It’s Fan Week at the U.S. Open, which means I get to go see world-class players play for free — including Coco Gauff, Carlos Alcatraz, and Medvedev and Serev and I saw Billie Jean King give a talk, WHAT — and apparently also means I have an incredible conversation with a perfect stranger for two or three hours in Arthur Ashe Stadium.
I take as sacred whenever I talk with Holocaust survivors or their children. Avi’s parents stories were incredible to hear, and since yesterday he also emailed me a draft of his mother’s story. He said he now feels motivated to work on it again. He has published essays on his parents’ history in a few different journals.
I told Avi I had interviewed a Holocaust survivor named Ilse Heyman a couple of years ago for my grant work with the Cambridge Arts Council.
If you have not yet seen (and heard) that interview, please visit this link: http://www.coyneworks.com/blog/ilse-heyman. If that link is not live, you can go to Coyneworks.com —> Cambridge Seniors and then scroll down. Her profile is the second from the bottom.
It’s been an awful time for me lately, besides having the support and love of friends, so I was very gratified to have this extremely meaningful chance encounter. And to get to play pickleball on a free court earlier yesterday morning for the first time. (Not as great as tennis for me, but still a lot of fun, and I was amused that European tourists kept stopping to be spectators before going off to their next thing).
If you only want to hear his parents’ story, it starts at 5:30. But you get a sense of Avi himself in the earlier minutes of this recording. A very thoughtful, amusing person.
Carlos Alcatraz and Karen Khachanov (did I mention this is FREE?):
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