Soccer Dad

Legacies

At the end of the year, the New York Times runs a feature, "The lives they lived" in its magazine section. The object of this feature is to remember those semi-celebrities who died the previous calendar year. As I glanced through this feature, three individuals caught my attention. All of them, it turns out were Jewish.

Perhaps the oddest rememberance was that of Miriam Rothschild | b. 1908: Parasite Lover. Miriam Rothschild, a member of the banking family developed an interest in fleas and studied them, becoming a renowned expert on the tiny insects.

John H. Slade | b. 1908: Job for Life tells the story of Hans Schlesinger who escaped Europe just in time and made his way to the offices of the Jewish Wall Street firm of Bear Stearns where he worked pretty much until his dying day. Of course Schlesinger changed his name but he was something of a legend on Wall Street.

Peter Zvi Malkin | b. 1927: Chasing Evil recounts how Peter Malkin captured and then cared for Adolf Eichmann until the architect of the Final Solution was ready to be secreted out of Argentina and into Israel for his trial.

The story reminded me a bit of "Interrogating Eichmann" a chapter from a book by Avner Less that was excerpted in Commentary (in 1983 I think). Less described in detail the particulars of his interrogation of the villain. But what struck me most is that at some point Less informed Eichmann that his family had been killed out. Eichmann excalaimed "How terrible" (or something like that) as if he had had nothing to do with their murders.

By coincidence, though he's not Jewish, I noticed that this week Urbano Lazzaro who was credited with arresting Mussolini also died.