Author Archive | Martha Shelley

This Pride Week, the New York Times published a belated obituary of a lesbian who died in 1988. It was part of a series called “Overlooked No More.” Here’s how they describe the series: Overlooked is a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times. This month, […]

Today I’m turning this space over to Andrea Gourdine, who lives with her wife in a retirement community in California. A mutual friend sent me this article. Ms. Gourdine doesn’t have a wide audience of her own, but what she says here is more important than anything I could say on the matter. I’m hoping […]

Change doesn’t come about because the oppressed dress up in nice suits and ask politely. It doesn’t come peacefully, via reasoned argument, sociological studies, or letters to the editor—although those means are part of the process. Change requires loud demonstrations, illegal occupations of government offices, rebellions, and sometimes revolutions or civil wars. I know. I […]

This week’s police murder of George Floyd, and the ensuing riots, brought back some troubling memories. I was working in Harlem in April 1968, when MLK was assassinated and Black neighborhoods in nearly 200 U.S. cities convulsed into rioting, arson, and looting. What was I doing in Harlem? In June 1965 I graduated from City […]

Magic Carpet Sale! Sheltering in place? Crazed with cabin fever? Tired of endless news stories about the plague? Ebisu Publications is having a special sale through the end of July–a literary magic carpet that will transport you to ancient and distant lands. Travel through the kingdoms of ancient Tyre (still part of Lebanon), Israel, Assyria […]

I sifted through a shoebox of faded papers and odd keepsakes, and the memories drifted up. The first item in the box: Grandpa Samuel’s Cuban naturalization certificate, dated November 19, 1928. As I wrote in a previous post, my mother was born in Poland in 1914, and her family immigrated to Cuba in 1921. In […]

For the last few months, I’ve been irritated by four particular phrases—shibboleths, really—that liberal readers post in the comments section of The New York Times. The annoyance grew, like a boil, until I finally decided to skewer it. Here are the four: 1) No one is above the law. I’m sure that those who parrot […]

My father, Jacob Joseph Altman, was born in Brooklyn in 1912. His family moved to the United States before the change in immigration laws that prevented my mother from coming here. Jacob’s father, Reuben, was from Kishinev, an Eastern European city that was founded in 1436 as a monastic village. It became part of the […]

In this spring of convergent disasters—a global pandemic and collapsing economy—it may be useful to remember how our forebears survived the calamities of their time. My mother, Gitl Dina Bojankosky, was born in 1914 in Nowy Dwor, a town 24 miles from Warsaw. I couldn’t find the census figures for that year but in 1921 […]

A friend has urged me to post about the current health crisis. I’m not a medical professional or politician, but I can offer a little historical perspective. What I’ve seen in the last six decades is an empire in decline, and I think the combination of the Coronavirus pandemic and our hell-for-leather environmental destruction will […]