Donn O'Meara (July 30, 1924 - September 8, 2004) [1] was an author, linguist and anthropologist. His most well known book, Living Jewish was published in 1972.
Son of noted American author Walter O'Meara and Esther (née Arnold) O'Meara, Donn's mixed, Irish and Ashkenazi Jewish heritage would prove a formative aspect of his life. O'Meara grew up in Minnesota and then lived in New York City as a teen. By the mid-1940s O'Meara had become fluent in several languages, eventually learning Spanish, French, Portuguese, Catalan, Italian, German, Japanese and Hebrew. [1]
While attending Bard College, O'Meara recognized that he was Jewish due to being born of a Jewish mother. He spent the summer of 1942 in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. He arrived back at school in the fall able to speak Galitzianer Yiddish. [1]
Prior to being drafted into World War II, O'Meara married a woman from Nicaragua named Cecilia Pereira. During the war worked in London, England for the OSS. O'Meara and Cecilia returned to Bard College after the war. They would parent five children together: Gabriel, Suzana, Miriam, Daniel and Dina. [1]
O'Meara supported himself primarily through work in the advertising and public relations field in Caracas, New York and Rio de Janeiro. [1]
While in Caracas, in 1972, O'Meara wrote Living Jewish which was published in 1978 in New York and London. For the book, O'Meara assumed the pseudonym, "Michael Asheri" explaining, "Who would buy a book like that by somebody named 'O'Meara'?" [1] The book became a seminal guide to living as a religious Jew in the 1970s. It is divided into nine major sections not including the Preface, glossary and index.
Preface
Section 1: The Jewish PeopleSection 2: The Jewish Religion
Section 3: The Jewish Life Cycle
Section 4: Illness, Medicine, Death, Burial and Mourning
Section 5: Daily Jewish Life
Section 6: Prayer, Private and Communal
| Section 7: The Holidays
Section 8: Just for Jews
Section 9: Seen Through Jewish Eyes
|
In 1977, the O'Mearas moved to Israel where they settled in Petah Tikva. At that time Cecilia changed her name to "Zippora". O'Meara then began work for the Israel Military Industries Corporation until his retirement in the 1990s. [1]
In Moose: Chapters From My Life (the posthumously published, 2013 autobiography of Academy Award winning songwriter, Robert B. Sherman) the author devotes a chapter to his time shared with his friend at Bard College. Sherman credits O'Meara with giving him the nickname, "Moose" which is also the title of the autobiography. [2]
Isaac Bashevis Singer was a Polish-born Jewish-American novelist, short-story writer, memoirist, essayist, and translator. Some of his works were adapted for the theater. He wrote and published first in Yiddish and later translated his own works into English with the help of editors and collaborators. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1978. A leading figure in the Yiddish literary movement, he was awarded two U.S. National Book Awards, one in Children's Literature for his memoir A Day of Pleasure: Stories of a Boy Growing Up in Warsaw (1970) and one in Fiction for his collection A Crown of Feathers and Other Stories (1974).
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Vasily Semyonovich Grossman was a Soviet writer and journalist. Born to a Jewish family in Ukraine, then part of the Russian Empire, Grossman trained as a chemical engineer at Moscow State University, earning the nickname Vasya-khimik because of his diligence as a student. Upon graduation, he took a job in Stalino in the Donets Basin. In the 1930s he changed careers and began writing full-time, publishing a number of short stories and several novels.
Richard Morton Sherman is an American songwriter who specialized in musical films with his brother Robert B. Sherman. According to the official Walt Disney Company website and independent fact checkers, "the Sherman Brothers were responsible for more motion picture musical song scores than any other songwriting team in film history."
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Samuel Sherman was the court composer and conductor for Emperor Franz Josef I of the Austro-Hungarian Empire between 1903 and 1909.