For Tatyana Yasnovsky, a retired psychiatrist and émigré from the former Soviet Union, her arrival in America in the mid-‘70s was joyous and unforgettable, Prompted to leave Leningrad, now St. Petersburg, to escape Russia’s pervasive antisemitism, Yasnovsky’s family endured ostracism and the loss of their jobs when they applied for exit visas. They then spent ...
Sally Abbott believes her role as a novelist was written before she was born. It started with her middle name: Abbott’s mother was so enamored of the renowned short-story writer Katherine Mansfield that she gave her second daughter the middle name “Mansfield.” To top it off, both Katherine and Sally were born in the same ...
Few who end up in the hospital are likely to be thinking about whether there’s a sufficient, readily accessible, and safe supply of blood on hand if needed. Someone who has is Sarah Young, former manager of the blood bank at San Francisco’s Veteran’s Affairs Medical Center. Until she retired in 2017, it was her ...
Seated in the backroom of a café on Polk Street, Kevagne Kalisch leans against the wall and stares at a nearby painting of two clowns: one grinning, the other crying. Turning, she said she’s puzzling how to tell her own story: one of happiness and grief. Kalisch, 78, struggled with alcoholism for many years. She ...
Jonah Raskin was 10 in 1952, during the height of the anti-communist fervor of the Cold War. His father was an attorney, among the vast intellectual class swept up in McCarthyism, the campaign to expose suspected Soviet sympathizers. Raskin’s father was never accused. Still, Raskin only learned much later the extent of his parents’ communist ...
Hitoshi Shigeta has perfected the art of juggling. Not the act you might see in a circus, but the act of a man whose life has three demanding priorities. He’s a working artist and teacher of art, an English-to-Japanese translator of business documents fighting against a technological wave, and full-time caretaker to his 27-year-old autistic ...
