“Out, Out, Brief Candle!”
I grew up in a multigenerational two-family home in Queens, New York City, during the 1960s and Seventies. Every weekend, my grandparents prepared a feast for the whole family. Among them were my mother’s younger brother, Marvin, and his wife, Inge, an artist who’d immigrated from Germany.
They were childless, but Marvin delighted in his four nieces, including my sister and me. A professor of Shakespearean literature, he read Macbeth and King Lear to us when we were young, along with the more child-friendly works of Lewis Carroll.