It’s curious how smells, more than sights and sounds, are the Madeleine that unlocks the pleasures and torments of childhood. The whiff of a jar of peanut butter recalls for me an American treat my Poland-raised mother occasionally prepared. The musty odor of a pile of prayer shawls brings back the yellowed tallis my father wrapped himself in whenever he went to shul, with its mystical evocation of the divine. The acrid aroma of a strong cigarette recalls a magnetic elfin refugee friend of my parents, and the hacking cough until he died. And the cloyingly sweet fragrance of a box of crayons brings back my early school days in the early 1950s in a yeshiva on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
Source: The Smell of Crayons: Memories of an Upper West Side Childhood – Tablet Magazine
