The Mountain of Names
In 1977, a book editor suggested that I write up the history of my family, and I accepted the proposition not only eagerly but with a sense of urgency. My two grandmothers were both nearly ninety. I had heard some of their stories, in bits and pieces -of how they had got out of Russia …Read More
40 years ago
yesterday, when our guys did the first moon walk, and I believe one of them even whacked a golf ball on its dusty surface, I was in Pacific Grove, California, glued to Walter Cronkite at George and Ann Crile’s house, and I wrote this little vignette of their elderly French neighbors.
Pacific Grove. Sunday, July …Read More
#36: A Miraculous Meeting With My 22nd Cousin
By Alex Shoumatoff
This originally appeared in the January, 2007 Travel + Leisure, and is reproduced from travelandleisure.com.
In search of family history—and to meet a long-lost, distant cousin—Alex Shoumatoff crosses the country to the ancient city of Novgorod and finds a place of exhilarating beauty and personal resonance. From January 2007
I think of myself sometimes as …Read More
#1: On Loss – Part One: A Sylvia Plath Moment at the Charles Hotel
On August 8 of this year, 2001, I drove from our place in the Adirondacks to Cambridge, Massachusetts to discuss a possible future Dispatch with a Shamar Rinpoche, a high lama of the kagiu lineage of Tibetan Buddhism, and an American practitioner whom I have known since childhood. The drive across New England took five …Read More
#1: On Loss – Part 2: Hellsapoppin
A month later, I went to New York City for a memorial service for my editor at Harper Collins, Robert Jones, an extraordinary person, an old soul if you believe in that sort of thing, highly evolved and deeply compassionate, who had truly devoted himself to his writers, to nurturing their talent and bringing out …Read More