Featured Books
Growing Up Different
The author recounts his family’s journey from leaving New York city’s West Side with his immigrant parents to a house in Fairview, New Jersey owned by his grandmother in search of a better education and life for him and his brother. He recounts the games he played with his neighborhood friends — Meatball and Boxball — urban variants of baseball. Through these games, free of any adult involvement or rules, he learned how to win and also how to lose. Summers were spent on a farm in the Catskills with his mother and brother and a host of other characters looking to escape the summer heat — a place he calls an immigrant version of the Hamptons. When he was 12, he and his father traveled to their ancestral home on Cyprus to visit his aging grandmother and find a husband for his spinster aunt — a story with comical results. He chronicles the changes that occurred in Fairview between the time they moved there until he went off to college in Massachusetts – and again later when his own son moved from New York City back to Fairview.