fauxklore

Errands: I have been been absurdly distracted on all attempts to get caught up on things here. The first half of August was just errands, with dealing with things like updating insurance (because the company I had used for years decided to pull out of Virginia) and trying to make some plans for where to focus some decluttering efforts. It doesn’t help that a couple of friends call me to chat when they are trying to procrastinate on doing their housework.

Local Theatre Going - Nine: The only halfway interesting thing I accomplished in the first half of August was seeing Nine (the Maury Yeston musical) at the Kennedy Center as part of the Broadway Center Stage series, which is a scaled down minimally staged series. I like the score for the most part, though there are some songs that annoy me. (Fortunately, one of the ones I really dislike, “The Germans at the Spa,” was omitted altogether. And my favorite song from the show, “My Husband Makes Movies,” was done well.) The two most interesting things to note were that: 1) nearly every time I go to the Kennedy Center, I run into somebody I know. In this case, there were 5 women from my Chavurah there. And, 2: I had decided to go last minute and got a rush ticket at the box office for $38.50 for a center orchestra seat, which was a great deal given that the list price was over $100.

Book Club: Oh, wait, I did also have a Crones & Tomes book club meeting. We discussed Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver. I think I had an advantage reading it since I’m familiar with Appalachian Virginia and a late friend was Melungeon so I felt like I knew more about the cultural milieu than some of the other people in the group. On the other hand, I’ve never read David Copperfield (and I am not really big on Dickens.) Overall, I found it interesting, but it was too long and my wrists hurt getting through it.

IAJGS Conference: Later in August, I took the train up to Philadelphia to go to the International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies conference. This was supposed to start with going to a baseball game (Phillies vs. Nationals) but I had a stupid accident. The conference was at the Sheraton, but I had decided to spend Saturday night at the Marriott, which was a bit cheaper. I got out of a taxi, grabbed my backpack and was putting it on, when I somehow stepped backwards onto the curb and tripped and fell, injuring my back. This was very painful. It was also not helped by an alarm going off at the hotel at 12:30 a.m., though that proved to be nothing major (aside from sleep deprivation). Anyway, I moved to the Sheraton in the morning, which was more convenient for the actual conference sessions. I didn’t think
I was badly injured, so I managed to limp through the conference.

As for the conference itself, here’s a brief list of presentations I went to:

Monday


• The Mess of New York City Vital Records - I was already pretty familiar with the work that Reclaim the Records has been doing, but this was interesting.
  
  
• Researching Small Landsmanshaftn Synagogues - this should have been interesting, but there wasn’t really enough detail.
  
  
• JRI-Poland Luncheon / JRI-Poland Annual Meeting. The luncheon talk by Andrew Carroll about his activities collecting war letters was particularly intriguing, though not especially relevant for me. I also liked that they’d seated people by what part of Poland their families were from, so I could chat with other people who had roots in Lomza Guberniya.
  
  
• BOF: Vinius District Research Group - good general discussion
  
  
• Landscape of Dreams: Jewish Genealogy in Canada - I’m still trying to figure out some details on how my great-uncle got to Canada (and then on to crossing the border to Buffalo).
  
  
• JewishGen Annual Meeting - mostly various awards. I was pleased to see that they named a new award series after Dick Plotz (who was a friend from both the puzzle world and the genealogy world).
  
  
• The Ron Arons Game Show Night - Jewpardy! is always a fun activity, but I was exhausted halfway through.
  

Tuesday

I’d planned to go on (and paid for) a morning walking tour, but my back was not in any condition for that, alas.


• The Importance of Memory in Building a Jewish future - Mostly an overview of the holdings at YIVO
  
  
• Litvak SIG Meeting - the annual catch-up of what is new.
  
  
• Holocaust Compensation and the United Restitution Organization - Since I am fairly sure both my father and grandfather got reparations money, I need to spend some time delving into these records
  
  
• Genealogy Death Match - This is another game show, featuring two people competing over whose records go further back. Old people like me are at an obvious disadvantage.
  
  

Wednesday

I had again planned on another walking tour, but was still not up for that. Sigh.


• Entering Eretz Israel: Getting Around Government Limitations - This covered legal possibilities during both the Ottoman Empire and the Britihs Mandate. I was particularly interested in learning about religious grounds for immigration, since I’ve been told my maternal grandfather studied at a yeshiva in Petah Tikva.
  
  
• When Traditional Genealogy and Genetic Genealogy Collide - I think everyone gets frustrated over people who expect either one path or the other to “cousin hunting” to be the be all and end all to solving genealogy mysteries. Unfortunately, this talk didn’t really come to an answer.
  
  
• BOF: Tracing the Tribe - Tracing the Tribe is definitely one of the better Jewish Genealogy groups on Facebook. This was an interesting and amusing talk by one of the moderators of it.
  
  
• Jewish American Life Beyond New York: The Industrial Removal Office, 1901-1917 - Most of this was focused on the East Coast, Midwest, and Great Plains, so was not particularly relevant for me, though there was some discussion of cities like Atlanta (where a large branch of my father’s family settled). There was, alas, not really any discussion of the Pacific Northwest, where my earliest immigrants from Lithuania to America went. Still, there are some sources I should check out.
  
  
• Gala Banquet - Arthur Kurzweil was the banquet speaker. He spoke well enough but didn’t really say anything I didn’t already know.
  
  

Thursday


• Letters Have Wings: Digitizing, Annotating, and Exhibiting Family Letters - I was volunteering as a session manager for this session. This had some good material about how to preserve and document family letters.
  
  
• Jewish Gen Belarus Research Division Meeting / Jewish Gen Belarus Research Division Luncheon - There was some material about the history of Belarus in light of the 1905 Russian revolution, but not a lot on good resources.
  
  
• Mentoring - I spent a couple of hours helping people find some Lithuanian data. I always enjoy doing this, since I benefited a lot from other people helping me when I first started doing genealogy.
  
  

Overall, the conference was reasonably useful though being injured was annoying. I traveled onward to New York on Friday. I will write about that in the next entry.

I already wrote about RhinoStock. So what else has been going on in May?

I had my usual Jewish genealogy mentoring session on the first Wednesday of the month. It was pretty productive because I was able to help someone find some of her ancestors in the 1897 All Russia Census.

I went to Ottawa Storytellers for the second time. It’s really a nice group of people and I especially like that they have a couple who do ballads. For what it’s worth, I told “Berel the Baker,” which is my most popular Chelm story.

We had a Grimm Keepers meeting to talk about The Three Ravens. Actually, the number of ravens varies depending on which version you look at. There are a lot of Grimm stories involving people (usually brothers) who get turned into birds and having to get rescued by a sister. In this case, the sister loses the chicken bone she is supposed to use to get into the glass mountains where her raven brothers live and cuts off a finger instead. My comment was, “well, haven’t you ever heard of a skeleton key?” Also, it might actually be fun to imagine a Grimm aviary.

Over the weekend, I went to two movies as part of the JxJ Festival. This is what used to be two separate Jewish festivals - one for films and one for music. Saturday night was The Catskills in Bethesda, which was a bit of a pain because of Metro track work and local road work walking from the metro to the theatre. Despite that, I did enjoy this documentary. I particularly liked that they included material about bungalow colonies, as well as the resort hotels. And they didn’t focus excessively on the Borscht Belt comedians at the resorts. The scenery they showed was quite attractive, too. Overall, it brought back some good memories. We didn’t go for the whole summer, though my grandparents did have a bungalow at Rabinowitz’s Bungalow Colony in Parksville. But we did go for long weekends every now and then to various hotels. I remember playing miniature golf and pinball with other teenagers and rowing on the lake at the Homowack.

On Sunday, I went to see Shari and Lamb Chop which was at the Smithsonian American History Museum. Someone had asked Mallory Lewis (Shari’s daughter) if Lamb Chop was at the Smithsonian and she explained that the Smithsonian only has retired puppets, but Lamb Chop still has an active career. (One of the museum staff members did say they are getting a Lamb Chop puppet next year.) Anyway, the movie was both informative and entertaining. For example, I’d had no idea that Shari’s father had been the official magician of New York City, using the name Peter Pan the Magic Man. They emphasized that she did use her puppets as a way to communicate, not only to entertain, with Mr. Bearly a means to discuss relationship issues with her husband, Jeremy Tarcher. But really the main point was how amazingly talented Shari Lewis was, e.g. being able to voice two puppets (Lamb Chop and Charlie Horse) while also singing. And, of course, Lamb Chop was just delightful. At one point late in her career, Shari learned Japanese. When she toured Japan, people would come up to her and say, “Lamb Chop speaks very good Japanese. You, not so much.” I’ll have to see if I can get this movie on DVD to play at the annual Shari Lewis Memorial Lamb Chop Dinner, which I host during National Ventriloquism Week. (Yes, really.) By the way, another ventriloquist was particularly big in our family. My mother had known Paul Winchell while she was growing up and one of my favorite family photos is of her, as a teenager, at Jerry Mahoney’s birthday party.

Incidentally, I knew a guy in college who was a ventriloquist. His roommates started tossing his dummy around in their dorm room one night, and he got hit in the eye. They took him to the infirmary and he explained, "a dummy hit me in the eye." And the nurse told him that name calling wasn't going to help. (This is an absolutely true story.)

As for this week, my Crones and Tomes book club met on Monday night to talk about Crying in H-Mart by Michelle Zauner. I think most of us liked the book, though some aspects of it were pretty gut wrenching. The idea of using food as a basis for a memoir was appealing, though it would never work for me since my mother just wasn’t really interested in food. (She would have happily eaten boiled chicken for supper every night of her life.) Anyway, it was an interesting book and an interesting discussion.

On Tuesday afternoon, I flew to Indianapolis. I had a ticket to a minor league baseball game. Unfortunately, the weather did not cooperate and the game was postponed. Oh, well, the best laid plans of mice and Miriam ... I can use the ticket for another game, but I have to figure out when I can get back to Indianapolis. On the plus side, I ran into a former colleague on the plane. And I had a particularly delicious Asian chicken salad for dinner, (I flew back on Wednesday morning. Yes, that is pretty ridiculous.)

And tonight was playing Code Names with friends over zoom.

I’ve also made good progress on making travel arrangements, both for the trip I am leaving for on Monday and for a trip in July. I still have planning for August to put in place.

Once I fall behind, it always gets tempting to procrastinate further. So, come on, let me buckle down and write an actual entry.

Celebrity Death Watch: Hinton Battle was a Tony Award winning actor and dancer. Carl Weathers was an actor, best known for playing Apollo Creed in the first four Rocky movies. John Walker was a co-founder of Autodesk, a CAD software company. Wayne Kramer was the lead guitarist of MC5. Vittorio Emanuele, Prince of Naples, was the only son of the last king of Italy. Aston "Family Man" Barrett led Bob Marley’s backing band. Sir Anthony Epstein was one of the discoverers of the Epstein-Barr virus. Anthony George designed the flag of Grenada. Henry Fambrough had been the last surviving member of The Spinners. Jim Hannan pitched for the Washington Senators in the 1960’s. William Post invented Pop-Tarts. Bob Moore founded Bob’s Red Mill, an organic grain company. Jack Higgins was an editorial cartoonist for the Chicago Sun-Times. Bob Edwards was a journalist and radio host, primarily on NPR. Randy Sparks founded the New Chirsty Minstrels. Rabbi Jules Harlow was one of the editors of Siddur Sim Shalom, a popular Conservative Jewish prayer book. Benjamin Lanzarote wrote music for television shows. Reuben Jackson was a poet and jazz historian. Marc Pachter directed the National Portrait Gallery from 2000 to 2007. Brian Stableford was a science fiction writer. Ramona Fradon was a comic book artist. Jacob Rothschild was a banker, duh. Richard Lewis was a comedian. Iris Apfel was a flamboyant fashion designer. Juli Lynne Charlot created the poodle skirt.

Chita Rivera was an actress, singer, and dancer. She won Tony Awards for her performances in The Rink and The Kiss of the Spider Woman as well as receiving a Lifetime Achievement Tony in 2018. She was the first Latino American to win a Kennedy Center Honor (in 2002) and received a Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2009. Her most iconic roles included Anita in West Side Story and Velma in Chicago. The last time I saw her perform live was a production of the Kander and Ebb musical adaptation of The Visit at Signature Theatre.

Jean Malarie was one of the first two men to reach the North Geomagnetic Pole. (The other was an Inuk man named Kutsikitsoq.) He was a strong advocate for the rights of Arctic minorities. He wa son my ghoul pool list and earned me 19 points.

Toby Keith was a country singer. I had a colleague back around 2002 who played his song “I Love This Bar” constantly. I retaliated with Tuvan throat singing.

Sieji Ozawa conducted the Boston Symphony Orchestra for many years. I first saw him conduct in the mid-1970’s when I went to Tanglewood several times on excursions from the NSF biochemistry program I spent a summer at. He was a very animated and energetic conductor and always interesting to watch. And he got bonus points for being a Red Sox fan. Which brings me to this story, which I should probably apologize for (but won’t):

Seiji was conducting Beethoven's 9th during a critical time in Boston. The Red Sox were fighting for a post-season slot and everyone - including the members of the orchestra - was excited. Well, there's a long section towards the end of that piece where the bass players have no music to play and they took to slipping across the street to a bar to watch the ball game. To make sure they'd get back in time , they tied a string to the page in the music a little while before they needed to return. They strung that to the bar so that they could feel a tug when Seiji turned the page.
One evening, the game was particularly exciting and the beer was flowing more freely than usual, so they missed the tug on the string and got back late. Seiji was furious. And justifiably so...

It was the bottom of the 9th, the score was tied, and the basses were loaded.

Mojo Nixon performed music that was a cross between rockabilly and punk. His songs included “Elvis is Everywhere” and “Debbie Gibson is Pregnant with My Two-Headed Love Child.” The late 1980’s were interesting times.

Alexei Navally was the opposition leader fighting against Vladimir Putin’s regime. I really hope you didn’t need me to tell you that.

Brian Mulroney was the prime minister of Canada from 1984-1993 and participated in the development of NAFTA.


Non-Celebrity Death Watch: Millie Loeb died in July 2023, but I didn’t find out until late January. Back in the late 1980’s I took a couple of writing classes through UCLA extension. One of those was Millie’s class, Our Stories, Ourselves. The women in that class became close as we wrote stories about our life experiences and we went on to continue for another semester outside of UCLA, meeting at one another’s homes. The work I did in that class led to some of the personal stories I still tell. In short, Millie was a great influence on my life and I’ll miss her.


Speaking of Storytelling: I have told my story about my sense of direction at two story swaps since the show at the beginning of February. I think that the last time (at the Community Storytellers zoom swap), it was pretty much where I want it to be.

I’m not performing in the Women’s Storytelling Festival this year, but I am volunteering and will be emceeing on Sunday morning, March 17th. Tickets are still available. For more info and to buy tickets see The Women’s Storytelling Festival Web Page. Note that, while we’d love to see you in Fairfax, Virginia, the festival is being live streamed so you can watch from home. And the recordings will be available through April 21st.


Assorted Medical Stuff: I had some catching up to do on routine medical stuff (and one less routine but inevitable item). So I had a regular dental appointment. The same week, I had a bone density scan, which was a bit uncomfortable because I don’t normally lie flat ton my back on a hard table. Alas, I have some bone density loss in my spine, though my neck and hip are fine. A few days later came my mammogram, which was negative. Finally, the non-routine matter, was an ophthalmologist appointment to prepare for cataract surgery. I've now got that scheduled for mid-June. I’m somewhat of a nervous wreck about it because I made the dubious decision to read the whole write-up of potential complications. By the way, I have an appointment with my primary care doctor this Friday to go over the usual test results and get a couple of more vaccines because I’m old.


TCC Book Club: The travel book of the month was I Married Adventure by Osa Johnson. She was just a teenager when she married Martin Johnson and they set off to photograph people and animals in the South Pacific and, later, in Africa. She certainly lived an interesting and unconventional life. The curator of the Osa and Martin Johnson Safari Museum in Kansas joined our meeting and it definitely sounds like a place I need to get to one of these days.


Travel & Adventure Show: Cindy and I went to the Travel and Adventure Show on the last weekend in February. I’d gotten the tickets free. I found info on a couple of things I’m interested in but, as usual, there were far too many things like time shares, cruises on megaships, and other things I have no interest in. On the plus side, I did also manage to resupply my stock of tote bags.


Genealogy Meetings: The February meeting re: Apple Users and Jewish Genealogy was particularly interesting because we had a lot of good discussion about organizing photos. Our local Jewish genealogy society meeting had a presentation on researching relatives in the UK. The speaker was very good, but the subject wasn’t particularly relevant to my family.

The bigger genealogy event I went to was RootsTech, but that deserves its a separate write-up.

I think this will get me caught up on everything up until this month.

I’ve been using the same format for my year in review entries for several years now. It seems to work. Note that I took off the Volksmarch category this time since it’s been a couple of years since I managed to actually do anything there.

2023 started out stressful with mail being stolen, including a check which was washed and used fraudulently and a credit card which had to be replaced. It all got resolved, but I could have lived without the stress. There was a lot of stress later in the year, with the incompetence of the person at the local Social Security office who sat on my Medicare application for over two months without doing anything. That took way too many phone calls to get resolved. And, of course, there was the whole Middle East situation to make 2023 the Age of Anxiety.

Fortunately, things were otherwise good during the year.

Books: I read 53 books over the year. 39 of those were fiction, 3 were poetry, and the rest were nonfiction. Only 3 were rereads.

Favorites included Our Ancestors Did Not Breathe This Air (a poetry collection by Muslim women at MIT), Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozu Adichie, The Ghostwriter by Alessandra Torre, and The Caxton Private Lending Library and Book Depository by John Connolly. I also read 6 novels by Dick Francis, whose books provide a reliable antidote to ones in which not enough happens to keep me satisfied. Favorite non-fiction was The Best Strangers in the World by Ari Shapiro. Least favorite book was Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen.

I got rid of 39 books and have at least another 33 ready to go out.

In addition to my longstanding book club (called READ for Read, Enjoy, And Discuss), I joined another book club, Crones and Tomes, which was started by a friend from the puzzle world.

Other book events included the Moby Dick Marathon in New Bedford, Massachusetts, which was an amazing experience, and a talk by Ari Shapiro at Sixth and I.

Ghoul Pool: I finished 4th out of 14 players, with 220 points. People I scored on were Naomi Replanski, Steve Harrell, Bob Barker, Tony Bennett, Al Jaffee, John Goodenough, Robert Solow, Daniel Ellsberg, Sandra Day O’Connor, James L. Buckley, W. Nicholas Hitchon, and David Oreck.

Travel: In January, I went to New Bedford, Massachusetts for the Moby Dick Marathon. In February, I went to Tucson, which included going to Saguaro National Park and Biosphere 2, as well as winning some money at a casino. March included a trip to New York City to go to the symphony and the theatre and visit with a high school friend. April’s travel was to Connecticut for the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament.

In May I took a river cruise, which included going to the Kentucky Derby. The Derby arrangements were kind of a fiasco, but the stops at various small towns were a lot more interesting than I expected.

June took me to Svalbard, which featured amazing scenery, though the wildlife (or, more accurately, lack thereof) was disappointing. This was somewhere I’d wanted to go to forever, so I am glad to have had the opportunity.

In July, I went to Montreal for the NPL con. That also included eating a lot of Montreal Jewish food and following in the footsteps of Leonard Cohen. Later in the month, I leveraged off a genealogy conference in London to take a trip to Ireland (including a day trip to Belfast) and the Isle of Man. That included fulfilling a life list item by having a beer at the South Pole Inn in Anascaul. After the conference, I did a few more things in London, including side trips to Canterbury and to Ipswich and Sutton Hoo. Soon after I got back, I took a quick trip to New York City for Lollapuzzoola and theatre going.

LoserFest was in Philadelphia in September. Highlights included the Masonic Temple and the Magic Gardens.

In October, I took a quick trip to San Antonio for the annular solar eclipse, which was awesome. While I was there, I also did a day trip to the Hill Country, where I saw several sites associated with Lyndon B. Johnson, as well as visiting the town of Fredericksburg. Later in the month I went to Boston, mostly to go to a concert by Jonathan Richman.

I’m not sure if taking a day trip to Harrisonburg, Virginia in November counts as travel. But my trip to French Polynesia (Austral Islands and Aranui cruise to the Marquesas) definitely does.

Virtual travel talks I went to included one on Jewish Barbados and a few Travelers’ Century Club zoom sessions. There were also a few in-person TCC meetings.

Puzzles: I participated once again in the MIT Mystery Hunt as part of Halibut That Bass. I think the team worked particularly well together, but we had some issues with the way the hunt was structured, which resulted in our seeing only about half of the puzzles.

I was disappointed in my performance in the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament. I finished solidly in the middle of the pack and I wasn’t surprised to have trouble with Puzzle 5, but I left a blank square in Puzzle 3, which was sheer carelessness. I did worse at Lollapuzzoola 16 in August, because I failed to completely read parts of some clues in Puzzle 5 there. I blame jet lag from my trip just before that event.

As I mentioned above, I went to the National Puzzlers’ League Con in Montreal. Highlights included a couple of games by Cute Mage, as well as Rasa’s over the weekend cryptic.


Genealogy: I continued to volunteer as the Subject Matter Expert for a Jewish Genealogy Society of Greater Washington Litvak Special Interest Group. I also went to several JGSGW virtual meetings. And, of course, I went to the IAJGS conference in London at the end of July / beginning of August. Aside from several interesting talks, the highlight of that was meeting a distant cousin.

Baseball: I went to a little bit of a Nationals game in May, but it got rained out. In September I went to the new Texas Rangers stadium (Globe Life Field), putting me back at having been to a game at every Major League Ballpark. I also went to two minor league ballparks to see the Aberdeen Ironbirds and the Fredericksburg Nationals.

Culture: I’m not a big television watcher but I kept Apple TV+ long enough to watch Schmigadoon and Schmicago, both of which were tremendous fun for musical theatre geeks like me.

In terms of movies, I saw 18 overall, 4 of which were in theaters, with the rest on airplanes. Favorites were A Man Called Otto, In the Heights, Blackberry, Cocaine Bear, Searching for Sugar Man, Barbie, and Remembering Gene Wilder. Most disappointing was Weird: The Al Yancovic Story.

I went to 5 Gilbert and Sullivan operettas at the G&S International Festival in England, with the best production being of Ruddigore. I went to two other operas, both by Jeanine Tesori (Blue and Grounded). I also saw two ballets and one modern dance performance, with the ballet of The Crucible being the most satisfying. As far as classical music goes, I saw the National Symphony Orchestra twice and was privileged to see Michael Tilson Thomas conduct the New York Philharmonic. The only popular music concert I went to was one by Jonathan Richman, who is always wonderful.

I saw 14 plays and 9 musicals, assuming I counted correctly. Favorite plays were All Things Equal (about Ruth Bader Ginsburg), The Lifespan of a Fact at Keegan Theatre, Selling Kabul at Signature Theatre, and The Pillowman, which is a Martin McDonagh play I saw in London. I also loved The Enigmatist, which is a mixture of comedy. magic, and puzzles and, hence, I consider sui generis. Top musicals were In the Heights at Next Stop Theatre Company, Signature Theatre’s production of Pacific Overtures. and Shucked and Kimberly Akimbo on Broadway.

Storytelling: I went to several storytelling shows, including one by my Grimmkeepers group. I performed in two shows for Artists Standing Strong Together, and also told at the C&O Canal Visitor Center with Voices in the Glen, at the Washington Folk Festival, and in a Better Said Than Done show at the Stagecoach Theatre. Some other shows I particularly enjoyed were Ingrid Nixon’s show about Shackleton and several of the performances at the National Storytelling Festival. And, of course, the Women’s Storytelling Festival (which I also emceed at) os always a highlight of the year.

On a rather different note, the Grimmkeepers discussions about the Grimm fairy tales continue to be enlightening and enriching.

Museums and Art: I went to 32 museums over the year. Highlights included the New Bedford Glass Museum, the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, two exhibitions of miniatures (the Mini Time Machine Museum in Tucson and the Small is Beautiful exhibit in New York), the MIT Museum, the Virginia Quilt Museum, and the Museum of Failure. I also really enjoyed seeing the Book of Kells, the Manx Museum, and Sutton Hoo during my travels in July. My absolute favorite for the year was the Museum of Broadway.


Other Stuff: On New Year’s Day, my friend, Cindy, and I went to the Winter Lantern Festival at Tyson’s, which was impressive.

I went to various Loser events, including the post-Post Loser Party, the Flushes, LoserFest. I should probably count Poetry and Punchlines (a poetry reading associated with Light, which is a magazine of light verse) as a Loser event, too.

My crafting group changed to meeting on-line every other Thursday and in person at one members house on the weeks in between. I make it when I can. Similarly, I occasionally managed to get to my other (mostly) knitting group, which meets at the police station twice a month.

I went to a virtual organizing conference in September, which was moderately useful.

I played board games a few times a week, when I was home. Yes, sometimes I was home.

Goals: So how did I do on my 2023 goals? I went through maybe 10% of the photos from my parents and realized I have no idea where I put the slides, so I’ll give myself a 10% there. I did go to some sort of lecture or other formal educational event, either in person or on-line, every month, so I get 100% there. I get full credit (i.e. 100%) for taking 4 international trips. I finished only 1 craft project, so only get 33% there, though I did make progress on two others. I read 53 books, out of a goal of 75, so get 71% there. I get 100% credit for going to three new (to me) ballparks. I made it to at least one museum each month so get 100% on that goal. I only went to one national park, so get 33% on that goal. And I averaged significantly less than a half hour every day on housework, so I’ll give myself 10% there. Averaging things out, I’ll give myself a 62% on the year, which is not great but not terrible either.

Which brings me to goals for 2024:

• Circumnavigate the globe going westward. The backstory is that way back in 2000, I did an eastward circumnavigation, from Los Angeles to Russia via Germany by plane, overland through Siberia to Mongolia and to China, and back to Los Angeles by plane. I’ve got ideas for how I want to do the westward circle.
  
  
• Go to at least 3 national parks.
  
  
• Clean out my saved files of genealogy related emails.
  
  
• Read 80 books with a stretch goal of 125.
  
  
• Finish organizing my bedroom.
  
  
• Finish 3 afghans.
  
  
• Find and sort through my parents’ slides.
  
  
• Go to games at at least 4 AAA ballparks.
  
  
• Exercise for at least 20 minutes at least 3 times a week, with a stretch goal of at least 30 minutes at least 4 times a week.
  
  

The annual conference of the International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies (IAJGS) was held in London, England from July 30th through August 3rd, 2023. I’ve gone to the virtual conference the past couple of years, so I was very excited to be able to attend in person. In addition to going to several talks, I volunteered as a mentor, session host, and on the hospitality desk.

The conference was at the Park Plaza Westminster Bridge Hotel. It was easy enough to take the tube to Waterloo Station, but my map application managed to mislead me from there to the hotel, leading me around St Thomas Hospital. Well, yes, I could use the steps, but my luggage got heavier and heavier. I did get to the hotel, eventually, where I settled into my room and went down to the hospitality desk for my volunteer shift there. Mostly that involved giving out conference bags and maps of the hotel facilities, but some people wanted travel advice. Having just been to Ireland proved helpful when one person asked about going there as a post-conference trip!

The opening session started with a brief talk by Robert Voss, the Lord Lieutenant of Hertfordshire, who brought greetings from King Charles and talked a little about his genealogy story. There is a lord lieutenant for each county (essentially a personal representative of the monarch) and he is the only Jewish one. He’s a child of Holocaust refugees and is a patron of the Jewish Genealogical Society of Great Britain. He was a fairly entertaining speaker

The main keynote speaker was Dr. Blaine Betting who talked about The Adventures and Lessons of 20 Years of Genetic Genealogy. His DNA experiences were a lot more dramatic than mine have been, including discovering an unknown half-brother and half-sister. His talk was interesting, but I can’t say I learned anything. However, as I was leaving the room, a guy came over to me and asked if I was researching Schwartzbard from Ostrow Mazowiecka, Poland. See, the conference had a family finder feature and the smart way to use it is to search the towns you’re interesting in, instead of focusing on names. Then you can see if you have any names in common. We were able to sit down later on and found that we do have connections. And he just sent me some information files that I need to find time to go through.


I started Monday with a talk by by Alan Shuchat on History of Jewish Migration, the Diaspora, and Changing Natonal Borders. The most interesting part of this involved showing the growth (and decline) of the Jewish population in several cities over the years. I can’t say that I learned a lot that I didn’t know, but it’s always good to refresh your knowledge.

After that I went to Aleksandrs Feigmanis’s talk on Sources for Jewish Genealogical Rsearch in Lithuania and Latvia (archives, web, books). I knew about some of the archives, but he talked about a number of other types of records and how to use them. For example, for residence books (mostly in Latvia) you need to start with finding the address and working from there. He also talked about school and university files, directories, the balticgen.com cemetery database (which includes all Jewish cemeteries in Latvia), and several other resources. One interesting thing that may be relevant to my Briskin family is that there was regular transport of lumber from Polotsk (now in Belarus) to Daugavpils, Latvia. A lot of his material looks useful to me, but he wasn’t a particularly dynamic speaker.

Next up was the JRI-Poland luncheon. They’re reworking their website and everyone needs new user accounts on the new system. The speaker was Professort Antony Polonsky who talked about The Jews in Poland and Russia. This was another long list of what sorts of records are available and, while it is probably useful, it was rather dull to listen to.

The final talk I went to that day was Digital Traces: Creating a Personal Digital Archive While Insuring Your Privacy by Elana Brach and Ron Arons. This was lively and interactive. They talked about various options for things like backups and cloud storage and managing your on-line and off-line identity. One thing that had never occurred to me is the need for a digital asset clause in your will. I also liked the reminder on Keeping Found Things Found, i.e. documenting and following your own rules on file naming. As someone who struggles with organizing my research, this was a very useful session.

After that, I had some mentoring time set up. The mentoring area had not been well[-publicized so few people showed up. I was able to help one person by explaining to her what a journeyman is. (It’s a status for a skilled worker, in between an apprentice and a master.) At least, I wasn’t entirely useless. I also spent some time comparing family trees with the guy I’d met the previous night. We discovered some connections and exchanged contact info for further research.


Tuesday was LitvakSIG day. However, the first presentation I went to that day was by Aviva “Sherlock” Cohn about Clued In: More Case Studies. She is an expert on photo analysis and went through 6 examples of her work, giving tips on how to identify people in photographs.

Then I went to a presentation on The Jews of Canada by Bill Gladstone. One potentially useful thing I learned is that the 1931 census is now available on Ancestry and Family Search. Ancestry also has Ontario Vital Records. (The reason these may be of use is that I know my grandfather’s younger brother came to the U.S. via Canada later in the 1930’s. But I don’t know when he went to Canada and how long he was there. I also don’t know if he married in Canada or Cuba, though I do know he was married when he crossed the border into Buffalo.) He discussed various other records that may be available. Unfortunately, with the exception of Montreal, naturalization records are available only to Canadian citizens. I also learned that there’s a museum at Pier 21 in Halifax, which was, essentially, the Canadian equivalent to Ellis Island. That sounds like it would be worth a visit.

There was a LitvakSig meeting, which was interesting for finding out what new records are coming up. That was followed by the LitvakSig luncheon. The speaker at that was Egle Bendikaite, who spoke on Inhabitant but not a Citizen; Citizen, but a Foreigner. This had to do with the various situations that people found themselves in during the interwar period in independent Lithuania. This was very relevant to my research because of the difficulties my great-great-grandfather, Simkha Fainstein, had getting his internal passport. A couple of other notes of interest: 1) permission to resume citizenship was more easily given to women and 2) “everything is possible until it turns out to be impossible.”

After that, Rhoda Miller gave a talk on Litvaks - Here, There, and Everywhere. Most of what she talked about was familiar to me, though I hadn’t really though about the impact of the 1848 cholera epidemic. Also, she mentioned transmigration from Lithuania to Latvia in the context of Courland, but left out the large number of Jews from the Zarasai region who went to Vitebsk Guberniya, particularly Daugavpils, Latvia.

The last presentation I went to was on Emigration from German Ports in the 19th and 20th Century - Causes, Conditions, and Certificates by Andrea Bentschneider. Some of the things that I learned were that: 1) Hamburg was considered friendlier to Jews than Bremen was, so was a more popular port, 2) Ancestry has departure lists from Hamburg for 1850-1934, except for World War I. Bremen passenger lists from 1920-1938 are available on their own website, 3) Hapag (a major shipping company) was Jewish owned, and 4) children born on a ship often had the name of the ship as part of their name.

I spent a couple of hours in the resource room with one of my mentees from my local JGS, helping her with some records from Jonava. I ended the day with Genealogy Death Match. This is a contest between two people to see who can do a better job of documenting their family going back several generations. It’s always interesting and fun to see what records people can find. I will note that younger people have an advantage, since they’re more likely to have at least two or three more generations who are well-documented. I also met somebody from Los Angeles with whom I have a mutual friend.


I started Wednesday with the BialyGen Sig meeting. This is a group for people with an interest in the Bialystok (Poland) region. Interestingly, there were several other people there with roots in Tykocin, which is where my Chlebiocky family is from. My main takeaway was that the group hasn’t really been active in several years and that there hasn’t been any attempt at translating records. However, there are notary records on genealogy indexer, so that would be worth a look.

The next presentation I went to was Standing Where They Stood by Caitlin Hollander Waas. She talked about her travels to ancestral places and emphasized the power of place and the value of google. The coolest story she had was finding a document related to her family that had been used as a bookmark in an archive.

After that I went to Alex Calzareth’s talk on Enhance Your Data Analysis Skills. He talked about several tools, e.g. Gigahex, Google Tables, and AirTable. Frankly, I didn’t really follow what he actually uses these tools for.

I had my final volunteer stint as a session manager for Judith Silver’s talk on Emigration and Identity: combining records from Brzeziny, Poland and Cardiff, Wales to track the emigration and dissemination of a family group. This mostly involved keeping track of timing while she talked. The talk itself had to do with things she learned from comparing Brzeziny lists of residents with UK census records. While the particular places are not relevant to my research, the basic concept is useful.

While there were a few presentations in the afternoon that I was interested in, I decided a nap was a better use of my time. I did make it to the banquet. Helen Fry gave a talk about German Jews who volunteered in the British military in WWII. This was based on her book, The King’s Most Loyal Enemy Aliens. It was reasonably interesting though not especially relevant to my research.


The conference ended Thursday morning. The last talk I went to (or, at least, the last one I took notes at) was Introduction to the Jacobi Papers by Emanuel (Ami) Elyasaf of the International Institute for Jewish Genealogy. Paul Jacobi devised a method for an “absolute generations scale” which counts backwards, rather than forwards so, for example if generation 1 is 1965-2050, generation 2 might be 1935-2020. Anyway, he documented 100 elite families from central and eastern Europe. These monographs (and other information) are available on the IIJG website. Since the papers focus on rich people and rabbinical families, they’re not likely to be very useful to someone like me whose ancestors were cucumber farmers, tailors, and so on, with the odd brewer or coffee merchant thrown in.


All in all, the conference was reasonably useful. And, of course, I came home with a long long list of things to do, including watching several other presentations once they’re available on-line. Next year’s conference is in Philadelphia, which is much less of a travel commitment. And 2025 will be in Fort Wayne, Indiana.

I still had about another week in England, so I’ll get back to writing travel posts next.

Moving on to last week, it was still pretty busy.

Apple Technology for Jewish Genealogy: I go to a monthly meeting for Jewish genealogists using Apple tech. This month we ended up talking mostly about AI. It hadn’t really occurred to me, but there may be some real potential for using some of the AI engines out there for translating documents. My to-do list re: genealogy keeps getting longer, but my have-done list remains stagnant.

Grimm Keepers: Our story this session was “All Kinds of Fur.” It’s got some creepy elements (involving incest, for example). But it also provides a good opportunity for discussion of some folktale tropes and some mythological bases for this, going back to Sumerian legend. (Marc wrote a note in the chat that read, “Jack and Jill climbed up the ziggurat to fetch a pail of daughter.) Tim has done extensive research on this story, which definitely helped the discussion. This group remains a valuable activity for me.

Needles and Crafts: My weekly crafting get-together continues, also. Basically, we talk about crafts and books and what have you while working on our various crafting projects. In my case, I am currently working on a Tunisian crochet afghan. If it weren’t for that group, I’d never get any needlework done.

All Things Equal: Cindy and I went to see this one-woman play, subtitled “The Life & Trials of Ruth Bader Ginsburg.” The play was written by Rupert Holmes. Michelle Azar played the title role ably, with several projections and film clips. It really felt like RBG herself was actually talking to the audience. The aspect of the play that interested me the most (probably because I wasn’t as familiar with it) was her repeated mentions of Erwin Griswold as her foil. As the dean of Harvard Law School, he’d asked her how she justified taking the place of a man - and he went on to swear her in to her Supreme Court seat. There was also an excellent sequence of her dissents as the court moved to the right. I do think Ginsburg made a huge mistake in not resigning during the Obama administration, which she attributed (in the play) to her confidence that Hillary Clinton would become the next president and pick her successor. But, anyway, the play (which was only one night) was worth seeing.

Incidentally, we ate at Ben’s Next Door beforehand. This is the more upscale adjunct to Ben’s Chili Bowl (which is the logical place to eat if you are going to the Lincoln Theatre and has good vegetarian chili.) The food and drink were good, but it was earsplittingly noisy. So I won’t be back there.

The Flushies: Saturday was The Flushies, the annual party / award ceremony for the (formerly Style) Invitational. The Washington Post may have killed the Invitational but it lives on (via Gene Weingarten’s substack page) and there were probably about 70 (maybe more?) losers there. Lots of interesting conversation, seeing people I knew and meeting some I didn’t, plus the usual sing-along to parody songs, and so on. My contribution to the potluck was quesadillas, by the way, because they’re quick and easy to make. All in all, it was a nice afternoon.

PixelBloom: On Sunday morning, Cindy and I went to Artechouse for PixelBloom. This is their annual tribute to D.C.’s cherry blossoms and this year’s edition was butterfly themed. There’s a 22 minute immersive presentation and two side rooms with interactive exhibits. For example, you can color butterfly wings and move your arms to flap the wings.



Another exhibit was called Blooming Strings. In this one, there was a row of transparent panels with branches and flower buds on them. As you walked back and forth, the flowers bloomed and butterflies appeared and flew around. There was also music playing. Here’s a short video. (I think you have to click through to flickr to play the video.)



And here’s a video clip from the main presentation, which we actually watched all the way through twice because it was so relaxing.



There was other interactive exhibits, that I haven’t written about because they’re harder to explain. Anyway, the whole thing was fun and was worth an hour or so.


JGSGW: Sunday afternoon’s Jewish Genealogical Society of Greater Washington meeting had a talk on Jews of Northern Virginia. It was focused on the earliest congregations in the region, most of which were in Alexandria. It also covered Jewish-owned businesses. It’s not particularly relevant to my genealogical research, but it was still worth going to.

Here’s a run-down on other things I’ve done so far this month, focused on the good things. (I’ll save the stressful stuff for another post, which will probably be a non-public one.) But first, an announcement of an upcoming event

Shameless Self-Promotion: I am going to be part of a show of an on-line storytelling show of Fractured Fairy Tales on Thursday February 9th at 8 p.m. Eastern time. Tickets and more information are available here. If you can’t make it live, it will be recorded and you can watch the replay.


Routine: I have a lot of standing meetings. Book Club is every 6 weeks. My Lithuanian Jewish genealogy mentoring session is monthly. I have a standing crafting get-together every Thursday afternoon. And I play board games with a couple of different groups regularly. I have another book club starting up, too.


Three Genealogy Things: I went to a genealogy talk last week specifically for grandchildren of Holocaust survivors. Since both my father and grandfather were survivors (of the Kaunas Ghetto and Dachau), I qualify as both a 2G and 3G. I don’t think I really learned anything new from the talk, but they sent out a good list of resources.

I submitted a proposal for a talk about Telling Family Stories at the IAJGS conference in London. I have no idea whether or not it will be accepted. I plan to go to the conference anyway, since it has been way too long since I have been to London.

And I got a reply from a cousin who I contacted a couple of years ago. Now I need to get back to her. I am hoping she has some info about my grandfather’s mother’s family.


Two Jews Walk Into a War: I went with my friend Cindy to this play at Theatre J last weekend, i.e. a week ago Saturday. The play is very loosely based on the actual story of the last two Jews in Afghanistan, who loathed each other. I am reasonably sure that neither of them was descended from a concentration camp survivor, however, since the Soviet Jews who came to Afghanistan in the 1930’s and 1940’s were from Central Asia. And they certainly would not have spoken any Yiddish. Nor was the klezmer music played between scenes at all appropriate. I can’t imagine why they didn’t even try to find something mizrahi to use.

On the plus side, much of the play was funny, albeit a bit cruder than I’d have preferred. The biggest plus was the actors. Bobby Smith and Sasha Olinick both gave excellent performances.

Bit of historical trivia is that after Ishaq Levin died and Zablon Simintov emigrated to Israel, it turned out that a distant cousin of Simintov’s, Tova Morandi was still living in Afghanistan. But she left (to Albania!) a month after he did.

Museum of Illusions: On Friday, Cindy and I went to the pop-up Museum of Illusions in downtown D.C. A lot of the exhibits are familiar optical illusions, e.g. things where two lines look different lengths but are the same or staring at something makes it seem to move and so on. But there are some fun interactive exhibits. You really need someone else there to take pictures of you playing with them.

For example, here is a picture taken from a short distance:




But, if the picture is taken from the right spot (marked on the floor), I turn into Edith Ann:




In some cases, you have to manipulate the photo, e.g. by rotating it to get the effect, as in this one:




And here I am, just beside myself because I’m playing cards with untrustworthy sorts:



Overall, it was a fun way to spend about 45 minutes, but it was pricy and rather more crowded than was optimal. The museum is there until late March if you want to check it out for yourself.


Post-Post Loser Party: This past Saturday night (i.e. a couple of days ago) was the annual Style Invitational Loser post-Holiday party. The WaPo may have dropped us, but Loserdom lives on and we’re continuing on Gene Weingarten’s substack page. There were about 75 people there and we ate and mingled before the obligatory sing-along of loser-written songs. Usually there’s a certain amount of topical (i.e. mostly political) humor in the songs, but this year’s were all focused on the Post having canceled the contest. Overall, I had a pretty good time.

Two Minor Triumphs: I got Redactle #287 in 1 guess. That falls in the category of things that are unlikely to happen ever again.

And, yesterday, I reached #1 in the Diamond League on Duolingo. So I’ve gotten all of the achievements except the ones for playing consecutive games. That satisfied my competitive spirit since I can reach that remaining achievement independent of what anyone else does.

First, a quick personal genealogy note. I got a hint from one of the genealogy websites which claims that my grandmother’s brother died in Auburn, California. The interesting thing is that the date of death given is what I now believe to be the death date (in Lithuania) of one of their sisters. I suspect that this confusion is related to a similar (fairly common) name and may have arisen from a cousin who is: a) not sufficiently skeptical and b) not entirely fluent in English. But it is still something I need to spend time looking at.


Now, for what I’ve been trying to write about for a while …

Back in August, I went to the International Association of Jewish Genealogy Societies conference. I wrote about that at the time. Everyone had two months to watch as many remaining presentations as they could find time for. Which was, of course, fewer than I wanted to given that I tend to be a bit, er, busy. Anyway, here is a run-down of the presentations I did manage to watch.

American Jewish History Through the Lens of Literature: Cookbooks. This talk, by Jonina Duker was interesting, though I am not sure how useful it is to my research. The key point was understanding how people lived and using cooking as a window into the lives of our female relatives. Jonina talked a lot about what makes food Jewish, e.g. foods that have particular ritual significance like dates and olives. She also discussed certain products being marketed to Jews, e.g. Crisco being advertised in Yiddish. She also talked a lot about the history of Jewish cookbooks, including several types, like community fundraisers and product promotions. I was interested to learn, for example, that Gold Medal Flour had a recipe contest in Yiddish in 1921.


Bubbie, Who Are You? Finding the Maiden Names in Your Family Tree: Janice M. Sellers talked about various sources for the names of female relatives who weren’t recorded in many family records in Europe. Those included things like funeral cards, scrapbooks, nameplates in books, and diaries. Some other records that may have maiden names listed include marriage license applications (which often have more information than the license itself), affidavits to address destroyed records, and newspaper announcements. She also suggested looking for all siblings. Other possibilities are probate records, guardianship records for property, and social security applications.


Discovering My Litvak Ancestry: David Ellis is well known in Lithuanian Jewish genealogy and his talk focused on how he identified 146 direct ancestors, including 48 from Lithuania. He emphasized collaboration with other researchers as being crucial. Other key takeaways were: 1) need to repeat searches periodically, 2) records may not be accurate, and 3) family given name patterns may be helpful, particularly for the period before people took on surnames. There wasn’t really anything new to me in this, but it would be helpful for beginners.


Citing Your Sources in Genealogical Research: Janice M. Sellers gave a very brief overview of various ways to attribute prior or unoriginal work to sources, including potential style guides to use. She emphasized consistency and completeness and noted that if you are being published, the publisher will tell you what style guide to use. This whole presentation was only 11 minutes long, by the way.


Dos Gesl: The Kheyders at the Center of East European Jewish Life: This was a really interesting talk by Dan Oren about Jewish education, primarily in Poland. “Kheyder” literally means “room” and was where children spent all day being taught the basics of Jewish religion and culture, starting at the age of 3 until about the age of 12 or 13. There were big changes in the 19th and 20th centuries, including government regulations requiring teachers to be credentialed, as well as teaching the local language. However, most of the Russian that children were taught was the national anthem and the names of the tsars. There were various types of schools, depending on social status, including home schooling and private kheyders, as well as the Tamud Torah for poor children. In som cases, students were taught one-on-one, sometimes by assistants, and spent the rest of their time playing.


Researching Argentinian Jewish Families: This was a panel discussion, led by Hatte Blejer and Yoni Khpchik. There was a lot of background about Jewish immigration to Argentina, starting in 1889-1912 with agricultural communities, although many of those immigrants eventually moved to the cities. What made this presentation useful was the discussion of available archives (including information on work in progress) and the pointer to a Facebook group which I have now joined I have some work I need to do.


Witnesses at Birth, Marriage and Death Records: An Often Neglected Tool in Genealogical Research: Thomas Furth discussed what he called “social based genealogy” vs. the more common “pedigree-based genealogy,” i.e. focusing on Family, Friends, Associates, and Neighbors. In short, witnesses on vital records could be synagogue officials, relatives, or business associates. He suggested using spreadsheets to track these relationships.


Were Your Family Members Telling the Truth? And Other Inaccuracies: Steve Stein’s presentation emphasized using the Genealogy Proof Standard as the key to resolving discrepancies. His basic tips were to: 1) Get as many records as you can, 2) Use original documents when possible, 3) Evaluate sources, 4) Interview many people, asking the same questions of multiple people, and 5) Re-search (i.e. search repeatedly to find newly available information). I don’t think he said anything I didn’t already know, but he organized his information well.


Utilize Indirect Evidence to Discuss and Prove Relationships: Sydney F. Cruise also emphasized the Genealogical Proof Standard. She talked about the need to understand sources, in terms of why, when, and where they were created, who wrote or created them, whether they could have been altered, and what knowledge sources had and what their motivation was. She also suggested creating spreadsheets to track documents with timelines and using those to find connections.


Testimonies Carved in Stone: This was a film about Alba Iulia. a town in the Transylvania region of Romania, and a project to document its cemetery. While it didn’t have any direct relevance to my research, I thought it was interesting and worth watching.


Genealogy Goes to the Movies: This was another film, consisting of genealogy-related film clips from various movies. It was definitely amusing, but I would have liked to have heard Jordan Auslander’s live session chat discussing it to see if there was more to it than the humor value.


Alien, Enemy, Declarant, Grief: The focus of Emily Garber’s presentation was changes in the naturalization process and their impact on what records exist (and what information is in them). Before 29 June 1906, everything was done in local courts, with no centralized record keeping. The Naturalization Act of 29 June 1906 (which was effective 17 September) federalized and standardized the process. There were later acts which impacted aliens who served in the military in World War I, as well as further changes in 1926 and 1929. She recommended keeping a timeline for the person whose naturalization you are investigating. She also noted the value of looking at manifest markings.


Finding the Missing Piece of the Puzzle: This was presented by Eli Rabinowitz, who met the rabbi at a synagogue in Talinn, Estonia, and was able to help find a connection between him and a woman who found out, due to DNA evidence, that her father was switched at birth. I remember reading about that story. The short version is that she thought she was Irish and DNA testing revealed she was half Jewish. Eventually, she found a DNA match that solved the puzzle.


Finally, there was a Jewish Genealogy Society of Greater Washington meeting on Sunday. It was a hybrid meeting and I managed to make it in person. They are closing their library for various reasons and had a number of books for sale. I picked up one on The Jewish Communities of Long Island (where I grew up) at a very good price. Anyway, the speaker talked about records (mostly, but not entirely Holocaust related) from Ukraine which are now on-line, but mostly remain unindexed, and showed some examples of using finding aids for them. While my family is not from Ukraine, I actually do have some interest in Ukrainian records because the Jews were expelled from Kaunas Guberniya (in Lithuania) during World War 1 and I know at least two cousins were born in Ukraine in 1916. Well, one was born in Crimea. He was not sure if there were any relevant records and also did not know if the record sets included Crimea. But he told me to email him and he’d look into it.

I am, as usual, behind on everything. Sigh.

Celebrity Death Watch: Marilyn Loden coined the term “glass ceiling.” Lamont Dozier wrote and/or produced a lot of Motown hits. Darryl Hunt played bass guitar for The Pogues. Olivia Newton-John was a singer and actress. Raymond Briggs wrote and illustrated British children’s books. Richard Caruso founded Integra LifeSciences, a successful manufacturer of artificial skin. Robyn Griggs acted in soap operas as a young adult. David Kay led American weapons inspection efforts in Iraq. Clayton Jacobson II developed the jet ski. John Wockenfuss played baseball, primarily for the Detroit Tigers. Tom Weisskopf was a golfer who won several PGA championships own the 1970’s. Jerry Allison was the drummer for The Crickets and wrote several songs, including “That’ll Be the Day” and “Peggy Sue.” Esther Cooper Jackson was a civil rights activist. Len Dawson was a football player, primarily for the Kansas City Chiefs. Kurt Gottfried cofounded the Union of Concerned Scientists. Roland Messier was the White House executive pastry chef from 1980 to 2004. Robert LuPone originated the role of Zach in A Chorus Line on Broadway and co-founded the MCC Theater, but was never as well known as his sister, Patti. Peter Eckersley was a cyber security activist. Frank Drake was an astronomer. Peter Straub wrote horror novels. Moon Landrieu was the mayor of New Orleans for most of the 1970’s. Earl J. Silbert was the first prosecutor in the Watergate case. Tina Ramirez founded Ballet Hispanico. Bernard Shaw was the lead news anchor for CNN for over 20 years. Rommy Hunt Revson invented the scrunchie. Lance Mackey was a four-time Iditarod champion. James Polshek was an architect, whose work included the Clinton Presidential Center and the Newseum. Lowry Mars co-founded Clear Channel Communications. Ramsey Lewis was a jazz pianist and composer. Ken Starr was a lawyer, probably best known for writing the Starr Report which led to the impeachment of Bill Clinton. Roxanne Lowit was a fashion photographer. Jean-Luc Goddard was a film director. Fred Franzia made cheap wine. Irene Pappas was an actress, probably best known for playing the widow in the film version of Zorba the Greek. Liam Holden was the last person sentenced to death in the UK, though his sentence was eventually commuted to life imprisonment and his conviction was overturned later in response to revelations about the torture used to extract his confession to killing a British soldier in Northern Ireland. Brian Binnie was one of the test pilots for SpaceShipOne, built by Scaled Composites. Nick Holonyak invented the red LED.


Norah Vincent died in early July, but her death was not publicly announced until mid-August. She was most famous for her book Salf-Made Man, in which she described her experiences living as a man for 18 months.

David McCullough was a historian. He won the Pulitzer prize for his books about Harry S Truman and John Adams.

Marc Lapadula taught film studies at Yale University. He also lectured as part of One Day University and I’d been to a couple of his lectures about significant American movies.

Anne Heche was an actress who died in a rather spectacular traffic accident. She was probably at least as well known for her relationship with Ellen DeGeneres. I was able to use one of my ghoul pool trades for her, so she earned me 32 points (including the 12 point uniqueness bonus, which really only worked due to some convenient timing on the trade).

Barry Boehm was the founding director of the Center for Systems and Software Engineeringg at USC. He was something of a fixture in software engineering and systems engineering circles, and did important work on cost modeling, models for software development, and systems engineering processes. I scribbled down various words of wisdom from him at numerous conferences over the years, including, “the standards have been tailored so much that the suit has become a vest.”

Lily Renee was a comic book artist. She escaped from Nazi-occupied Austria to England as a teenager, before coming to the United States and becoming one of the first women in the comics industry. She was also the subject of a book by Trina Robbins which revived interest in her career. She earned me 25 ghoul pool points, which includes the 12 point uniqueness bonus.

I hope you don’t really need me to tell you who Mikhail Gorbachev was. He presided over the break-up of the Soviet Union peacefully and got the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990.

Barbara Ehrenreich was a nonfiction writer, specializing in social issues. Her most famous book was Nickel and Dimed, which discusses trying to live on minimum wage jobs. I have been hearing the term “toxic positivity” quite a lot lately and a lot of her writing touches on that subject.

Marsha Hunt was pretty much the last actress of her generation left when she died at age 104. Her career was cut short by McCarthyism, leading her to become an activist. She earned me 14 ghoul pool points.

You really really don’t need me to tell you who Queen Elizabeth II was. For people of my generation, she was the one British monarch throughout our lives. I think the most interesting thing about her was her World War II service as a driver and mechanic. Whatever one might think of the monarchy, she fulfilled her role with dignity and grace. She earned me 20 ghoul pool points.

Non-Celebrity Death Watch: I only learned a week or so ago that Mort Rau died at the end of July. I knew him as spaceman on flyer talk and got to spend time with him at a few FT events, including OzFest. We had a mutual professional interest in space systems so had plenty to talk about. He was a nice guy and I’m sorry to see him join the ranks of FTers who’ve flown off into the sunset.

Baseball: I know the season isn’t actually over, but the Mets are the only team I follow who are still in it. The Nats were particularly pathetic, even worse than the Royals. (I follow the Royals because a guy from my home town used to pitch for them.) And I can’t even think about my Red Sox without distress, though they haven’t actually been eliminated from the wild card race yet.

National Book Festival: I spent the afternoon of September 3rd volunteering at the National Book Festival. They were a bit disorganized this year, sending out the info for the zoom training sessions rather last minute. And I got my email with my volunteer assignment early in the morning the day before the festival. That assignment turned out to be program distribution. I was stationed at the L Street South entrance to the Convention Center. People were surprisingly enthusiastic in their gratitude for being handed a program. Some people (mostly men) were astonished that the program was free. (As was the entire festival.) I was mostly able to direct people to where they wanted to go, but I did misdirect one person (in fact, one of my neighbors!) because it was still early and I had forgotten that, for some ungodly reason, the convention center map has north on the left. Standing for 5 hours was tiring, but I’m still glad I did it and I’ll do it again in future years, schedule permitting.

My Birthday / Storytelling Workshop: I’d had an early birthday celebration on the Friday night before my birthday, in the form of going out to my favorite Thai restaurant (Elephant Jumps in Falls Church) with a friend. Then on Sunday September 4th, I turned 64. I celebrated by going to a storytelling workshop (over zoom), having to do with tall tales and liars’ contests. Bi Lepp was the perfect person to lead this and it was a fun afternoon.

Getting Rid of Books: I made a used bookstore run on Friday the 9th, getting rid of 59 books and bringing home only 13 with my trade credit. (I still have 30 odd dollars of trade credit, however.) The next day I drove to Baltimore and donated 77 books to The Book Thing. There are still too many books in my house.

JGSGW: Tyler Ainbinder gave a very interesting talk about Jewish Immigrants in Urban America. He talked about several things that I hadn’t already known. For example, the Statue of Liberty was funded by French radicals who were protesting the monarchy. 1 in 100 immigrants were turned away at Ellis Island, generally for health reasons. When you see pictures of people climbing the stairs to the hall, that was a test to make sure their lungs and legs were healthy. One thing that struck most of us as weird was that immigrants had to answer that they did not have a job that they were going to. This was because of a concern that they would have accepted low pay, which would take jobs away from people already in America. I’ll take Things I Wouldn’t Have Imagined for $600, Alex.

The Usual: My usual routine includes lots of other things over zoom. I have a once a month session on Litvak (Lithuanian Jewish) research discussion with JGSGW, for which I am the primary Subject Matter Expert. I go to a crafts group on Thursdays, which provides for time to work on projects (an on-going cross-stitch in my case) and good conversation, always including books. The discussion group on Grimm’s Fairy Tales started up again with “The Handless Maiden,” a story that poses a number of difficulties. And I play games (mostly Code Names) with friends several nights a week. As I like to say, I am retired from work, not from life.

FT Dinner: I had dinner a week ago with a couple of Flyertalk people at Farmers Fishers Bakers in Georgetown. The restaurant is at Washington Harbor, which is always a bit of a pain in the neck since, while it isn’t terribly far from the Foggy Bottom metro station, part of the route is rather pedestrian unfriendly. Anyway, I had a nice cocktail called a Southside, which had gin, lemon, mint, and clementine bitters. My seared tuna was just okay, as it was a little overcooked. I also had coffee ice cream for dessert, which was fine. The service was so-so, which is my usual experience at Founding Farmers affiliated restaurants. But the conversation (primarily about travel) was good and that’s the important thing.

No Place To Go: I saw this musical at Signature Theatre this past Thursday. It was written in 2012 and is somewhat dated given the rise in remote work, but the premise is that an “information refiner,” who is a “permanent part-time worker” has to decide whether or not to relocate when his employer announces they are moving - to Mars. It’s reasonably amusing and the music (played by a three-man band) was enjoyable. I was particularly impressed by Ben Boker, who played the saxophone at the performance I was at. But the whole thing works largely because Bobby Smith, who is well-known to all regular Signature attendees, is excellent. There are some ver funny moments, such as the song “Aging Middle Class Parents,” in which he considers moving in with his (or his wife’s) parents as a way to avoid moving. There’s also a running joke in which the last sandwich left in the conference room cries out to be eaten. There’s also a poignant song, “The Mighty Mench [sic],” which tells the story of a former employee who died. The key message is that people get more out of work than just a paycheck. Overall, this isn’t essential, but it was an enjoyable hour and a half.

The Color Purple: I was back at Signature on Saturday afternoon to see their production of The Color Purple. I’ve seen this show before (a touring production st the Kennedy Center) and thought it was just okay. But Signature made it outstanding, largely due to some excellent performances. I knew I was in for a treat when I saw that Nova Payton, one of the best actresses in the DC area, was starring as Celie. I was also very impressed by French Davis as Sofia and Danielle J. Summons as Shug Avery. There was also great choreography - especially for the song “African Homeland.” There are major holes in the book. I find Mister’s reformation completely impossible to believe, for example. But the show was both entertaining and moving. This type of performance is why I’m a long-time subscriber to Signature Theatre.

Story Swap: We had the monthly Voices in the Glen story swap on Saturday night. People are gearing up for Halloween. Myself included, as I did my first telling of a Russian folk tale (The Coffin Lid) that is, essentially, a vampire story. I also particularly enjoyed hearing a few stories from The Devil’s Storybook by Natalie Babbitt.

Bernstein’s MASS: On Sunday, a friend and I went to see Leonard Bernstein’s MASS at the Kennedy Center. This was commissioned by Jackie Kennedy for the opening of the Kennedy Center in 1971. Before the performance, we had lunch at the KC Cafe (overpriced and unexciting, but convenient) and checked out the new exhibit about JFK in the Gallery on the Terrace level.

As for the theatrical work (and it is theatrical, incorporating dance with the wide ranging music), it is very much a product of its turbulent times, which actually makes it relevant in these turbulent times. I’d only heard excerpts before, so was not entirely prepared for the complexity of the complete piece. I was glad for the supertitles (which translated the gist of the Latin mass portions, as well as English texts, which were sung clearly enough that I didn’t need the supertitles for them for the most part). Will Liverman gave an excellent performance as the Celebrant, which is a demanding role, given the emotional intensity of the piece, especially the Fraction. James Gaffigan conducted the orchestra and was less showy than some other conductors I’ve seen over the years (including Leonard Bernstein himself). I’d say my favorite section is the Credo, in which various members of the congregation sing about their conflicting beliefs. I’ll also note that the most memorable lyric is “half of the people are stoned and the other half are waiting for the next election; half the people are drowned and the other half are swimming in the wrong direction,” which was a gift from Paul Simon to Bernstein. (The primary lyricist was Stephen Schwartz.) At any rate, this was definitely worth seeing and it made me feel privileged to have access to the cultural life here.

One quick follow-up. It turns out that the experience of starting to dream before falling asleep is not actually uncommon. It’s called hypnagogic hallucination and about 70% of people experience it. I am less unique than I thought.


Celebrity Death Watch: Steve Wilhite invented the GIF (and still managed to pronounce it incorrectly). Ralph Terry was a pitcher who spent several seasons with the Source of All Evil in the Universe. Peter Bowles played Guthrie Featherstone in the Rumpole of the Bailey TV series. Scotty Mitchell was a television actor, who often appeared on game shows, as well as having recurring roles on a couple of sitcoms. Winfield Scott Jr. was an Air Force general and superintendent of the Air Force Academy in the mid-1980’s. John Roach led the development of the TRS-80 microcomputer. Kip Hawley directed the TSA from 2005 to 2009. Charles Boyd was a combat pilot in the Air Force and was the only Vietnam War POW to reach 4-star rank in the military. Edward Johnson III ran Fidelity Investments from the 1970’s on. Taylor Hawkins was the drummer of the Foo Fighters. Kathryn Hays was an actress, best known for appearing in As the World Turns for almost 40 years. Bobby Hendricks sang with The Drifters. Cat Pause was a fat studies activist. Bethany Campbell wrote romance novels. Patricia MacLachlan wrote Sarah, Plain and Tall.

C.W. McCall was a country singer, best known for the song, “Convoy.” Estelle Harris played George Constanza’s mother on Seinfeld and voiced Mrs. Potato Head in the Toy Story movies. Sidney Altman won a Nobel Prize in chemistry for his studies of RNA. Nehemiah Persoff was an actor whose roles included the father in Yentl. Bobby Rydell was a pop singer who played the role of Hugo in the movie version of Bye Bye Birdie. Mimi Reinhardt was Oskar Schindler’s secretary. Gilbert Gottfried was a comedian whose shtick included a really annoying voice. Mike Bossy played hockey for the New York Islanders. Liz Sheridan played Jerry’s mother on Seinfeld. Wendy Rieger was a news anchor in D.C. Barbara Hall was a British crossword constructor and puzzles editor for the Sunday Times. Cynthia Plaster Caster was a groupie who went on to create plaster casts of famous men’s erect penises. Guy Lafleur was a Hall of Fame hockey player. Mike Summer played football for the Washington Redskins. Susan Jacks sang the song “Which Way You Goin’ Billy?” Andrew Woolfolk played saxoophone with Earth, Wind & Fire. David Birney was an actor who is probably best known for the TV series Bridget Loves Bernie but also performed in a lot of serious theatre on Broadway. David Walden contributed to the development of ARPANET. Neal Adams was a comic book artist. Joanna Barnes was an actress whose movie credits included Auntie Mame and The Parent Trap. Naomi Judd was a country singer/songwriter.

Regine was a singer and nightclub owner. Jerry verDorn was a soap opera actor. Rick Parnell was the drummer for Spinal Tap. Norman Mineta was the Secretary of Transportation in the 2000’s. Mary Fuller was a sculptor. Midge Decter was a neoconservative, probably best known as the wife of Norman Podhoretz. Randy Weaver was a survivalist and the key figure in the Ruby Ridge siege. Robert McFarlane was the National Security Advisor under Ronald Reagan and a key figure in the Iran-Contra Affair. Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan was the president of the United Arab Emirates. Ben Roy Mottelson won the Nobel prize in physics for his work on the geometry of atomic nuclei. Vangelis was a musician and composer, whose work for films included Chariots of Fire and Blade Runner. Bob Neuwirth wrote the song “Mercedes Benz.” Rosmarie Trapp was one of the Von Trapp Family Singers.

Madeleine Albright was the first woman to be the U.S. Secretary of State. She was also famous for her collection of brooches, which I once saw at the Smithsonian.

Ann Hutchinson Guest was an expert on dance notation. She lived to the age of 103 and earned me 29 ghoul pool points.

Robert Morse was an actor. He won a Tonyin 1962 for playing J. Pierrepont Finch in How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying and another in 1989 for the one-man play Tru about Truman Capote. He later appeared in the TV series Mad Men. I believed in him.

Orrin Hatch was a Republican Senator from Utah for 42 years. He also wrote and recorded Christian music.

Roger Angell wrote about baseball, primarily for the New Yorker, for about 75 years. Saying that is like saying that Herman Melville wrote about whaling. He was eloquent and insightful, a true poet laureate of the sport. He earned me 21 ghoul pool points.


Non-celebrity Death Watch: Ernest Cravalho was an MIT professor of Mechanical Engineering. I don’t remember if I had him for Thermodynamics, but I am fairly sure we used a textbook he had co-written. He died in April 2021 but I only just learned of his death a couple of weeks ago.

Suzy Pietras-Smith kept an on-line journal at https://www.mutteringfool.com. I met her only once and briefly (at Journalcon several years ago.) She wrote well - not surprisingly, as she was a professional journalist. She had been in the hospital for well over a year, so her death was not a total surprise, but still sad.

I knew Patricia Hansen from FlyerTalk (where she went by the handle, Lili). She was a lively person and a good traveler and I always enjoyed seeing her at FT Dos.

Don’t Analyze This Dream: I worked in the offices of a large corporation. There was some sort of invasion by armed intruders. I locked myself in my office, but somehow I could see what was going on. Several people ran down a hallway to try to escape, but even though they were wearing hazmat suits, they got trapped in a hallway and mowed down. Two women started running in that direction but got away and ran into an office catty corner from mine and, like me, were able to see things happening. The intruders were mostly in a big open room downstairs and were trapped there, where they were killed, so all three of us survived.

Yemandja: I saw this show (play? opera?) at the Kennedy Center a couple of weeks ago. I went to see it largely because of Angelique Kiddo’s involvement. In addition to co-writing the music (with Jean Hebrail), she played the title role. Yemandja is the Yoruba goddess of water and healing. She has a running conflict with Oro, the god of wind. The story involves the influence of these spirits on a girl named Omulola as she tries to rescue her uncle from the slave trade. This is made more complicated because her fiancé , Olajuwon, is the son of the slave trader, De Salta. Throughout all of this, music is used to influence events and, eventually, provide healing. Overall, it was an interesting show and worth seeing.

Maryland Sheep ad Wool Festival: The first weekend of May brought the Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival, which is, essentially, a cross between a county fair and the world’s largest yarn shop. I met up with a few friends there, but mostly shopped on my own. I did not buy any sheep and confined my purchases to two books - one on sock architecture and one called What Would Madame DeFarge Knit? because how could I resist that title? I also bought a gradient yarn kit - several skeins in a blue, green, and purple color way called “They’ll Be Writing Songs About This.” That will eventually get turned into a shawlette.

Re-Boosted: I got my second COVID booster last Monday, I had gotten Pfizer previously and opted for Moderna this time because there is some evidence that mixing the vaccines might give more protection. I did have more side effects (arm soreness, headache, fatigue, mild nausea) but nothing intolerable.

Leading Jewish Minds - Daniel Jackson on Software: MIT Hillel has a series called Leading Jewish Minds at MIT and the most recent speaker was Daniel Jackson. His talk was on software and why it does and does’t work well. A lot of what he said had to do with user interfaces. But the broader question was what the key concept is that makes a technology useful. He was worth interesting and entertaining and I plan to check out his blog in the future.

Story Swap: The monthly Voices in the Glen story swap was last Saturday night. I told a story from Azerbaijan that I had heard from my guide when I was in Sheki. There was also a story about - and a lot of discussion about - pigeons.

Genealogy Meetings: I went to two genealogy talks over the past week. One was on Immigration and Naturalization correspondence files, which had a lot of information, but I need to go back through the slides to see how useful it is. The other was on tracing ancestors before they had surnames. That one seemed less useful, because almost all of the sources the speaker talked about were from southern Germany and Galicia.

Lunar Eclipse: I had looked forward to the lunar eclipse / blood moon of Sunday night. But, alas, the weather here in Northern Virginia did not cooperate. Damn clouds.

White House Webinar on Jews and Baseball: This was, apparently, an event for Jewish Ameriican Heritage Month. The moderator was Chanan Weissman, who is the White House liaison to the Jewish community. The speakers were baseball historian John Thorn, former player Shawn Green, Justine Siegal (the first woman to coach a professional baseball team), and Misha Halperin from the Museum of American Jewish History. Overall, this was entertaining, but I can’t say that I learned anything new out of it. Well, one thing - Shawn Green is still astonishingly good-looking I suspect that wasn’t the message the event was intended to get out. (The real subtext was that baseball was viewed by Jewish immigrants as a means to Americanization. In fact, Thorn said he learned to read English from the backs of baseball cards.)

Abortion Rights Rally: I went to the Jewish Rally for Abortion Justice on Tuesday. That deserves its own post, which I will try to write in the next couple of days.