On a chilly Monday morning in late November, the sunlit patio outside Kip’s Toyland in the original Farmers Market was awash in anticipation. Reporters and city officials milled about, and passers-by with cameras hovered among the tables and chairs.
Elmore Kittower was 80 when he died in November 2007 at Silverado Senior Living, an assisted-living facility in Calabasas. His death was initially attributed to natural causes; at the time, a sheriff’s deputy told Kittower’s wife of 49 years, Rita, that her husband had “just stopped breathing.”
Birthdays with a zero have a special purchase on the imagination. Whether one turns 40 or 70, that zero marks a turning point, the end of an old decade and the beginning of a new one, a chance to take stock: what in Hebrew is called cheshbon ha-nefesh — literally, an accounting of your soul. And if that birthday takes place in Israel, where you once lived for years — and where you might have stayed, had you chosen to — you have a formula for cascading, competing visions of what was and what might have been.
Jazz composer, cellist and pianist Fred Katz performed during a retrospective of his career at the Skirball Cultural Center on Feb. 20. Honored on the occasion of his 92nd birthday, Katz was joined by his son, flutist Hyman Katz, bassist Richard Simon and saxophonist Dave Koz, as well as the Flying Pisanos, John and Jeanne Pisano.
Innovation has been the Jewish response to societal change and spiritual longin
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