40 | APRIL 1 • 2021 

— “rediscovering his voice during 
the 1960s and ’70s.
” His love of 
monster movies led him to create 
Transylvanian Newsletter with a 
friend while they were in eighth 
grade. At Mumford, he started a 
magazine. 

LOVE OF WRITING
While Ovshinsky was caught 
in the middle of his parents’ 
disputes, they each in their own 
way supported his love of writ-
ing. His mother, Norma, gave 
him a diary to encourage his 
writing, and when Harvey was 
17, Stanley and Iris loaned him 
money to start The Fifth Estate, 
Detroit’s first alternative news-
paper. 
After his father died in 2012, 
Ovshinsky said he felt a sense of 
“relief and release and permis-
sion to tell my story,” he explains. 
“That first part of the book is let-
ting the cat out of the bag. That’s 
central to the rest. That’s what 

brought me to the table.” 
Once past his rocky child-
hood, Ovshinsky covers the early 
days of The Fifth Estate, taking 
us through the counterculture 
era of antiwar protests and hip-
pies, including poet and mari-
juana advocate John Sinclair and 
the Detroit Police Department’s 

Red Squad that compiled a thick 
file on Sinclair’s activities. 
Always looking for the next 
creative challenge, Ovshinsky 
became a host and then news 
director at WABX, Detroit’s pro-
gressive rock radio station, at a 
young age. 
He devotes considerable space 
to his television career — pro-
viding tips on finding and keep-

ing a production job and most 
important, how to make stories 
relevant to viewers. 
“Nobody cares about your 
story unless your story feels like 
theirs,” he says. The chapters 
about his less successful efforts 
to sell several screenplays and 
television series are less compel-

ling but perhaps useful to would-
be screenwriters. 
“Detroit was an excellent 
muse,” he says, looking back on 
his career. “Nobel prize-winning 
author Isaac Bashevis Singer 
wrote that every writer needs 
an address. For me, living and 
working in a city like Detroit, so 
famous for its genetically encod-
ed apocalypse-resistant survival 

gene, has been great practice for 
how to endure the tumultuous 
peaks and valleys and challenges 
that come from attempting to 
live a creative life,” he states in 
the book.
In later life, Ovshinsky and 
his wife, Catherine, moved to 
Ann Arbor where they continue 
to live. “Detroit was my mother 
planet, and it was time to be in 
another,” he says.
Education has been the favor-
ite part of his career. Ovshinsky 
has taught writing and creativity 
to young people and adults in a 
variety of schools and settings. 
“Nothing compares to helping 
young people find their own 
voice.” He describes it as “help-
ing people make good noise.” 
Now he does some speaking 
engagements and says, “This 
book is my teaching.” 

Ovshinsky’s book is available at Book 

Beat in Oak Park, Literati in Ann Arbor, 

through the Wayne State University Press 

website and elsewhere.

“NOBODY CARES ABOUT YOUR 
STORY UNLESS YOUR STORY 
FEELS LIKE THEIRS.”

— HARVEY OVSHINSKY

THE VOICE OF DETROIT 
continued from page 39

CROSSING THE SINAI
ABC’s annual broadcast 
of the 1956 film, The Ten 
Commandments, will air on 
Saturday, April 3, starting at 7 
p.m. It’s been quite some time 
since I wrote about the film. 
So, I am “rerunning” a few fun 
facts that you may or may not 
remember — and a couple of 
facts new to this column. 
Most of the cast wasn’t 
Jewish, including Charlton 
Heston, a devout Christian 
(and big Israel supporter), who 
played Moses. Edward G. 
Robinson (as the evil Dathan) 
and Olive Deering (as 
Moses’s sister, Miriam) were 
the only Jewish actors with 
important roles in the film. 
The only credited actor still 
alive is Joanna Merlin, 89. 
She played one of Jethro’s 

three daughters (not the 
one who married Moses). 
There’s a good chance you’d 
recognize Merlin from her 
scores of TV guest shots, 
including playing Judge Lena 
Petrovsky in 43 episodes of 
Law and Order. 
Merlin’s sister, Harriet 
Glickman, died last year, 
age 93. A retired school-
teacher, she got a big N.Y. 
Times obit because in April 
1968, after the death of 
Martin Luther King, she wrote 
Charles Schultz, the creator 
of Peanuts, and urged him to 
put a black child character in 
his comic strip. Schultz wrote 
back and got her consent to 
share her letter with black 
friends and get their input. In 
July 1968, Schultz introduced 
Franklin, the strip’s first black 
character. 
 On April 2, Hulu will begin 
streaming a new documen-
tary, WeWork: Or the Making 
and Breaking of a $47 Billion 

Unicorn. WeWork is an 
office-sharing company that 
attracted massive investment 
and then nearly financially 
collapsed in 2019. The com-
pany is currently valued less 
than the money that investors 
poured into it. 
The co-founder and former 
CEO of WeWork is Adam 
Neumann, 41. For a time, he 
seemed like a Jewish role 
model: born in Israel and a 

veteran of the Israeli navy, 
he permanently settled in the 
U.S. around 2000. This hand-
some and charismatic guy is 
a religious Jew, has a smart 
Jewish wife (who is a first 
cousin of Gwyneth Paltrow) 
and together they have five 
kids.
WeWork wasn’t quite 
a scam, but it was way 
“oversold.” Fortunately, for 
Neumann, most of its debt 
was held by a Japanese bank 
that felt they had too much 
invested to let WeWork fail. 
They “forced” Neumann out 
in 2019, but he walked away 
with a $1.7 billion severance 
package. 
The documentary was 
directed by Oscar-nominated 
filmmaker Jed Rothstein, 47. 
(A dramatic mini-series about 
WeWork is in the works. It 
will co-star Anne Hathaway 
as Rebekah Neumann and 
Jared Leto as Adam, her hus-
band). 

CELEBRITY NEWS

NATE BLOOM COLUMNIST

 NYU/TISCH

ARTS&LIFE

Joanna Merlin is the only 
credited Ten Commandments 
actor still alive.

