In 1948 Martin Stolzenberg received the Principal’s Award for writing skills from Dr. Pullman at P.S. 200 in Brooklyn, New York. Other than that he has minimal literary credentials. However, during his business career, as a market researcher, in New York, he wrote thousands of reports, which required writing skills to synthesize large bodies of information into coherent reports and recommendations. He never expected to use those skills for anything like The Advocacy Newsletter!

Stolzie retired to Ann Arbor in 2006 with his wife Gale, to be near their daughter and her family. While here, he also fulfilled a long time fantasy of becoming a basketball coach by assisting at Pioneer High School. His wife Gale quipped, “He is well suited to working with high school boys, because he never grew up.”

In 2011, he became a board member of Ann Arbor’s newly founded street newspaper, Groundcover News, and began to write regular commentary articles on happenings in the town, social and political events. The publisher soon objected to some of his articles because they were too political, and as a 501 C (3), they were required to be apolitical to keep their non-profit status. So he started to send his commentaries, which he called The Advocacy Newsletter: Connecting the… Dots, to family and friends. This has grown into a blog that reaches hundreds, soon to be thousands, of readers.

This gave him the courage to undertake writing his memoir, Through Brooklyn Eyes. It came about this way. On a whim, he decided to write a short piece about an incident that had occurred between him and his father. In later years he came to realize that this moment encapsulated the essence of their relationship. That eventually became one of his commentaries, “When a Knish is More Than a Knish,” that was published by Moment magazine.

As a follow up to this, he wrote a short piece about his mother, followed by a reprinting of the eulogy he had written on the death of his brother. At Gale’s suggestion, he began to turn this into a memoir. In doing this he wanted to leave a kind of legacy for his children and grandchildren to better know who he was. Then he thought that others might be interested because his story is not unique, but it is of probably of general interest for people to know what it was like in that time and place. Originally self-published in a hard copy, Through Brooklyn Eyes can be bought on Amazon/Kindle for all of .99 cents.

Stolzie’s Webmaster

Janet lives and works in Ann Arbor, Mi, where she combines her work as a musician and teacher with writing, and with work helping other writers such as myself. She is also a committed activist with the Washtenaw County Democratic Party, and helps to write its new website, washtenawdems.org  You can reach her at jtcancan@gmail.com