Ania watches the boy run toward her. In his hands he holds a box big enough for a pair of shoes. It is the Czaykowski boy, isn’t it? She grew up with his mother, and their mothers were children together in wartime.  But maybe this is another child. They all look the same now, with their buzz cuts, their summer shorts and T-shirts with American slogans. The boy’s reads: Madonna World Tour.

              He stands in front of her, saying something about a hole he dug in the back field.

              “Calmly,” she tells him. “Let me see what you have.”

They sit at the corner of the square, on the stoop of the house a few doors from Ania’s mother’s. The boy hands her the box. As she looks through its contents, he tells her his story in a high breathless voice.

From The Girl Who Stole Everything

She walks down Abbott and marvels at how much has changed in the last few years.  Wall murals.  Whoever thought these streets would spawn wall murals?  One is of a stenciled girl with blunt-cut yellow hair.  She blows fluff from the head of a dandelion.  Above it is a banner promoting “all-new concrete homes.”  Here come the new neighbours.  Once upon a time the locals were punks like herself, social workers, down-and-outers, and cops.

From The Girl Who Stole Everything

My grandfather arrived in Canada at Quebec, then crossed the country by train to join his brother in Vancouver.  There he stayed through the end of 1931, when he returned by train to the prairies, to his first Canadian job and prairie home, at Dysart, in the vicinity of the Qu’Appelle Valley and the old Hudson Bay outposts at Fort Qu’Appelle and Fort Ellice, in south central Saskatchewan. . . .

       His arrival, as part of the grand project of sending European settlers west, was belated.

From Ten Pictures: An Immigration Story for Our Time

The temptation was terrible.  Norman Flax sat at his desk overlooking Seventh Avenue.  The night behind the window turned the glass into a mirror in which he saw himself, along with Lola who stood naked behind him, holding in each hand a newly peeled lichee nut, two wet ivory balls like tantalizing pearls in her palms.  A Flaxian simile if ever there was one!

From Sex, Skyscrapers, and Standard Yiddish