In these stories readers will meet, come to know, and often be surprised by high-achieving upper-class academics, seemingly conservative educators brought low by greed and lust, children of the Holocaust whose lives depended on youth-developed skills of cheating and cruelty, and a drug-addicted street person with life-long confusion of personal identity. This book of four short stories and a memoir is based on the author's vast memories of people and places he has known in his eight decades of life so far. In a touching memoir about the house where he spent his childhood the author sets family history against a vivid background of decades of urban development. Drawing on sixty years as a professional educator and psychologist, as well as having lived among middle class professionals as neighbors, Merle Fischlowitz's stories illuminate the inner and outer worlds of the astounding variety of people he has known.
