I (Mendel) attended a NYSWI (New York State Writers Institute) campus event this Fall 2025 featuring a poet and author who wrote a comedic memoir about growing up in Jewish Skokie (a very Jewish suburb of Chicago). I’ve been to Skokie when visiting Chicago relatives, and Jewish nostalgia has its appeal (but as it turns out, he spoke little or none of that).
I was intrigued by his blend of poetry and comedy, his humor and timing was great, and he offered some interesting insights on the difference between sharing/expressing one’s feelings vs. making a piece of work, developing those feelings and experiences into a meaningful written piece of work.
Walking out the big wooden doors of UAlbany’s Page Hall on the downtown campus I met old Albany lifer R’ Heshy Ungerman.
First a word of background about Heshy: He was born in Albany, raised a family and was Jewishly involved all his life here – and continues to be. A sweet good man, with a very Jewishly and humanely attuned soul. I once interviewed him (back in 2005) for a Maimonides School Oral History project and the most memorable line that stuck with me was: “I sold newspapers on Albany downtown street corners for 4 cents a paper, and if they gave me a nickel and didn’t ask for change, that’s how I made my money. We were poor but we weren’t culturally poor. Culturally, we felt rich.”
I’ve seen him locally many times since, but I realize it was 20 years since that 2005 conversation, when I meet Heshy again outside Page Hall after the comedy/poet talk. I greeted him, and Heshy grumbled with disappointment: “I came here to hear some Yiddishkeit, but he said nothing about Yiddishkeit!”
I realized how very sweet this grumble was! R’ Heshy’s expression of disappointment was actually a celebration, affirmation and exultation of importance of Judaism in our lives! We are culturally rich, we have so much in our heritage, how can one not speak of that!?