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.