“A PLACE CALLED HOME: A MEMOIR” by David Ambroz (Legacy Lit, 384 pages, $30).
David Ambroz’s gorgeous new memoir, “A Place Called Home,” begins in Manhattan at Christmas. He and his mom and two older siblings are trudging through the streets on a bitterly cold night, trying to find a place to sleep, trying not to be assaulted, trying not to starve.
Ambroz is 5 at the time. He and his family are homeless. It’s the only life he’s known.
“The Midtown windows glow,” he writes, “each one a framed fantasy.”
“On the fringes of this shiny holiday wonderland, in the dark alcoves and corners of the night, are people like us, passing like ghosts around and through the bright, clean tourists,” he continues. “We drift in circles, making home everywhere and nowhere. We hunker down in the colorless crevices of the city, in the gray shadows of gray buildings where the gray snow is piled; we are gray people fading to nothing.”