More Jewish geography

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When I write an article for this newspaper or another publication, I seldom hear from readers.  So I am surprised and often feel rewarded when I do.

Shortly before Yom Kippur, I was quite surprised to receive an email from our editor asking if I would like to reply to a reader who had sought my contact information.  Why not?  The reader, Beth Schuyler, was responding to my September article on family acquaintances in Andover, Massachusetts. So I gave her a call.

Andover, it turned out, was her hometown.  Indeed, I had written about her uncle, Thayer Warshaw, and a family acquaintance, Richard Kapelson. Thayer and Beth’s father, Sidney Frankel, had once been partners in a car dealership established by Max Warshaw, Thayer’s father and Sidney’s father-in-law.

Beth’s sister, Judy, had actually followed two of Thayer and Bernice Warshaw’s daughters to Providence’s Lincoln School, graduating in 1963.

Beth went to boarding school elsewhere, but then we discovered that one of her old friends, Esther Simon, was my late father-in-law’s cousin!

Beth, who has lived in Providence for 45 years, commented on the Lawrence Jewish community’s close-knit bonds before many of its members relocated to Andover.

Beth lives on the East Side, and we plan to meet in person.  And I was also delighted to hear that, having been “touched” by my article, she sent copies to her sister and her three Warshaw cousins.

AND IT TURNS out that my article in the June issue of the newspaper had reached a few readers far from Little Rhody.  This article focused on a Jewish family that had lived in Aberdeen, South Dakota, but eventually relocated to Los Angeles, my hometown.  Indeed, Bill Brussell, who ran a successful haberdashery chain in L.A., married my mother’s first cousin, and he and I became friends.  While I was a graduate student, I worked in his Beverly Hills store for a summer.

So how did a reader in Washington, D.C., become aware of my June article – unless she happened to have googled “Aberdeen, South Dakota”?  After finding my article, this woman then emailed one of her childhood friends from Aberdeen, who had moved to Los Angeles more than 60 years ago.

I knew Chuck Levy because, following his graduation from UCLA Law School, he had worked in my father’s firm and eventually became a partner.  Indeed, Bill Brussell may have introduced Chuck to Dad.

But how did I learn that Chuck had also read my article?  It gets far more complicated!  Yes, my brother-in-law, Keith Klevan, a Philadelphia native who has lived in Los Angeles for nearly 50 years, is also a lawyer.  Indeed, he’s a tenant in Chuck’s office building.  Chuck sent Keith a copy of the email that his Aberdeen friend had sent to him.  Yes, Chuck remembered me, so he probably figured that Keith or my sister, Betty, would contact me.

Having obtained an email address for the reader in Washington, I contacted her, asking how she happened to find my article.  It turns out that Google was not a factor.  Rather, she received a copy from Lenore Piper Bunting, one of my friends from Temple Beth-El.  Lenore and her friend, Beryl Radin, the D.C. resident, had been roommates at Antioch College more than 60 years ago!

BUT THE interconnectedness of the Jewish world may be even better illustrated by still another Los Angeles-Providence connection.

About four years ago, while chairing Temple Beth-El’s library committee, I suggested to Rabbi Howard Voss-Altman that we purchase a book about an important Jewish painter, Ronald Kitaj (1932-2007), who had grown up in Ohio and New York but spent most of his adult life in London.

During the early 1960s, Kitaj began to achieve widespread recognition among a circle of hip, representational painters that included David Hockney as well as a number of Jews.

A few years after I mentioned the Kitaj book to Rabbi Howard, a visitor attended a Shabbat morning service at Beth-El, and he and Rabbi Howard introduced themselves to each other.  This guest was Max Kitaj, a former Army medic in Afghanistan who became a Brown medical student.  So Rabbi Howard proudly took him to the temple’s Braude Library to show him the book about his late father.  Then Rabbi Howard called me with this amazing news.

But my friend, Howard, knew only a small portion of my Kitaj story.

During the late 1970s, while living in Los Angeles, I became quite friendly with a retired art museum director, James Byrnes, who introduced me to many of his art-world colleagues.  These included a Jewish couple: Ethel Fisher, a painter, and her husband, Seymour Kott, an eventual benefactor of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Ethel was a figurative painter who occasionally accepted portrait commissions.  After asking me if she could paint my portrait, we agreed on a modest fee and I happily sat in her studio for several hours.

Perhaps only later did I learn that Ethel’s daughter, Sandra Fisher, an artist in her own right, became Ronald Kitaj’s lover and then, in 1983, his second wife.  Indeed, Sandra was Max’s mother.  Following her sudden death in 1994, at 47 years of age, Ronald relocated to Los Angeles, partially to be closer to his older son but also so that his younger son could be closer to his grandmother.

Of course, I was more than eager to show Max the portrait that Ethel Fisher had painted – surely her only commission residing in Little Rhody.  But the pandemic interceded, and Max and I were unable to visit before his medical school graduation and his return with his young family to Southern California.

DON’T THESE stories of mishpachah make your head spin?  I’m saving a few more for a future article.  One story deals with a small book, “How to Take a Japanese Bath,” which I found in the shop in Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts.  It was written by Leonard Koren, one of my religious school classmates, whom I hadn’t heard from or seen since our Confirmation in 1964.  Of course I had to get in touch!

GEORGE M. GOODWIN, of Providence, is the editor of Rhode Island Jewish Historical Notes.