Sittin’ in the Back of My Memory: My Father and His Musical Commandments
by Genevieve Sachs

While I was growing up, my Jewish father could barely keep track of Hanukkah. When he would remember, the holiday would most likely be halfway through already and we probably wouldn’t have any candles. Therefore, at my mother’s behest and my father’s defenseless surrender, I landed in Catholic School, enduring plaid skirts and mass twice a week for the first thirteen years of my life. However my dad, Lloyd, was the one who passed down the religion that stuck. Not Judaism—although I definitely have his nose—but the religion instilled by growing up under a music critic’s roof.