by Carolyn Kraus
On a warm and windy July morning, we were headed south on the Partisan Highway out of Minsk, Belarus. Marina, the friend of a Jewish Belarusian expatriate I knew back home in Detroit, was nervous at the wheel of the little twenty-year–old Soviet-built Moskveech she’d just learned to drive, its doors wired shut [...]

by Marcia DeSanctis
Two women, one skirt, and an untold story.
The first time I met Maria Konstantinovna, she was wearing a black leather skirt. It was Italian, brand new, and it was mine.
Masha, as I would come to know her, was a dejournaya in Moscow. Women like her sat on every floor in every hotel [...]

A Journey Down the Colorado River with Captain John Wesley Powell
by Michael Shapiro
Our boats are four in number. Three are built of oak, stanch and firm (with) water-tight cabins.… These will buoy the boats should the waves roll them over in rough water. The fourth is made of pine…built for fast rowing.… We take with [...]

by Tawni Vee Waters
There’s bones on the beach. There’s ashes in the jar.
Ghosts in the air laughing at fools in the bar.
But somewhere inside, this river don’t run to the sea no more.
Give me a sign, amigo, can you tell me,
Did you go down laughing when you finally fell?
“Ashes of San Miguel,” by Roger [...]

by Kevin McCaughey
It was a mistake, finishing that bottle of Kagor.  But with no heat and no lights, no TNT all night movies, there wasn’t much to do, except wait for spring.
But that was last night.  This morning, outside my apartment block, the bare trees clump with snow, and the potholes in the road are [...]

by Gina Briefs-Elgin
According to Hasidic tradition, thirty-six “saints” (lamed vavnik) are hidden in the world at all times, holding it together through their secret good deeds.  Disguised as socially marginal figurespeasants, porters, and homeless, nameless wanderersthey appear among strangers and, through their seemingly trivial actionsor even through nuisance they causebring about shifts in people’s perception [...]