Sy Safransky

All The Difference

Money

Money, or, as Karl Marx’s mother puts it, “If Karl, instead of writing a lot about capital, had made a lot of it . . . it would have been much better.”

From The Kitchen

Become A Friend Of The SUN

Sy’s New York Diary: Amazing Flesh

I read, in the newspaper, about a man who is dragged from his car, knifed repeatedly for the few dollars in his wallet, and left bleeding in the gutter. My mother says her friends don’t go out at night. It’s an old story, old as the city’s tired and dour expression, old as the dry and wrinkled hands of a man trying to remember better days and remembering nothing but bone.

The Nothing Poems

Chewing It Over

Yom Kippur. The Jewish Day of Atonement. Along with my family, I used to fast, on this holy day, to expiate my sins, to assure that God would mercifully grant me yet one more year, during which, along with my family, I might sit every night before the TV, eating enough fruit and cookies to feed the whole block.

American Cheese

American cheese on white bread. Dry and joyless. Wholly unsatisfying yet, as a bus station refreshment, wholly appropriate. The bread is without flavor or soul, edible foam rubber, hardly the staff of life. The cheese is mostly chemical. But we are far from the farm.

The Traveler Returns: Home, More Or Less, At Last

Going home, as if home were still a possibility, or, like those other shadowy and relative values of our age — love, honesty, rationality ­ — nothing more than a momentary echo of something past, and nearly forgotten, a smudge on the map, a torn page from the history book, when families stayed put, when the heart was forever, when politicians were statesmen, when faith was an arbiter at the edge of learning rather than a substitute for reason.

Spring