The legends of Schulman

Grace Schulman’s collection of essays, First Loves and Other Adventures, chronicles the lives of others through stories told with poetic exactitude. From the East Hampton Star:

Ms. Schulman carefully situates the subject of each essay. She “places” writers as familiar to us as, say, Sylvia Plath among the stones at the Yaddo artists’ colony. She places Steven Sondheim (rightly, I believe) squarely in the precincts of poetry, hailing him as a bard, indisputably. From her own family history, she describes her first awareness of and sensitivity to poetry — in hearing her father recite a poem in Polish, not English.

The essays are linked by the story of her aunt's tragic death in the Warsaw ghetto:

“Helen had moved to the Warsaw ghetto, where her husband had died in a typhoid epidemic. She believed she would be deported to a concentration camp, for there were rumors of the forthcoming ghetto liquidation. A survivor of Auschwitz, then in Israel, reported that he had known Helen in the ghetto. He said that he had seen her climb the tower of a municipal building, run to the ledge, and pull down the Polish flag from its staff. With a strength that seemed to startle her, she ripped the flag into shreds. Then she stood for a while, holding the red cloth and smiling before she was shot down by a Nazi guard. ‘It was an act of revenge on the Poles for having given her away,’ Beta [another aunt in Israel] wrote. ‘Her act gave that man courage to survive.’ ”