\”It\’s an attempt at a bit of nostalgia,\” said Abe Glazer (Haaren High School, \’49) as he shuffled into a courtyard ringed with banners identifying high schools — DeWitt Clinton, Erasmus Hall High, New Dorp — where former bobby-soxers sat with Shofar hot dogs or lined up at a vintage Carvel Ice Cream cart as a sextet of alumni/musicians whomped out big band sounds.
Katchor said he doesn\’t think there is a message to his comics — just a model that people can contemplate. \”It should send you back into the world looking at the world in some more subtle way,\” he said. \”It\’s a lesson in how to look at the world.\”
The Lower East Side first captured Katchor\’s imagination at a young age. Although he grew up in Brooklyn, he often went to the Jewish immigrant neighborhood with his parents.
Lucette Lagnado, an award-winning investigative reporter for The Wall Street Journal, portrays her father and the cosmopolitan Cairo he loved and had to flee in 1963 when life became exceedingly difficult for the Jews, in the decade after King Farouk\’s fall and Gamal Abdel Nasser\’s ascent to power.
The death of Rabbi Moses Teitelbaum, spiritual leader of the Satmar Chasidic sect, marks more than the passing of a revered Torah sage. It also signals the conclusive passage of his community from Europe to America, a process that first began nearly 60 years ago.
Chaim is — or was — a Skver Chasid, born and raised in the ultra-Orthodox enclave of New Square, N.Y. His world until recently was Torah, family and a close-knit community.
But now he\’s entering the secular world.
Chasidic Williamsburg, Roosevelt Island and Long Island City are easily navigable by bicycle, but given New York\’s frenetic pace, you might prefer an expert take you there.
A traffic sign with the words, \”Leaving Brooklyn Oy Vey!\” went up on the Williamsburg Bridge from Brooklyn into Manhattan.
Johnny Childs, blues musician, has come a long way from his old life as an ultra-Orthodox hoodlum. He started off in Brooklyn as Yonah Krohn, the unruly third child in a family of 10, who would sometimes briefly steal the fancy cars outside synagogues and take them for joy rides. He left home when he was 12 because his parents didn\’t want him corrupting his younger siblings, and at 14, while in a group home, his life gained focus after he discovered the dulcet strains of blues music.
Oh where, oh where did my single friends go? Seems the chicks in my clique are all dating, married or hauling around gargantuan diamonds.
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