Category: Family
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More book promotion
We seem to have had some success getting coverage from local TV and print news outlets. Here’s a front-page story in the Charlottesville Daily Progress. And here’s a short piece from Philadelphia’s Jewish Exponent. Local TV news outlets also produced short spots: Here’s one from Philadelphia’s 6ABC and a second from Charlottesville’s NBC29.
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Aharon Pick’s Diary
Here’s what I’ve been up to: As a young man, my grandfather had a friend named Aharon Pick. The two of them collaborated on a project to collect Yiddish folksongs in and around their hometown, Keidan, in Lithuania. My grandfather emigrated to the U.S. in 1904; Aharon Pick went to France, where he graduated from…
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Dr. Golden Hands
The piece triggered a powerful memory for me from June, 1999: My dad, then aged 79, was in Columbia-Presbyterian, being operated on for a life-threatening condition called aortic stenosis;
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Covid thoughts
When my children were growing up, I noticed that, no matter what else I was doing, a small part of my brain was constantly occupied with a single question: Like a constant radio signal, or background hum, sporadically heard but always there. “Is it safe enough?” Not simply “Is it safe?” because of course there…
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B. Cassel
My grandfather, Boruch Chaim Cassel, was born in Keidan, then part of the Russian empire, in 1877, and arrived in New York in 1904. He had served as a clerk in the Russian army and worked as a bookkeeper in Riga, but his first business enterprise in the U.S. was a candy store. The photos…
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Unburying the past
From 1935 until his death in 1941, my grandfather, Boruch Chaim Cassel, edited a monthly bulletin called “The Keidaner,” a publication of his landsmanshaft, or immigrants’ club. The Keidaner Association of New York began in 1900, like all such groups, as a mutual-aid society. Its members, recently arrived in the U.S., helped each other find housing, jobs…
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The Keidaner Blog, v3.0
This is another shot at setting up a blog to accompany the Keidan website. Or rather, it was. I’ve now consolidated the site at keidaner.com . Please click or browse there to learn more. Thanks.
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Graveside
Kedainiai today is a town of about 25,000, situated near the geographical center of Lithuania, supported mainly by agriculture and ag-related processing. There’s a fertilizer plant, an ice-cream dairy and a number of cucumber-packing businesses. (Even in my grandfather’s day the town was famous for its cucumbers.) Sadly, though, for Jews like me, the most…
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*היימ–ארבעט
איך האָב ניט ליב זיך צו באַרימען מיט מיין יחוס, אָבער איך וואָלט פאָרט געוואָלט דערמאָנען, אַ דער זיידע מיינער איז געווען אַ שטיקל פאָלקלאָריסט. ניט קיין פּראָפעסיאָנעלער און דאָך אַ גאַנץ פעאיקער. סוף 19טן יאָרהונדערט, ווען די פּעטערבורגער פאָרשער – גינזבורג און מאַרעק – האָבן פאַרבעטן די פאָרשטייער פון דער אינטעלעגענץ זאָלן זיך פאַרבינדן מיטן פאָלק…
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Kedainiai
I came to Lithuania for two reasons. One was to revive my flagging Yiddish language skills. The other was to revisit Kedainiai, which I did this weekend. As some know, I have been obsessed with this place since about 1990, when I discovered my grandfather’s memoirs about his home town, called Keidan in Yiddish. As…
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