’s worst jokes. There was a black-Jewish link through time in Detroit. Every generation of Jews had its signature high school. Within their echoing halls and funky locker rooms, every half generation had what passed for integration, but was in fact transition from white to black. Still it was contact, sometimes powerful. All my life in Detroit I knew black aficionados of Jewish culture and vice versa—Pentecostal grandmothers who would only buy kosher meat, black teenagers who knew the right Yiddish word, countless Jews aspiring to soul music, and later, to nonwhite righteousness. Our neighborhood, a cauldron of instability, produced many a crossover confection.”
― Miriam's Kitchen: A Memoir
― Miriam's Kitchen: A Memoir
Robin Lieberman’s 2025 Year in Books
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