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After four decades as a reporter, columnist, and editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Philadelphia Daily News, and inquirer.com, I'm devoting myself to projects relating to my parents.
Five years ago, while cleaning out my childhood home in Wilmington, Delaware, I made an exciting discovery. I found four notebooks filled with Polish poetry and prose written by my mother while she hid in a sewer from June 1, 1943, until the city of Lviv was liberated at the end of July 1944. Stay tuned for new developments in the translation and publication of this material.
I've spoken widely about my parents, whose lives I chronicled in three cover stories in the Inquirer's Sunday magazine.
My Mother's Day 1983 article, A Bird in the Wind, published five months after my mother's death, was the first English-language account of her 14-month survival with nine other Jews in the sewers beneath Lviv. The Polish director Agnieszka Holland's Oscar-nominated 2011 movie "In Darkness" was about this survival story.
My 1985 article Journey To My Father's Holocaust, in which I traveled with my father to Auschwitz and Buchenwald and other places of his past, was a finalist for the 1986 Pulitzer Prize in feature writing and won awards from the Overseas Press Club of America and the Associated Press Managing Editors.
In 1986, at a dinner of the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors in the grand ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York, hundreds of survivors gave me a standing ovation for a spoken letter to my late mother.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, my mother's hometown in Ukraine became accessible to the West, and in 1992 my wife and I were the first Jews in a generation to visit. Our presence in Turka-nad-Stryjem yielded 15 hours of film footage, a half-hour TV documentary produced and directed by Janine Jaquet Biden, "Visiting the Past," and my Mother's Day 1995 article Speaking For the Ghosts: A story for my mother.
I've been a senior editor at CNN.com in Atlanta, and a reporter at the Kansas City Star and the Wilmington News-Journal. I reported throughout the Middle East for Universal Press Syndicate during the Iranian revolution in 1979. My articles have appeared in the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal, and many other publications. I hold bachelor's and master's degrees from the University of Missouri School of Journalism. In 2005, I taught journalism at Beijing Foreign Studies University in China.
I live in Philadelphia with my wife, Ronda B. Goldfein, executive director of the AIDS Law Project of Pennsylvania. Our 1992 wedding was attended by millions who read about it -- and about my mother -- in the epilogue of James McBride's international bestseller The Color of Water.
