I’m sitting in a lovely hotel room just outside of Chicago--a rare experience for me--and enjoying doing nothing. Robin and Steve arrived earlier. I gave them the car and they went shopping. Tonight is Jerry’s wedding; I’m resting, regrouping and enjoying the free wi-fi with two days to tell about.
I got a parking space at 9:30 Wednesday evening; undoubtedly the luckiest day of all. First a long lunch with my cousin Phyllis, shopping with no purchases to show for it, dinner with Karen and Kathryn. All told a satisfying day. Found out the North Shore Hotel in Evanston is still a retirement facility. If I ever decide to come back here, that’s the place. Everything in downtown Evanston and much of Northwestern is accessible on foot and there is train service to downtown Chicago.
Thursday, Betty and I went to Skokie to the Illinois Holocaust Museum. They told us it would take one or two hours to go through; we were there four or five hours. It’s a heart wrenching experience. Original films and oral histories are used to tell the stories of the people whose lives were so drastically affected by Hitler and his war against the Jews.
I am always amazed at how pervasive anti-semitism is, and how easily it is blamed for anything someone doesn't like. Louis Sullivan, not a Jew but with a Jewish partner, whose work was too "different" for the establishment and establishment architects, was accused of creating Jewishness (whatever that means), according to this statement in the exhibit I saw on Tuesday. (Chicago's first architect) John van Osdel says "it's architecture run crazy. It's an experiment in Jewishness like we have never seen before."
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