What follows is at heart a UConn love story, one still going strong as it nears the half-century mark.
It is excerpted from the recently published “Dual Identities: Living in Meier’s Shadow” by Arthur M. Horwitz ’76 (CLAS). In the memoir, Horwitz bookends his UConn story between tales of a childhood that includes delivering papers and mucking stalls in a tight-knit Jewish neighborhood of New Haven, Connecticut, and a newspaper career that — begun on said paper route — cycles through copyboy, reporter, bureau chief, and publisher stages to culminate in the establishment of the Arthur M. Horwitz Collection at the University of Michigan and the author’s enshrinement in the Michigan Journalism Hall of Fame.
Layered throughout is the “Meier” of the title, the younger brother of Horwitz’s mother who, unlike her, did not survive the Holocaust. His absent presence has permeated Horwitz’s life and was one factor in his career choice.
It also helped Horwitz recognize “even as a paperboy” that every individual has a story to tell, and it is one of the things that made him “fall in love even then with a profession” focused on finding and telling those stories, on “giving voice to people whose voices are unheard or underrepresented. … As a child of a survivor,” he considers, “that is six million individuals, each with a life, a path, a reflection.”
Horwitz’s mother, Sally, died in 2014 at age 86, but, he says, “I can hear my mother’s voice, ‘You little pisher! You have a collection at the University of Michigan!’”
