Grandma's army

I have always been something of a musical snob and only interested in classical music. I therefore missed out on a great artist of our times and only discovered him after he died,  when listening to his prophetic swansong “Hineni”. Nineteen days before his own death, Leonard Cohen issued the album “You Want It Darker”, whose prophetic words were matched to music which was the deepest, darkest and slowest of his career. After my interest was awakened I discovered that Leonard Cohen”s ancestors came from a village in Lithuania called Moletai, just outside of Vilna. The list of people who trace their ancestry to this small town, those who the Nazis and Lithuanians wanted to annihilate, includes many of the greatest Jewish minds of our time. It includes Nobel Prize Laureate Bob Dylan ; Canada’s great international human rights lawyer Irwin Cotler; former Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin ; New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg ; painter Marc Chagall ; foremost American composer Aar...