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In Claremont Boy:My New Hampshire Roots and the Gift of Memory, Joseph Steinfield shares humorous, insightful, and often poignant recollections spanning more than half a century. The author recalls what it was like to grow up as part of a small Jewish community in a New Hampshire mill town, but the book includes much more. Readers will meet, and perhaps recognize from their own lives, grandparents and other relatives from Eastern Europe; influential public school teachers; some public figures whom he has known, Julia Child among them; and a host of other fascinating people from New England and beyond, including a Hebrew-speaking Muslim from the Northern Caucasus Republic of Adygeya and a P.L.O. leader from Jericho in the West Bank.Originally written over several years for the Monadnock Ledger-Transcript of Peterborough, New Hampshire, these essays are united by the author’s sense of irony and the unexpected.