Brandeis Magazine

Richard Burger notes he is currently negotiating a transition to “retired” from “unemployed” and says, “It is a largely internal transition, reflecting notions of my employability. I still enjoy learning — at professional seminars and symposia around New York City and beyond, and as a senior auditor at the City University, studying things I missed as an undergraduate.” Cantor Sheila Cline created a trio of songs titled “The Blessing of Compassion” for a fundraising concert at Temple Beth Zion in Brookline, Massachusetts, to benefit Temple Beth Shalom in Puerto Rico and the Hebrew Congregation in St. Thomas, which suffered damage during the 2017 hurricanes. She also created, performed in and directed “Purim on Broadway” at Temple Emanuel in Newton, Massachusetts. Madeline Geltman Levine’s new translation of the fiction of Bruno Schulz, Poland’s great Jewish author, was published this year by Northwestern University Press. The volume was commissioned by the Book Institute of the Polish Ministry of Culture. Madeline notes that creating a more vibrant English voice for Schulz was the wildest and most rewarding challenge of her 40-year career as a literary translator. She retired as a professor of Slavic literatures at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2010. Claudia Shuster writes, “I feel fortunate to continue to sing in choruses — do you believe I am singing Haydn’s ‘Creation’ again, 50 years after singing it with Alfred Nash Patterson? I’m also painting portraits after years of doing life drawing, including at Brandeis.” Judith Glatzer Wechsler’s documentary “Svetlana Boym: Exile and Imagination” has had showings at the New York Institute for the Humanities; the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences, in Paris; and UMass Amherst. Each was followed by a Q&A session. Her film “The Passages of Walter Benjamin” was shown at Duke, and another film, “Aby Warburg: Metamorphosis and Memory,” was shown at the Montréal International Festival of Films on Art. Nisha Zenoff’s nonfiction volume “The Unspeakable Loss: How Do You Live After a Child Dies?” was a finalist in American Book Fest’s 2017 Best Books Awards.