“There isn’t an after party because I know pretty much everyone here,” composer David Amram announced at the end of his 80th birthday celebration at Symphony Space on November 11. “I figured that with 500 of you, plus your dates, plus the 60-piece orchestra, the rest of the performers and our families, we’d need Madison…
Crossposted From Under The Fig Tree For centuries, taking to the road has been the stuff of grand adventure and equally grand literature. From Benjamin of Tudela’s 12th century “Book of Travels” to Jack Kerouac’s 1957 “On the Road,” travel has been bound up with freedom and an enhanced sense of self. But what if…
Next month, the office of Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer will host a show in its gallery of work by Lynda Caspe. In addition to being a respected painter and sculptor, Caspe recently wrote to inform me that she is also the granddaughter of one of the Forverts’s first science editors, Dr. Abraham Caspe. Alana…
Last week, I posted the story of how the Forverts reunited Israeli writer Nava Semel’s family. What I didn’t know then — but do now, thanks to our archivist extraordinaire, Chana Pollack — is that Semel is the sister of folk-rock star Shlomo Artzi. Chana also passed on this great video of Artzi singing in…
From the mailbag: I just received a note from Israeli author and journalist Nava Semel. Ms. Semel was writing to alert us to the publication of her new book, “Israisland,” but she included a story that she rightly surmised might interest me. “My American grandfather found out that his abandoned son survived the Holocaust through…
I received a lovely note today from Dov Burt Levy, a columnist for the Jewish Journal North of Boston, who passed along the review he wrote of “A Living Lens.” Readers should, of course, peruse the whole piece, but there’s a lovely tidbit at the end that I can’t help but highlighting: Because the Jewish…
From the mailbag: “Dear Ms. Newhouse: I recently received a phone call from a family friend that he had received a copy of A Living Lens as a gift,” wrote Anne Feferman of South Bend, Ind. “To his astonishment, he found a picture of my father, Henry Feferman, on page 234. In the photo, he…
This might be my all-time favorite story from the book tour. During the Q&A session in Virginia Beach a woman in the back of the room motioned to me. “I just wanted to thank you for a lovely presentation, and to tell you that I brought my aunt with me today” — at this, the…
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