Objects of Love and Regret: A Brooklyn Story

An award-winning historian and museum curator tells the story of his Jewish immigrant family by lovingly reconstructing its dramatic encounters with the memory-filled objects of ordinary life.

At a pushcart stall in East New York, Brooklyn, in the spring of 1934, eighteen-year-old Sarah Schwartz bought her mother, Shenka, a green, wooden-handled bottle opener. Decades later, Sarah would tear up telling her son Richard, “Your bubbe always worked so hard. Twenty cents, it cost me.”

How could th...