Category: History
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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 memoir has been translated
The project that began in 2020 to translate the Holocaust memoir written by my grandfather’s childhood friend, Aharon Pick, has come to fruition. Indiana University Press published the English version, using Pick’s original title, “Notes from the Valley of Slaughter.” It is available from the publisher or via Amazon. Here is the publisher’s website with…
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A 50-year civil war?
Jill Lepore argues in The New Yorker that the Kent State shootings, of which today is the 50-year anniversary, followed by those at Jackson State in Mississippi, followed by the “Hard Hat Riot” in New York (in which construction workers beat up student antiwar protesters) began a civil war that continues today, with Trump’s shock…
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Brassed Off
I’ve been a Jules Feiffer fan for as long as I can remember. To my 1960s teenage mind, his cartoons and animations put him squarely in that olympian world of hip, intellectual Greenwich Village. He was in a pantheon that included comics like Mort Sahl, Lenny Bruce and Nichols and May, and publications like the…
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The Joy(?) of Yiddish
Yiddish humor, it’s often said, is about laughing to keep the darkness away. I’m sure I’m not the first to make this connection, which is funny (in the classic Yiddish manner) but requires explanation. (How can a joke be funny if you have to explain it? I don’t know; ask a comedian.) First, you need…
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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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Postscript: Berlin
My month in Vilnius was followed by a few touristic days in Berlin. For American children in the 1950s, this may have been the first non-U.S. city to enter our consciousness, via newsreels, cartoons and the general sense that WWII was still very much with us. For Jewish children, moreover, this was Mordor – the seat…
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Vilna, Vilna
Before leaving Vilnius, some random thoughts and images. We were invited the other day to the final match of a basketball tournament featuring the Maccabi Tel Aviv junior team and a local sports academy. It was a spirited contest, with some surprising 3-point shooting by both teams, but Maccabi ran away with it in the final…
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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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