The following is a guest post from Beth Kaplan, author of Finding the Jewish Shakespeare: the Life and Legacy of Jacob Gordin, who will be speaking at the Y on April 8.

New York City, for me as for many, is filled with family and friends. But it is also a city of ghosts.  My father, Jacob Gordin Kaplan, was a left-wing New Yorker who had to move to Canada in 1950, thanks to Joseph McCarthy. Every year, we flew or sailed back from Nova Scotia to visit Dad’s birthplace, making the rounds of countless relatives - many of my grandmother’s ten brothers and sisters, and my grandfather’s six. All of that generation, now, are gone. 

Luckily, though, some were still furiously alive when I began work, in 1982, on my book about my great-grandfather Finding the Jewish Shakespeare: the Life and Legacy of Jacob Gordin. In 1983, how amazed I was to discover that Jacob Gordin’s youngest child, my father’s Aunt Helen, was still living in Queens.  We had never visited and I knew nothing about her because she and my grandmother often argued, as did so many of the Gordins. I went immediately to Queens, to hear a woman of 87 tell stories of growing up in the household of the greatest Yiddish playwright in the world.

All my life, going to New York has been a thrill, but this time – coming to speak at the 92nd Street Y about my great-grandfather’s titanic, tragic life and about my search for him – is especially momentous. This is a New York story, the tale of an immigrant, forced into exile, who arrives penniless on the Lower East Side, and transforms not only his own life but the lives of his fellow Jews around the world, with his dramatic words. 

I have dreamed of honoring my Great-aunt Helen, and all the others who gave me their memories, by bringing their stories back to New York where they belong. On April 8th, thanks to the 92nd Street Y, I will be flying in to do so.