Two on the Aisle: A Dramatized Reading

PSU History professor David A. Horowitz presents literary and narrative selections from Two on the Aisle: A Judaic American Tale of Romance and Creative Dreams, his recently published biography of his parents, accompanied by PowerPoint and Gershwin musical excerpts.

Two on the Aisle: A Judaic American Tale of Romance and Creative Dreams, is a hybrid cultural history and family chronicle that traces the aspirations, experiences, and creative works of the author’s parents, Nathan and Dorothy Horowitz, in an account encompassing many of the central themes and contradictions of twentieth-century American and Jewish history and identity. The story describes how two offspring of Eastern European immigrants combined a struggle for material security with literary efforts that blended Yiddish-flavored humor, social compassion, religious devotion, and secular concerns with piercing meditations on life’s disappointments and fragility. While sampling fragments of the couple’s three-act play that enjoyed a brief run off-Broadway in the 1950s and excerpts from published poetry, short stories, sketches, and essays, Two on the Aisle draws on an archive of correspondence, journal entries, and unpublished work to provide a fully human dimension to this remarkable story.