National obituaries

Author E.L Doctorow dies at 84

JTA — American Jewish author E.L. Doctorow, who wrote the novel “Ragtime,” has died at age 84.

Doctorow died of complications from lung cancer July 21 in Manhattan, according to the New York Times. Author of a dozen novels as well as assorted other works, Doctorow primarily wrote historical fiction. “Ragtime,” published in 1975, is set in New York in the lead-up to World War I and includes characters like Sigmund Freud and the anarchist Emma Goldman. His works spanned periods from the Civil War to the present day.

Doctorow won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction. He was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Among his other prominent works are “Billy Bathgate,” “The Book of Daniel” and “The March.” Several of his books have been adapted into films.

Doctorow was born in 1931 in the Bronx to Jewish immigrants from Russia. He told the Kenyon Review that he grew up surrounded by talented Jewish refugees who had fled Nazi Germany. He attended Kenyon College and published his first novel, “Welcome to Hard Times,” in 1960. He lived in New York City.

Doctorow is survived by his wife, three children and four grandchildren.

Grooveshark co-founder Josh Greenberg found dead at 28

JTA — Josh Greenberg, co-founder of the early music streaming service Grooveshark, has died at 28.

Greenberg’s girlfriend found him in his bed July 19 in Gainesville, Florida, the Gainesville Sun reported. An autopsy found no evidence of drug use, foul play or suicide, and the cause of death is not yet known. A toxicology report will reveal more information in two to three months.

His mother, Lori Greenberg, told police that Greenberg was never sick and said that medical examiners were “as baffled as I am,” according to the Gainesville Sun.

Greenberg founded Grooveshark with Sam Tarantino in 2006 when the two were freshmen at the University of Florida. The site, which allowed users to stream music uploaded by other users for free, shut down on April 30 after a protracted legal battle with several of the largest record companies, including Universal, Sony and Warner Music. At its peak, Grooveshark boasted some 40 million users and 145 employees in Gainesville and New York City.

Greenberg’s mother said her son was not troubled by the result of the lawsuit because he was working on a series of new ventures, including a new mobile music app.

Burt Shavitz, Jewish co-founder of Burt’s Bees, dies at 80

JTA — Burt Shavitz, the Jewish beekeeper and co-founder of the Burt’s Bees cosmetics company, has died.

Shavitz, born Ingram Shavitz in Manhattan in 1935, died of respiratory problems in Bangor, Maine, July 5 while surrounded by family and friends.

He grew the Burt’s Bees company with business partner, Roxanne Quimby, and his scraggly, bearded image became the face of the brand. Quimby bought out Shavitz’s share in the company for an undisclosed sum in the mid-1990s before Burt’s Bees was sold to Clorox for $925 million in 2007.

Shavitz has said that he was forced out of the company because he had an affair with an employee. In addition to the buyout money, Shavitz received 37 acres of land in Maine.

“In the long run, I got the land, and land is everything. Land is positively everything. And money is nothing really worth squabbling about. This is what puts people six feet under. You know, I don’t need it,” he said last year.

After spending time in the U.S. Army and working as a photographer for Time-Life, Shavitz left New York and moved to Maine in 1970, where he began making honey. In the 1980s he met Quimby, who made new products from Shavitz’s beeswax and moved the company to North Carolina in 1994.

“Burt was an enigma; my mentor and my muse. I am deeply saddened,” Quimby told The Associated Press.



Shavitz was the subject of the 2014 documentary “Burt’s Buzz,” which delved into his unusual career and eventually reclusive life in Maine.

“Roxanne Quimby wanted money and power, and I was just a pillar on the way to that success,” Shavitz said in the film.

Shavitz owned three Golden Retrievers and had a reputation for being a quirky, straight-talking hippie.

“We remember him as a bearded, free-spirited Maine man, a beekeeper, a wisecracker, a lover of golden retrievers and his land,” the Burt’s Bees company said in a statement.

Nicholas Winton, Kindertransport organizer, dies at 106

 JTA – Sir Nicholas Winton, who organized the Kindertransport that rescued 669 children from Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia, has died.

Winton, known as the “British Schindler,” died July 1 at 106.

The baptized son of Jewish parents, Winton was a 29-year-old stockbroker when he arrived in Prague in December 1938. He was planning to go on a skiing holiday in Switzerland, but changed his plans when he heard about the refugee crisis in Czechoslovakia, which had just been occupied by the Nazis.

In the following nine months, he organized eight trains that carried children, the vast majority of them Jewish, from Czechoslovakia to safety in the Britain. 

Winton’s heroism was unremarked until the 1980s, when his wife found evidence of the rescues.

Britain’s chief rabbi, Ephraim Mirvis, praised Winton for his “exceptional courage, selflessness and modesty.” 

Winton received many honors in his later years, including a knighthood. Last year, the Czech government flew him to Prague in a military plane to receive the country’s highest honor.