“I began researching this book in Los Angeles, as a UCLA/Mellon Fellow. For the opportunity to read Sholem Aleichem on the Santa Monica boardwalk (and have ‘Vos makht a yid’ shouted at me by a roller-skating passerby), my thanks…” –from the Acknowledgements section, The Worlds of Sholem Aleichem by Jeremy Dauber. ++++ This is not […]
Hebrew
“Watching” football at the Yale Club before there was television
Courtesy of Project Gutenberg, here is Robert Benchley‘s essay on “watching” football at the Club where the play-by-play is announced by a member reading aloud the latest telegram. http://www.robertbenchley.org/oat/index.htm This esssay appeared in Benchley’s book Love Conquers All , published Printed October, 1922. Note 1. On personal preference: We are Penn State. Note 2. Thanks to my […]
My mother’s Thanksgiving story and my Thanksgiving letter
Let us start with my mother. My mother Miriam told me [when I was a freshman at Druid Hills High School in Decatur, Georgia in 1961] of her attempt to convince her Aunt Marcia (Tanta Masha) to have a Thanksgiving celebration in 1933 when my mother was eight years old. Tanta Masha, married to Sol […]
A 7 year-old eulogy of a friend from first grade
[I miss my friend Lee. Certainly, this posting exists for remembering old friends especially one of my classmates at the Hebrew Academy of Miami Beach where Lee was voted most likely to become Secretary of State. Flamboyantly arrested and taken out of Manhattan’s flagship Brooks Brothers store in handcuffs for embezzlement to support substance abuse, […]
Travel barriers limit lives of those with disabilities
The following is my June, 2010 column From Where I Sit for Voices of Central Pennsylvania: “Are you really my son?” my 84-year-old mother, who suffers from dementia, asks. Six weeks ago my mother, Dr. Miriam Pell Schmerler, stopped answering the telephone by herself. Our weekly calls were models of the bizarre, with my combining […]