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New York paper lays off Boston boy

Nat Hentoff, who grew up on the Roxbury/Dorchester line, went to Boston Latin and got excommunicated by three rabbis in Tewksbury, has just been let go by the Village Voice after writing about politics and jazz there for 50 years.

Excerpt from Boston Boy, Hentoff's memoir of growing up in Jewish Boston:

... Eating a huge salami sandwich very slowly, I sit in the middle of the morning on our porch, which overlooks Warren Street, around the corner from Howland. Warren Street is the main route to our shul, our synagogue, a block away. It is Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the day of fasting, the day on which God marks down the fate of every Jew for the year ahead. Some of the Jews who look up at the slovenly, munching boy on the porch shake their heads in disgust. I stare at them, taking another bite. One old man, with a white beard almost as long as our rabbi's, shakes his fist at me. Another old man spits. ...

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Comments

"Boston Boy" is a tremendous book, and especially appealing if you grew up in this area (or like jazz, of course.)

Suldog
http://jimsuldog.blogspot.com

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In Boston Boy, I especially enjoyed Hentoff's account of his collegiate days at Northeastern, then a very hardscrabble school, during which he learned a lot about journalism and civil liberties while working for the school paper.

This makes me sad. When I lived in New York, I liked Hentoff's column -- he was provocative and willing to stick his neck out at times. That's the end of an era for the Village Voice.

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