BTW his daughter Ilana is the Official Folklorist of Queens, NY, "most ethnically diverse county in the nation." Two vignettes from Queensistan:
Immediately after I got the job, I ran into an English acquaintance of mine on the subway. I told him I got a job as the Queens folklorist. He looked stunned: "Wot? Why’d they hire an American?" So now when I tell people I’m the Queens folklorist I quickly add, "The borough, not the lady."
. . . people from neighboring countries on distant continents are now literally neighbors in New York. For instance, a relatively new Turkish community has settled smack in between a Greek community in Astoria and an Armenian community in Sunnyside and Woodside. You could superimpose a map of Greece, Turkey, and Armenia and the settlement pattern here would roughly align with the map. This baffled me considering the political history of those three countries. After pondering how to phrase the question delicately, I asked a young man in the Turkish grocery store in Sunnyside, "Isn’t it hard for you to be living between these two communities?" He replied, "Well, you know it’s like when you break up with your boyfriend—you still want to know what’s up with him."
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