From left, the Tampa JCC & Federation’s Professional Societies honorees: Rob Lewenson, Cindy Sper, Deborah Rosenthal, John Couris and Mark Wright. Photos by Amy Scherzer Expert and emerging leadership was celebrated with a timeless Jewish tradition stand-up comedy at the Professional Societies of the Tampa JCCs & Federation annual awards dinner. The sold-out
Jed Perl on Reading Nick Lyons’s
Fire in the Straw
March 12, 2021
A few months ago my friend Nick Lyons, long admired for books about his passion for fishing, published a beautiful memoir,
Fire in the Straw. Reading the book has underscored, in a personal way, the gap between life and literature that so many of us take for granted. I’m familiar with quite a few of the stories in
Fire in the Straw subtitled
Notes on Inventing a Life from the conversations that Nick and I have had over the years. But as I’m turning the pages of the book everything feels new. That’s where the difference between life and literature comes in. I had heard about some of the traumas of Nick’s childhood. But I hadn’t met the boy he introduces in his memoir “I was skinny and freckled and had a queasy feeling” who stands at the entrance to the “gray gabled” boarding school where his mother, after the death of his father, leaves him to pretty much fend for himself for a couple of ye