From Boris Lurie to the Grateful Dead to Wulf Wolodia Grajonca (Bill Graham) to Boris Lurie

While translating one prose text by Boris Lurie about his time in the Stutthof concentration camp and another about his complicated relationship to his languages (Yiddish, Russian, German, and English), I was listening to the Grateful Dead. When I noticed that juxtaposition, I remembered that Bill Graham, the promoter of concerts by the Dead and countless other bands until his death in 1991, was born Wulf Wolodia Grajonca in Berlin in 1931. In 1939, he was sent to France and then to the United States to live in a foster home in New York City. And like Boris Lurie's mother, grandmother, and sister, Wulf Grajonca's mother was murdered in the Holocaust. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 9 February 2023)