Helen Zelon

New York magazine profiled New York City’s established and rising movers and shakers, including this short list of the most influential voices in public and private education.

One of New York City’s much-heralded new, small high schools, struggling to retain students — and maintain order — in the face of daunting odds.

In a disused church school in a desolate stretch of Coney Island, aspiring athletes
– most possessed of more drive than sheer talent — take the lessons of sports to the classroom.

A seafaring school set in the landlocked heart of Brooklyn, within the time-worn edifice that once housed Bushwick High School. In November 2006, the Harbor School learned it will relocate to Governor’s Island, where it will have its own dock, boats, and ferry service to the Brooklyn “mainland.”

A hidden gem on the edge of New York City, Leon M. Goldstein is a public high school that feels nearly suburban, on the campus of Harvard-by-the-Bay, aka Kingsborough Community College.

Guidance for kids (and panicked New York City parents) facing a labyrinthine, daunting high school application process: Make smart choices that don’t feel like you’re gambling with your child’s entire future.

Help your kid become a happy, sound, and independent sleeper (eventually).

One of parenthood’s great joys is celebrating baby’s first holiday season. Candles sparkle a little brighter now, and the pine boughs smell even more pungent. But the season can mean extra demands, too, with lots of socializing, family visits, and travel away from home. Sound stressful? Read on.

Happiness is the Holy Grail of parenthood: Every parent wants their child to live a happy life. For help, parents often turn to experts, consultants, and parenting books, looking for ways to insure their child’s happiness. There’s so much advice out there that parents can feel overwhelmed — and like they’ll never get this ‘parenting’ thing right. If this sounds familiar, read on.

Say you’re driving on a four-lane highway en route to meet a friend. You spy a flock of baby quails trying to cross to the other side. Their parents swoop and dive all around them. What would you do?

For an existential rationale in favor of simple kindness, read more.

A writer goes looking for a story and discovers more questions than answers, below the Mason-Dixon.

In life, we aim for the Big Moments, the extremes, the pinnacles and valleys that define life’s contours. This story tells instead of the unsung and small, those experiences that somehow resonate and linger, the questions that are hard to answer, that gnaw and nag in the small hours of the night. …

From Dean Street’s cracked sidewalk, hard by Triangle Sports and Bergen Tile, number 475 looks nondescript. It’s a nowhere sort of place, six stories of squat yellow-brick symmetry with tidy window frames painted green. But on the fourth floor of this generic industrial building, Samuel Zygmuntowicz, world-renowned master luthier, is at work creating something extraordinary. “It’s an artist’s space on the outskirts,” Zygmuntowicz explains. He says it with a hint of a smile, after offering up a soft-skinned handshake that could crush a small bird. …

Everyone knows that Brooklyn is crawling with writers and other artistic types. What may be surprising is how many of these creatives are making children’s books–and how deep the roots of children’s literature run under the brownstone-lined streets. Read the story that ran in BKLYN magazine.

Across cultures and centuries, certain narratives persist: stories of creation, of the battle between good and evil, love and hate, the righteous and the damned. This story is not universal but particular, a specific myth-that’s-not, a true legend peculiar to my family and rehearsed all the years of my childhood, as my mother told and retold her tale. It unfolds in four parts and reveals layer after layer of truth, received memoir and longing for a lost time, a lost world, a life less complicated and dark.

In part I, Cesia Dymetman and her family are living in the Warsaw Ghetto, during World War II. Rudolf Natter, a German officer, controls much of Ghetto life, enforcing a brutally random discipline, even as he turns a blind eye to smugglers and, occasionally, brings illegal weapons and identity papers into the Ghetto himself. Cesia and her father inadvertently survive the liquidation that sends her mother and sister to Treblinka, they secure false identity papers for Cesia from Natter. Father and daughter settle into a new daily routine, until circumstances force Cesia to make an instantaneous — and irrevocable — choice.

In every life, some things are known, and others, mysterious. This story, my mother’s, is strung together like beads on a long silk thread. It begins in the early months of World War II, in the Warsaw Ghetto, and traverses hundreds of kilometers and more than a thousand days. In part III, Cesia learns to survive the last years of the war by impersonating a Polish refugee.

Stories with clear narratives satisfy a real human craving for order and understanding; they unfold from their beginning, thicken in the middle, and resolve at the end. But stories from life often lack that linearity, looping from event to event with sometimes startling gaps in fact and logic — the contours of a lost terrain. In Part IV, Cesia returns to Warsaw.

A working-class Brooklyn community mourns a favorite son.

Some days fit the mold, others don’t. A few simply reinvent themselves, again and again.

Friendship, loss, and a fancy baking pan.

Sketch of New York City’s official mayoral homestead, for www. newyorkmag.com. Learn about Giuliani-era graffitti (shocking!) here.

Longing for winter in sunny Southern California: a story from a suburban childhood, via Warsaw. Read more.

THE TRUE STORY of the only all-male, full-drag Shakespeare company in a medium-security mens’ prison in the U.S., first published in American Theatre, and later the basis for the prize-winning Sundance documentary Shakespeare Behind Bars. Read a related essay here.

What happens when a well-intentioned guest gets robbed — inside a medium-security men’s prison.

An actor’s epiphany, thanks to mortality, Marc Blitzstein, and the emotional quicksand of new motherhood. Read more.

In a city where change is the only constant, a century-old synagogue endures. Read more.

The bond between grandparents and grandchildren is singular and precious. But as the older generation ages, youngsters can witness disturbing changes in their grandparents’ physical and cognitive abilities. Confusion, fear, and distaste for what they’re seeing can cause them to pull away. And ’sandwich generation’ parents can end up feeling torn.
This story, which was featured on CBS News and nominated for a Front Page Newswomens’ Award by Family Circle editors, explores how parents can keep kids and elders connected, when the double challenges of growing up and aging threaten to pull them apart.