Rye Patch's digital competitor today published some original on-the-ground reporting here in Rye. Yes – I’m shocked – but I’m also delighted with their work-product, their subject selection and it’s subtext of immigration.
Many local media profiles have been done about Rye’s Moy family – but I for one always enjoy reading their powerful story of immigration, hard work and proud success.
On a sadder immigration note, this week marked the passing of one of America’s foremost academic writer-scholars whose love of American slang and colloquialisms combined with his masterful command of English and Arabic allowed him to transfix and enlighten readers, TV audiences and heads of state. Fouad Ajami, as Brett Stevens of the Wall Street Journal writes, was - a great American. Here are links to both stories -
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Rye Family Dry Cleaner Spans Three Generations, 58 Years
Find out what's happening in Ryewith free, real-time updates from Patch.
“RYE, N.Y. – Eric Moy has grown up with three generations of customers at his family’s 58-year-old dry cleaning business in Rye.
Moy is the third generation in his family to work at Fong’s Cleaners, which was named for his aunt’s husband. His grandfather established the business in 1956 and then his father, Sam, took it over in 1968 and runs it to this day.”
Fouad Ajami, Great American
“His genius lay in the breadth of his scholarship and the quality of his human understanding.
Fouad Ajami would have been amused, but not surprised, to read his own obituary in the New York Times “Edward Said, the Palestinian cultural critic who died in 2003, accused [Ajami] of having 'unmistakably racist prescriptions,'" quoted obituarist Douglas Martin.
Thus was Said, the most mendacious, self-infatuated and profitably self-pitying of Arab-American intellectuals—a man whose account of his own childhood cannot be trusted—raised from the grave to defame, for one last time, the most honest and honorable and generous of American intellectuals, no hyphenation necessary.
Ajami, who died of prostate cancer Sunday in his summer home in Maine, was often described as among the foremost scholars of the modern Arab and Islamic worlds, and so he was. He was born in 1945 to a family of farmers in a Shiite village in southern Lebanon and was raised in Beirut in the politics of the age.”
You can read the rest here at WSJ.com – subscription required -
http://online.wsj.com/articles/fouad-ajami-great-american-1403564092?tesla=y&mg=reno64-wsj
