In this collection of linked stories, the three figures at the center are a mother, father and son who leave Riga, Latvia, for Toronto, Canada. The stories are told from the point of view of the son, Mark Berman, who observes everything and helps interpret the New World for his parents.
Film composer Elmer Bernstein, who died last week at the age of 82, was born in New York, the son of immigrants from Ukraine and the Austro-Hungarian empire.
The three A\’s in \”Natasha\” are filled in by tiny stylized Matryoshka dolls, the traditional Russian stacking dolls, on the book jacket of David Bezmozgis\’ radiant debut (Farrar Straus and Giroux, $18).
In this collection of linked stories, the three figures at the center are a mother, father and son who leave Riga, Latvia, for Toronto, Canada. The stories are told from the point of view of the son, Mark Berman, who observes everything and helps interpret the New World for his parents.
\”I\’ve been working at the Century Plaza for three years. I\’ve had only a 44-cent raise, and I have two children. It\’s hard to support a family with this salary,\” hotel worker Sonya Lopez told a crowd in Roxbury Park at the Progressive Jewish Alliance\’s (PJA) Aug. 8 event, \”Justice in the Park,\” to educate groups on the hotel workers\’ position.
Since their extended contract expired June 1, unionized workers at nine Los Angeles hotels have been embroiled in a struggle with hotel management over new terms. Aside from a battle over wages and other benefits, the main sticking point between the two groups is the length of the contract.
Most of the workers are low-wage earners, starting at about $11 an hour, and many are recent immigrants.
For someone wandering the cobblestone streets of Mexico City\’s Historic Center, where the sound of the cathedral bells fills the air and the streets have names like Jesus Maria, it\’s hard to imagine that this neighborhood was once the heart of the country\’s Jewish community.
If the controversy pumps up \”Heart,\” its Jewish filmmaker, Louis Schwartzberg, isn\’t taking advantage.
Clifford Odets burst onto Broadway in 1935, when three plays by the 29-year-old actor-writer — "Waiting for Lefty," "Awake and Sing" and "Paradise Lost" — opened in the same year.
Barbara Boyle has come full circle. When she first entered UCLA in 1957, she was one of four female law students in a class of 140.
On a recent trip to Manhattan, I traveled to the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, which I\’d heard about from friends in Los Angeles. The core of the museum is a restored 19th- century tenement house, which was a second point of landing, after Ellis Island, for a mixture of Italians, Germans and Eastern European and Sephardic Jews who made the hard crossing to America in search of better lives.
When Holocaust survivor and Los Angeles real estate developer Jona Goldrich wanted to hire security consultants and guards for his vast network of Southern California apartment buildings, he hired Israelis.
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