Author Archives: Leora Freedman

Evan Feuerstein met Chic in the 1960’s, while they were both working at Slide O’Chrome, a top New York professional photographic lab.  Chic’s full name was Charles M. Chic.  A few years earlier he’d been drafted into the US Army, … Continue reading →

When he was a teenager in 1912, Grandpa Manny left his shtetl of Stepin in Ukraine and sailed alone on the Lusitania to New York.  Eventually he brought over his parents and sisters, but then there was a quarrel and … Continue reading →

Tsirel Charlop of Brest-Litovsk was tall, dark, and held herself like the Spanish-Jewish aristocracy of her ancestors.  They were descended from the Jewish exilarchs of ancient Babylonia.  Tsirel was intelligent and freethinking, but as a rabbi’s daughter in the late … Continue reading →

In 1923, Joseph Baum sent his son Edwin to Palestine for a year after Edwin graduated high school.  In those days, lots of New York kids skipped grades and graduated young. Edwin was only sixteen.  Joseph himself had dreamed of … Continue reading →

At eighteen, Evan Feuerstein imagined himself becoming a traveling bard, a poet who would know a whole poetic tradition by heart.  He would be both vessel and essence of this tradition.  When his parents sent him to the new country … Continue reading →

In the early twentieth century, Evan’s grandfather started a family tradition of sending teenagers to the Land of Israel. The summer Evan was sent there, he photographed two Jewish children who had fled North Africa, a little boy and girl … Continue reading →