The continuing humanitarian crisis in Ukraine is heartbreaking as millions flee their homes and we watch helplessly on the TV news. At the turn of the 20th century, with the Jewish influx of the time, both my maternal and paternal grandparents emigrated to the States from Eastern Europe, my father’s parents from Ukraine. They all came as young adults seeking opportunities for a better life and they studied and worked hard, and raised their children with a sense of security and an...
For years we had seltzer delivered by the case, and used it especially for our homemade egg creams. But now I have a Sodastream and make the seltzer myself, and when I do I think of Sammy. Our friends Gail and Jay, fellow New Yorkers and egg cream mavens, also had their seltzer delivered. Their deliveries were made by an elderly man named Sammy, and one day he announced he was retiring and someone else would take over his route. It happens our friends had long planned to leave...
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 East Side 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...
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!
