May 29, 2009

Today, May 29, marks 70 years since my mother and her family arrived in New York, completing their winding flight out of Mussolini’s Italy between 1938 and 1939. It is also six days short of one year since she died, and it is with these events in mind that I traveled down to Manhattan’s Pier 88, an updated version of the long, multileveled rectangle reaching into the Hudson River from the end of West 48th Street, where the Arnsteins of Trieste arrived at 8:15 on what my mother always said was a miserably hot morning.