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Leah Dunaief

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By Leah S. Dunaief

Leah Dunaief

Thanksgiving Day would have been my sister’s 78th birthday. But my parents were told at her birth that she would not live long because she had Down syndrome, a genetic disorder. In fact, one of the physicians at the hospital commented, “Best to just throw her in the garbage.” My mother, who was deeply religious, advised the doctor that he was not God, told him in no uncertain terms where he could go, and together with my father, brought my sister Maxine to our loving and supportive home.

That was 1942, when no one ever saw a Down syndrome child, with the characteristic physical markings of a round face, almond-shaped and up-slanting eyes and short stature, on the streets of New York. As a result, she was the object of stares when we were in public. Fortunately, she was a happy and social child, and when she saw people staring, she would wave at them, smile and say, “Hello.” If they stopped, she would continue with, “How are you?” and even, “How old are you?” She would then advise them that they looked much older and thus make them laugh.

Even as late as 1960, the life expectancy of people with Down syndrome was considered to be 10. But by 2007, on average and according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, persons born with Down would live to be about 47 years old. My sister made it to 65.

Why the dramatic difference within one lifetime? The easiest answer is the change in attitudes about children with Down syndrome. When Maxine was born, such children were routinely institutionalized, where they received notoriously poor treatment and lived in horrible conditions. Journalist and lawyer Geraldo Rivera, in 1972, exposed the neglect and abuse in Staten Island’s Willowbrook State School. It broke people’s hearts and was a change agent, and such facilities began to disappear.

Since the 1970s, a Down syndrome child is to be given a free and appropriate education like any other child in the United States by law. When my sister was six, my mother brought her to the neighborhood elementary school to register her for first grade. That was the first of many times she and Maxine were turned away. With great patience, my mother taught Maxine how to read “Dick, Jane and Baby,” to write her name and address between the lines, and to do arithmetic on a second-grade level. Ultimately Maxine attended a Catholic school in Brooklyn for children with special needs. My sister also had a natural gift for music, often spending many minutes playing familiar melodies by ear on the household piano.

I was reminded of all this by December’s Atlantic monthly magazine’s cover story, “The Last Children of Down Syndrome.” The article, by Sarah Zhang, focuses on prenatal genetic testing, the impact it’s having on the number of children born with special needs, and its effects on world-wide population as it becomes easier and more widespread. Her report is centered in Denmark, which in 2004 became one of the first countries to offer free genetic Down syndrome screening to every pregnant woman. She writes that since universal screening was offered, the number of parents who chose to continue a pregnancy after a Down diagnosis, in 2019 for example, was seven. What does the universal introduction of choice indicate about the future of humanity as genetic testing gets more sophisticated? she asks.

What is the value of a human life? The article poses the question, as well as dealing with the terrible pressures of choice. My mother was 36 when she gave birth to my sister. Age 35 and older is considered higher risk for the birthing of a Down syndrome child. There wasn’t the choice of amniocentesis then, certainly not other genetic testing, but had there been, I know how my parents would have reacted. They would have carried on in the same way.

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By Leah S. Dunaief

Leah Dunaief

Thanksgiving 2020 will surely be remembered by all. Other Thanksgivings blend into each other on the impressionist edges of memory, in a sepia-colored haze. But this one will stand out like a gargoyle, in bas-relief at the center. Never before have we disinvited our children from our homes during this holiday. Never have we set the table for so few. Never have we been urged not to travel to reconnect with our families. Never have we been drilled on the three Ws: wash your hands, watch your social distancing, wear your mask. COVID-19 overhangs our lives.

Nonetheless, for most of us, there is so much to be thankful for, even as we have to push past the anxiety and the upending of our lives the pandemic has caused to remind ourselves of the many ways we can be thankful.

First is for the good health most of us are lucky enough to enjoy: for our own and that of our loved ones. Perhaps, never has good health been viewed as such a blessing as now, as hundreds of thousands fall ill. Even without the coming vaccine, we can work to keep the virus at bay by diligently following the three Ws.

Next is the love we have in our lives that has become so manifestly important to acknowledge and declare. It is that love: for our spouses, our parents, our children, our dearest relatives and friends that is our safety net during these challenging days. We have always been aware of that love but perhaps not so appreciatively as now. The need to connect with them has not been so vital as now. And if we have a warm home and people who live in it with us, and enough to eat each day, how thankful we can be.

We can be thankful for our jobs, if we have them, and if we don’t, for the country we live in that supports us at least partially during our temporary unemployment. And if we are holding on ourselves, we can help others around us through our churches, soup kitchens and donations to our neighbors in need. To help others is a great privilege.

Though I never particularly embraced the computer when it appeared in our daily lives in the 1970s and 1980s, I am thankful for technology. Because of my computer, I can see my children and grandchildren regularly. I even have a place in the house nicknamed the Zoom Room. I can also see my friends, attend meetings, albeit virtually, and learn new subjects if I choose.

I escape from the news and the responsibilities of daily life with movies on Netflix and other streaming services. I still cannot stop marveling at Siri and the ability to find the answers to all sorts of questions by just pushing a button on my cellphone.

I sometimes think of my husband, whose poor sense of direction was legendary in the family, and how he would have loved the GPS. The ability to call someone from this marvelous invention I hold in my hand and tell them I am on my way but will be 15 minutes late or that I need help because I have a flat tire is a commonplace miracle of the 21st century. How lucky we are to be alive in these times, when a vaccine to overcome our version of the black plague can be developed in a matter of months.

Difficult times force us to turn inward and find the resilience to cope. And we can cope, we all can. If we believe in ourselves and have faith that this pandemic will end, which it surely will, we can then build back our lives and our world again. We can give thanks for that inner strength. Governments must help, charities and philanthropies do help, and we can help ourselves and each other. We can take inspiration from the natural world, which goes on in all its seasons of beauty despite periodic upheavals, and thankfully we will too.

Thanksgiving 2021 we will all together sit around the dinner table and profoundly give thanks.

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By Leah S. Dunaief

Leah Dunaief

“Crazy time.”

That was the message a friend in California texted me yesterday. And she certainly summed up perfectly these days of our lives. Let us together count the ways we have gone off the rails. For starters, can you imagine a time when you had to decline a visit from your children at Thanksgiving in order to ensure your health and theirs?

I suspect the same for you; gathering around the table at Thanksgiving and appreciating our lives with our family and close friends has been a tradition for us as long as I can remember. After my children married and joined their wives’ families with ours, we have even traded off other holidays for Thanksgiving at our home every year. I guess we can include thanks this time for and via Zoom.

Could you imagine a political stalemate over the election at the presidential level like the one playing out in the courts in different states across the country? Yes, the 2000 vote was a handwringer, but it pales in drama when compared with this election. Back then, the decision hung on 537 votes. This time, with vital information withheld and with a pandemic raging, more is at stake than the outcome of the election. We are vulnerable to attack as a nation.

And as for that pandemic, as direly predicted this past spring, it is rearing its ugly head now that the weather has cooled and we are living more indoors and closer together. We have learned some things since the affliction started. Masks make a difference in protecting others and also ourselves from the spread of the virus. Fresh air, social distancing and hand washing continue to be vital. HEPA filters are powerful allies. And broad scale testing, followed by tracing, matter. Still, people are hospitalized, emergency rooms and ICU beds fill up and even some patients die, as we wait to be rescued by science. Incredible progress has been made developing a vaccine, and by more than one laboratory, but distribution to and acceptance by the general public of the vaccines will not happen during this imminent winter.

Weather has also been a villain. Violent storms and hurricanes, the ferocity of which has been unleashed, we are told, by climate change, have disrupted life for many in the United States and across the globe, even in the midst of desperate efforts to fight the pandemic. And further complicating rescue are the unprecedented fires burning in California and the far west. Then throw in assorted mudslides and tornados for good measure. Tragic!

The economy continues to worsen for many as it excels for the few businesses that benefit from the consequences of the virus. Restaurants, hotels, travel, transportation, formal entertainment, cultural events, retail, health care, child care, education — all have suffered huge financial blows. And the effects are not, curiously, shared equally among men and women. Most of the jobs in those industries are filled by women, who now have no jobs because of shutdowns, or have jobs they cannot get to because of child care responsibilities. This one issue is being viewed as a significant setback for women in the workplace, and for society as a whole, for years to come. Meanwhile construction, renovation, manufacturing and high tech, that makes Zoom and countless other products now deemed a necessity possible, are mushrooming.

The tenor of watershed events in people’s lives is tarnished. Weddings, graduations, significant and not-so-significant birthday parties, reunions, baptisms, funerals — all are put on hold or otherwise unwillingly altered in timing and attendance. Even an entitlement as innocent as looking forward to a thrilling freshman year in college has now morphed into a two-dimensional, remote experience. And returning college students are considered risks for households and communities.

There is no point in complaining. It will not alter this bizarre year and the troubles it has brought. The one thought I could offer my friend on a return text: “We will be able to say, as we someday will tell the tale, that we lived through it.”

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From left, Geraldine Ferraro, Ivan and Leah Dunaief

By Leah S. Dunaief

Leah Dunaief

The road to the election of a woman vice president of the United States is a long one, and with our newspapers, we have traveled it from the first nomination of a woman by a major party to today.

Geraldine Ferraro was the running mate of Walter Mondale in the 1984 presidential election and was supported after she was nominated by a majority of women, according to a Newsweek poll, 49% to 41%.  Men supported the Reagan-Bush ticket 58% to 36%.

In the end, despite a lively campaign that had Ferraro traveling 55,000 miles around the country and speaking in 85 cities, the Democratic ticket lost in a landslide, carrying only the underdog, Walter Mondale and his home state of Minnesota and the District of Columbia.

When I was president of the New York Press Association, it was my responsibility to arrange for the keynote speaker at our 1985, 500-member state convention. I mailed an invitation to Ferraro, and despite collegial assurances that she would not even read the letter herself, much less come, she delighted us by accepting. Indeed, she came to the hotel in Colonie, north of Albany center, for the entire weekend and was most generous with her time, including a productive shopping trip during break to the local mall on Saturday afternoon. She also gave my oldest son a private interview for his college newspaper.

Why did she agree to come? She felt poorly treated by the press throughout her campaign, and I had suggested that she might want to offer her impressions of how badly she was covered to us. Indeed, she did, in direct and no uncertain terms.

Ferraro, as you might guess, was a remarkable woman and politician. She was known for her breezy style and saucy manner, and when she felt patronized by Reagan’s vice presidential candidate, George H. W. Bush during the campaign, she memorably scolded him publicly. She was endearing in many ways. When introduced at public gatherings, if she liked the introduction music, she would break into a little dance behind the speaker’s platform before beginning her talk. She wore silk dresses and pearls but never flowers. When my husband, who was with me at the convention, brought both of us corsages to wear on stage, she declined most apologetically. “I’m not allowed to wear flowers,” she explained to our astonishment. “They are too feminine.”

As The New York Times described in her obituary in 2011, she was ideal for television. Down to earth, streaked blond hair, a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich-making mother of three, she was appealing, I guess in the way of Doris Day. She was brought up by a single mother, who over the years, it was told, sewed beads on wedding dresses to pay for her daughter to attend good schools. And while Ferraro graduated from Fordham Law School, it was not until her own children were of school age that she started working in the Queens District Attorney’s office.

From 1979-1985, after serving as a criminal prosecutor, she was elected to the House of Representatives. Less combative than Representative Bella Abzug before her, she proved to be comfortable and well liked “by the boys,” especially House Speaker Tip O’Neill, Jr. And while she was more familiar with urban ward politics than foreign policy, for example, she was a quick study and learned what she needed to know at any given time.

Unfortunately, Ferraro was forced to hold a marathon news conference in the middle of the election, when her husband, John Zaccaro, was accused of financial misdealings, an event that certainly hurt the ticket.

Born in Newburgh, New York, in 1935, Ferraro was, to me, a phenomenon in a crowded room. She would stop and shake hands with every person as she walked along, look each one in the eye and within 30 seconds establish some common connection that brought a smile to each face. She was not only the first woman candidate for vice president of a major party but also the first Italian-American nominee. Kamala Harris stands on Geraldine Ferraro’s shoulders finally with her win.

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By Leah S. Dunaief

Leah Dunaief

However devoutly to be wished, the election results concerning the next President of the United States of America are not yet known. Nor will they be for a good while, it would seem, as the avalanche of mailed ballots needs to be counted and recounted for accuracy. The suspense and anxiety remain.

What can any one of us do?

For starters, we do the obvious. We wait. As adults, we know we don’t always get what we want when we want it, and that goes for the political world as well.

This year, 2020, will be known as the year we all waited. We are waiting for a vaccine to save us from COVID-19 too. But while we are waiting, there is a lot we can do.

First, we can calm ourselves down. It does no good to hurl accusations and invectives at each other for believing differently. We are, for better or worse, all Americans, and we will be moving forward from here. As to how we can calm down, I suggest (and it may seem ironic) that we watch and listen to less news. One or two good and brief news reports a day should do nicely. My own preference is CBS News at the top of the hour on my clock radio first thing in the morning and PBS News Hour or the BBC in the early evening. I stress “early” because I don’t want the news to be the last thing I hear before going to bed.

As for the rest of the day, besides the daily efforts to keep life going — from brushing one’s teeth to doing our best job at work and at home — we can use our energies productively instead of shouting into a void. We can make a big difference on a local level economically and socially. We can donate food, and perhaps even time, if done safely, to local soup kitchens and food banks.

We can also donate unused clothing and even furniture through the offices of local houses of worship. We can spend a little time on the phone, calling those we love who live elsewhere in this large country, and those who live nearby but are elderly and don’t get out much, to keep relationships vibrant and perhaps share a laugh or two. Sometimes people just need to talk with someone who will listen in order to feel better. It is a merciful thing just to be willing to actively listen.

We can shop locally, especially at this holiday time when store owners depend on revenue gained during the last quarter of the year to keep them in business. By and large, those store owners and their employees are also local residents and the first ones to underwrite educational and sporting events for our children and funds for community betterment. If we don’t want to go indoors because of the risk of contagion, we can call in to the store or restaurant and the merchandise or orders will be brought to the curb. Or we can call and ask what precautions are being taken to ensure safety within a store: masks, social distancing, hand sanitizing and so forth to help us decide if we feel safe there. Together we form a tight community and look out for each other.

These are all pretty obvious, but we need to be reminded, especially when there is so much noise abroad. And I will further share with you my personal ways to escape the tumult of our times. Thanks to the marvels of technology, I think of my children and grandchildren as being in the computer room, in a way, where we Zoom with each other regularly.

And I regard my smart TV as a temporary replacement for the plays, musical performances and other cultural events that have of necessity been put on hold.

Netflix and other services allow talented actors to hang out in my family room, available with their performances at the mere flick of a switch. At the moment, I’m watching “Outlander,” a love story couched in time travel. Being transported to a different time can remind us that people have had their challenges whenever they have lived, and by and large survived them.

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By Leah S. Dunaief

Leah Dunaief

Finally, we are in the home stretch, with Election Day soon upon us. Of course this has been no ordinary election experience for Americans. In addition to the usual barrage of electioneering from local and national candidates, we are forced to work around COVID-19 in deciding how to vote.

Some residents, in record numbers, have chosen to mail in their ballots, some have decided to vote early in-person, a novel situation forced into existence by the virus to spread out the voting population and avoid crowds. And some will just show up at their normal polling places at their usual time and do what they always do to cast their ballots.

Whatever you may think of our president, Donald Trump has certainly supercharged the electorate. Voters are out in record numbers, whether to vote for or against him. Joe Biden has not pulled any punches. His main goal in running is to keep President Trump from a second term. And that also seems to be the goal of the voters: either for the man or against him.

I have to confess that I would feel a little envious when I would see pictures of residents, in countries newly emerging from dictatorships, who lined up for hours and miles to cast their votes in their first exercise of democracy. Many in the United States were generally uninspired to vote, often letting the minority who came to the polls decide who would govern us. We were often apathetic about voting and about politics in general. But not this year. So that’s a good thing.

A not so good thing is that we stand in red vs. blue partisan formation, aggressively shouting our views and often disparaging the other side’s beliefs. Dialogue is one matter, screaming matches are something else, something totally unproductive and ultimately injurious to those others with whom we are otherwise proudly united into one country.

In an attempt to simplify the positions of the local candidates, we are dedicating much of this issue to their views. We as journalists are in the unique and privileged position of having access to them. We invite them, individually for each race with their opponent(s), to a Zoom meeting to answer questions put to them by our editorial board. This typically takes about an hour and a half. We then write up their answers as informational articles, passing on what we have learned. Those stories can be found in a separate section elsewhere in this paper.

In our usual end pages for opinion, we offer our endorsements of the candidates. These can be found on the page opposite this column and are based on the interviews and whatever else we might know about them after following them as we covered the news. Of course, these are only our opinions, and we urge you to learn about the candidates and make your own decisions as to whom you will give your vote. We merely share our impressions with you, feeling it our duty since we have personally interviewed them.

The following is a list of local races for which we have held interviews with the candidates:

1st Congressional District

Nancy S. Goroff (D) & Lee M. Zeldin (R)

3rd Congressional District

Thomas R. Suozzi (D) & George A.D. Santos (R)

State Senator 1st Senatorial District

Laura A. Ahearn (D) & Anthony H. Palumbo (R)

State Senator 2nd Senatorial District

Mike Siderakis (D) & Mario R. Mattera (R)

State Senator 5th Senatorial District

James F. Gaughran (D) & Edmund J. Smyth (R)

2nd Assembly District

Laura Jens-Smith (D) & Jodi Giglio (R)

4th Assembly District

Steven Englebright (D) & Michael S. Ross (R)

8th Assembly District

Dylan G. Rice (D) & Michael J. Fitzpatrick (R)

10th Assembly District

Steve Stern (D) & Jamie R. Silvestri (R)

12th Assembly District

Keith Brown (R) & Michael Marcantonio (D)

We hope we have helped. Whatever you decide, please vote.   

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METRO photo

By Leah Dunaief

Leah Dunaief

A friend is planning to retire at the end of the year. His wife is already retired, and we three talked about the future. Since none of us has jobs with pensions, they are understandably trying hard to discern economic trends for the investments they hope will carry them through their golden years. Currently their money is mainly in stocks, which are doing well enough, but they, and the rest of us, have duly noted the disconnect between the stock market and the economy.

The stock market, of course, is not the economy but rather is thought to be one predictor of future economic trends at least six months ahead. There are others as well, and one place to get some insight is the PBS program, “Consuelo Mack WealthTrack.” Mack is the host of this weekly financial program, and in the tradition of “Wall Street with Louis Rukeyser,” which ran on the same channel (13) and in the same time slot (Friday, 7:30 p.m.) from 1970 to 2002, a guest each time discusses with her their area of expertise.

Originally broadcast on Oct. 9, a recent guest was economic guru Nancy Lazar, who spoke of four forces she sees as driving the economy to a powerful comeback. The first is, as you may have guessed, technology, which helps make companies more profitable. Lazar emphasized the importance of reinvestment in their companies by executives in order to stay up to date and to increase productivity.

As an example, she offers the sad story of Sears vs. the strong growth of Amazon. Businesses must keep up or be left behind. Technology, especially software, is a critical driver in a strong recovery. Banks are another example. Their movement to online services has been enabled by software developments and now COVID considerations using that software. And as she points out, the United States is the technology leader.

A second driver is housing, which brings with it so many related businesses and jobs: carpenters, painters, spacklers, roofers, plumbers, electricians, cesspool servicers, landscapers, driveway pavers, furniture and carpeting salesmen, and on and on. Housing is doing well, driven by exceptionally low mortgage interest rates, demand from millennials and now single family homes for COVID refugees from the cities.

A third driver for Lazar is manufacturing. She refers to the Rust Belt as her “favorite emerging market.” Disruption in the supply chains due to the pandemic have made companies aware of how much safer it is to make it here if they are going to sell it here. This has even become something of a national security issue. She counts 176 companies that have moved back to or started up in the United States since the beginning of 2020. States like South Carolina, Tennessee and Alabama have benefited.

And the fourth is capital spending. Lazar believes that the reinvestment that companies have made in their businesses as a result of the huge tax cuts has been underreported and underappreciated. While many companies have indeed increased their dividends and bought back shares, she has tracked reinvestment from some of that windfall and feels that will result in higher productivity, higher profits and more jobs. In order to grow, companies must reinvest, and when they do, the economy grows. A business cycle spurred by reinvestment — building new plants, hiring and training new workers -— lasts 30 years.

Meanwhile, many are out of work and there is a lot of pain. Lazar also recognizes that in every recovery, not all sectors improve. But she advocates for more business reinvestment to produce more jobs and believes that will lower unemployment to half by next year. Without a further stimulus package, she envisions a handoff from government to the private sector as a driver for healing unemployment. Consumers, meanwhile, are turning more conservative, having been hit by two shocks in the last decade: recession in 2008 and COVID now.

While Nancy Lazar is not an investment advisor, but rather an economist, she has pointed out areas that might be ripe for investment. Good luck to us all!

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By Leah S. Dunaief

Leah Dunaief 

Blame it all on the pandemic, but in an effort to practice social distancing from my refrigerator, I have seriously begun to binge. On what am I binging? I plead guilty to the following definition of binging from my cell phone browser: “watching multiple episodes of a television program over a short period of time.”

Now I am not exactly an innocent when it comes to watching a serialized story all at once. Given the opportunity, I did just that with the last year of “Downton Abbey.” I got all the coming installments at once in return for a donation to PBS, and I stayed up past three o’clock in the morning, too hypnotized to turn off the TV until the series had ended. I guess that was the tip off to my plot-addicted personality. The reveal is that I love stories, and like the monarch lover of Scheherazade, Persian King Shahryar, in “One Thousand and One Nights,” I cannot leave a tale in the middle when I have the opportunity to see how it ends, regardless of my fatigue.

So on a recommendation, I started watching “The Crown,” and you guessed it. This marvelous series, a historical drama about Elizabeth II, the Windsors, and some of the events that have marked her reign, captivated me.

The first season starts with the marriage of Elizabeth and Philip, Duke of Edinburgh in 1947, to the end of her sister Margaret’s involvement with Group Captain Peter Townsend in 1955. After dinner each night, I turned on the television and watched all the stories filmed to this point until I fell asleep in my chair.

I eagerly await the start of the fourth season, which I believe will happen Nov. 15 and include Margaret Thatcher’s premiership and more on Lady Diana Spencer. The fifth and sixth seasons are to cover the years in the 21st century. Sadly, though, I will be limited only to one episode at a time because I am caught up.

The problem with a series is that sooner or later, they end. I guess they just run out of juice or the talented people involved want to move on to something else. Having gone as far as permitted with “The Crown,” I started casting around for another compelling show and stumbled upon “Grace and Frankie,” with an incredible cast: Lily Tomlin, Jane Fonda, Sam Waterston, Martin Sheen and a seemingly endless list of talented actors.

Far from being an historical drama, this series could only run in today’s world. Begun in 2015 and scheduled to finish in 2021, after filming resumes, the story begins when the lawyer husbands of Grace and Frankie announce that they are not only business partners for the past 40 years but also have been lovers for the last 20. They are “coming out” and wish to be married. The two couples, their relationships redrawn, now have to deal with their revised circumstances, and as they move forward in this comedy-drama, their lives touch on so many current themes with sympathy and occasional belly-laughter results.

Both couples, forced to recognize their advanced years, deal with physical limitations, retirement issues, health insurance frustrations, bigoted elderly parents, interracial relationships, sexual needs and computer challenges. Both couples have adult children, who bring into the plots some of the pain and satisfactions of the twenty-somethings: raising young children, not wanting children, addiction, being able to afford buying a home, and worrying how to take care of older parents who don’t want to acknowledge aging.

It is primarily the story, though, of two women, Grace and Frankie, who could not be more different. They cannot stand to be in the same room with each other at the start, yet we see how they slowly come together in trying to deal with their mutually altered circumstances. The characters are well drawn by the authors and actors, and they ultimately reveal much about the value of supportive friendships between women. Can Grace and Frankie, two women in their 70s, survive being outcasts? The answer is a resounding YES!

Be assured, there are already 78 episodes with more on the way, enough for a great binge.

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By Leah S. Dunaief

Leah Dunaief

For some reason, this book tickles me, maybe because of the ending. And maybe because I am always interested in how women manage to balance being a wife, mother, housekeeper and cook with a demanding job outside the home. I haven’t read the book yet, only the review, but that was enough to hook me.

The book is Agent Sonya by Ben Macintyre, and yes, it is a spy story. The reviewer, Kati Marton, writing in the Book Review section of the Sunday New York Times, calls the author “John le Carre’s nonfiction counterpart.” The main character in the book, Sonya, is based on a real person, Ursula Kuczynski. Born in a prosperous, bourgeois German family, she suffered a blow from a policeman’s rubber truncheon when she was 16 and participating in a street demonstration in the 1920s as Nazis and Communists brawled. It was enough to cause her to sign up with the Communists, who were the only ones apparently willing to shed blood in fighting the Nazis. She was further seduced by their promise of a workers’ utopia.

Her story, a “panoramic account of espionage from Weimar Germany through the Cold War is, above all, a woman’s story.” It is based on Sonya’s own journals, in which she captures “the stressful balancing act of spymaster, mother and lover of several men during the most dangerous decades of the 20th century. Like many supremely successful women, Sonya benefited from men underestimating her.” And by the way, the name, Sonya, means dormouse in Russian.

Are you hooked yet?

The scene shifts from Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists and Mao Zedong’s Communists to Japanese-occupied Manchuria, to the bucolic Cotswolds of England, where she lived during much of WWII as a housewife and mother. In addition to caring for a husband (who was himself a lower level spy with no idea of his wife’s top level position) and two children, she managed spy drops and transmitted coded messages as an expert radio operator and in Morse code, all the while eluding the German, British and American secret services hunting for her. Without ever wearing a military uniform, she held the rank of colonel in the Soviet army. “Domesticity was the perfect cover,” according to reviewer Marton.

Sonya was right up there at the top of intelligence gathering. She was the spymaster to pass along secrets about the atom bomb from brilliant German theoretical physicist Klaus Fuchs. Fuchs worked in Britain and Canada and ultimately at Los Alamos, and she was his handler, sending critical information to Stalin and the Soviet Union. Throughout the war, Fuchs played a seminal role in helping to develop the powerful new weapon. He ultimately confessed to the British to having spied for the Soviets and served a nine-year sentence there, then promptly emigrated to East Germany.

The reviewer delights in descriptions of the flat-footedness and sexism of the British secret services as revealed in the book. Only one member of British M15 “smelled a rat” regarding the Cotswolds “housewife,” another woman, Millicent Bagot. “But her less shrewd (male) colleagues prevented [Bagot] from bagging her prey.” Sonya was interrogated twice inconclusively in 1947 by British intelligence agents. Years later, she was dubbed by the media as “Stalin’s
best spy.”

Sonya too spent the Cold War years in East Germany, leaving England the day before Fuch’s trial began. He did eventually unmask her. And this is the part that tickles me the most. She became an author, assumed the pseudonym of Ruth Werner, and wrote knowingly about spy adventures. Her books became best sellers. She died in Berlin in 2000 at age 93.

Almost all the spies she worked with were caught at some point, but she survived two intense decades, the 1940s and 50s. She led a fascinating life and was clearly exceptionally intelligent. The only pity is that she worked on the wrong side of history, believing in an ideology that was made up of lies.

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Pentimento Marketplace

By Leah S. Dunaief

Leah Dunaief

Local businesses continue to struggle and local employees continue to worry about job security. None of this is new, but perhaps we should stop simply waiting for matters to improve with a rebound in the economy or more stimulus help from Washington and take a more proactive role.

The word is: pivot. Some already have. Here are two examples to share with you. One is a restaurant in Stony Brook village, the other is action taken by two people in their 20s.

Many restaurants already have moved in collateral directions. They have developed take-out orders for curbside pickup, and while that represents only a small fraction of the volume they would normally do, we have given up on the word “normal.” With diners unable to come inside, restaurateurs have sent meals outside.

Then many took the further step, and made the additional investment to create outside dining areas as the world came to learn that eating outside was a lot safer. They built tents, leaving one side open to qualify as “outside,” so as to serve meals in the open air, and local governments cooperated by allowing tents to mushroom in parking lots.

Residents discovered the pleasure of eating “en plein air,” much as artists have when painting. Now some restaurant owners are hurrying to add heating devices to the tents so that patrons will continue to come and be able to eat in comfort despite cooler weather. European cafes have long ago mastered this arrangement.

While these are examples of rearrangements around cooking and serving food in order to survive, Pentimento Restaurant has made a true pivot. In addition to patio dining, which they are fortunate to offer behind their intimate restaurant, they have taken out the tables and chairs in one now unused room and turned it into a marketplace instead.

Featured by the owners are fresh produce, attractively displayed, and all manner of unusual high end foods in jars and cans, many from other countries. There are also prepared foods in the freezer to take out and even some delicious ice cream. Those who dine on the patio are a “captive” audience of potential shoppers as they pass the new offerings on their way out, and they seemed delighted by the selections.

The other example involves my oldest grandson. He is known to some of you as the filmmaker of the historic “One Life to Give,” telling the story of Nathan Hale, Benjamin Tallmadge and the beginnings of the Revolutionary War Culper Spy Ring that was shown at the Staller Center and is being viewed in school districts.

He had moved to the West Coast to continue his chosen career. After some initial success, but with Hollywood now locked down, he and a friend cast around for something else to occupy their creative energies and to pay the rent. Fanciful stickers caught their attention, and they started out by applying them to work calendars and back packs, taking orders to customize such utilitarian products.

They really hit their stride when they customized 32-ounce clear plastic drinking cups, the kind with covers and straws featuring stickers displaying different themes. These they then mailed to initial customers. Putting together their skills, they made a video of themselves creating the stickers and decorating the cups, then showed the video on the internet. A few orders trickled in, then their business took off.

He still intends to return to his dream career, but until then … bottoms up!

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