We live on Manhattan’s Upper East Side several blocks from the renown 92nd St Y, and for decades the Y has been an important part of our lives. Shortly after we moved into the city my husband joined the Y and swam regularly in its olympic-size pool. I joined the Y’s Poetry Center and heard celebrated poets and writers reading from their works – memorably among them Bernard Malamud, Michael Ondaatje, Anne Enright, George Saunders, Tom Stoppard, and the amazing Toni Morrison...
My beautiful and glamorous great-aunt Miriam Elias lived a rather scandalous life, or so goes the family legend! Miriam was born in 1897 in Kamenets Podolski, Ukraine, a small village near Odessa. Her village, she once told us, was very much like the fictional shtetl Anatevka immortalized in Fiddler on the Roof. In fact her father was the village rabbi and like Tevya in Fiddler he had five daughters. Miriam was the adored youngest of those five Elias sisters, and my paternal...
My father Arthur was born in 1912 in the Catskill town of Liberty, NY some years after his folks, my grandparents Esther and Sam, had emigrated to the States from Ukraine. At first they settled among other Eastern European Jews in New York’s lower eastside where my grandfather worked as a cutter in a garment district sweatshop. But Sam developed emphysema and was advised to leave the city for the cleaner air in the country. And so they resettled in the Catskills in a small town that...
For years I’ve shopped in two neighborhood supermarkets – Gristedes and Key Food – both a few blocks from my apartment and across the street from each other. Although New York is often thought of as an unfriendly place where people live in isolation and anonymity, we New Yorkers know that’s simply not true. For most of us our neighborhoods are like small towns, and we know our neighbors, our postmen, our local merchants – and certainly the managers of our...
I’ve written before about my grandmother Esther who ran a small hotel in the Catskills. (See My Heart Remembers My Grandmother’s Hotel and Hotel Kittens. Esther was a wonderful cook and baker turning out meals for hundreds of guests at the hotel from Memorial to Labor Day. She had a staff of course, but she was always in the kitchen herself instructing, supervising, and tasting everything before it was served to the guests. Then after the season when we were all back in the...
Welcome to my blog World Thru Brown Eyes! Enjoy the read and please leave a comment and tell me how this old world looks thru YOUR eyes!
