Looking Back: January 6, 2012

100 Years Ago in the Forward

Not long ago, a number of rooms in a hotel in Norfolk, Va., were broken into and thousands of dollars worth of jewelry was stolen. Police fingered one Mendel Rosenthal, who was in possession of some of the stolen goods. After Rosenthal was arrested, his brother, Charles, tried to spring him from prison. The police got the idea that Charles was also in on the robbery, so they decided to arrest him, too, but by then he was on a boat to New York. Police were waiting for him when he arrived. After an investigation, it was discovered that Charles Rosenthal had been arrested numerous times in New York and Chicago.

75 Years Ago in the Forward

Stone-throwing Arabs attacked a bus carrying 72 members of the newly formed Palestine Symphony Orchestra as it made its way through Shkhem (as Nablus is known in Hebrew). Many of the bus’s windows were smashed, but none of the musicians was injured. Founded recently by well-known Jewish violin player Bronislaw Huberman, the orchestra has been led by famed conductor Arturo Toscanini. The previous week, Toscanini and the orchestra played in Jerusalem, a performance that was broadcast on the radio here in America. Toscanini was conducting a performance for farmers in the Jezreel Valley and was not on the bus when it was attacked.

50 Years Ago in the Forward

The following is an excerpt from Isaac Bashevis Singer’s “Shadow on the Hudson,” a full-length novel that was serialized in the paper:

During the evening, guests had gathered in Borekh, or Boris, Makover’s new apartment. Boris Makover had recently moved to a new apartment house that reminded him of one in Warsaw. It had a huge courtyard with two large, gated entrances, one on Broadway and the other on West End Avenue. The studio, as his daughter, Anna, called it, had a window that looked out onto the courtyard and when Boris Makover looked out of it, it seemed to him that he could be in Warsaw. It was always quiet and there was a little garden surrounded by a spiked-fence. During the day, the sunlight climbed up the opposite wall. Children played and ran on the asphalt below as birds chirped and flew from roof to roof. Smoke puffed out of a chimney. The only thing that was missing was a peddler carrying a sack of second-hand goods or even a magician with a parrot and an organ.

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