Why I read the New Yorker

I remember the first time I picked up a copy of The New Yorker from where it was lying on a friend’s Mother’s kitchen table.  This was sometime in the eighties.  I read one snippet from the “Talk of the Town” and was immediately intrigued.  Another time I found an issue at their house and read an article about pies.  The author was traveling around with her dog in search of the perfect pie.  It was quirky and funny and well-written.  I was hooked. After awhile, I finally got my own subscription and have been reading it ever since.  It’s more than the eclectic mix of articles coupled with fine writing and editing, it informs my worldview in a way that is deeply satisfying.  For instance, recently I was reading a book called “Out of the Shadow” by Rose Cohen, it’s a firsthand account of a Russian Jewish imigrant who came over in the 1890’s from a village in Russia. While reading the story, I thought of “Fiddler on the Roof” and the life in the village, the Czar’s pogroms that pressued Jews to leave the country. In the “Briefly Noted” section of the May 4, 2009 New Yorker, there is a book review of “Wandering Stars” by Shalom Aleichem, the author of the stories that were turned into “Fiddler on the Roof.”  This book starts in a Russian shtetl and ends on New York’s Lower East Side, “capturing, with whimsy and pathos, the experience of the Jewish diaspora at the beginning of the twentieth century.” It’s connections like these that keep my faithfully reading the New Yorker, week in and week out.