Features
LOS ANGELES — My parents are dining at a Jewish federation event with some folks from their community. As happens on occasion when Jewish parents get together, the subject turns to the accomplishments of their children (shocking, right?).
Mr. Cohen offers up that his son is curing cancer. Mrs. Schwartz mentions that her daughter is working with Obama. Then my mom proudly declares, “My son didn’t throw anything away last year, instead keeping all of his garbage and recycling in his basement. And worms eat all of his food scraps!”
The table falls quiet as forks clink on gefilte fish plates and looks are traded.
Someone coughs. A few moments pass and one mother leans in to another.
“They always seemed like such normal people,” she says. “Didn’t David go to yeshiva?”
And then I wake up.
Jean Chatzky — personal finance journalist, columnist, editor, author, speaker, TV and radio personality — is fluid in the rarified financial terminology that flies over most of our heads.But for her, finance rightly belongs in the realm of the personal.“I find that working in personal finance is fascinating,” says Chatzky, the headline speaker at the Allied Jewish Federation’s Choices event Thursday, Feb. 12.“I never wanted to write about 12b-1cs (annual expense fees deducted by mut...
AVENTURA, Fla. — I remember, after the kaddish was said, after the pale roses were laid down, a light rain falling through trees. On a gray March day in 2007, I made a visit to what in all likelihood was the grave of my mother, my two younger brothers, Hershek and Moshek, and my infant sister, Itka. The boys were only 11 and 9 when they left the world; Itka was barely 6 months old.Their nameless tomb rests in a location to which I once vowed never to return, a death-sown place that had destroy...
KARAGANDA, Kazakhstan — Liza Luchanskiy was born to a poor, Yiddish-speaking family in Berdichev, the historic, heavily Jewish city deep in the Pale of Settlement. Lured by Soviet promises of equality, she became a communist true believer, working her way up to serve on a committee in Siberia that targeted so-called enemies of the revolution.But her zeal wasn’t enough to save her or her similarly devoted husband, Josef.They were swept up during the frenzy of Stalin’s Great Terror, from 193...