Pedro Lilienfeld

When Armin, my younger son, was about 2 1/2 years old, I remember distinctly that as he looked out of our living room window in New Rochelle, NY, one evening, he saw the Moon, pointed at it and asked: “Moon not fall down?”. With a mixture of fatherly pride and surprise I tried my best…

Repeatedly we hear these days about the damaging effect on the education and future prospects for a successful career that children would suffer if normal schooling and exposure to other children were to be stymied, delayed or interrupted due to the limitations imposed by Covid-19 preventive measures. I would like to disagree about the inevitability…

In February of 2007 Evelyn and I travelled to the Middle East for the first time and this is a summarized travelogue of that trip We just spent almost three stupendous weeks in the Middle East, specifically in Jordan and then Egypt. We would like to share some of the salient – as well as…

The following was a letter that I wrote to the local Lexington weekly newspaper where it was published in the early 2000s I live in a Lexington neighborhood blessed with a canopy of trees, an unusual feature in a world of ever growing asphalt and concrete jungles. Recently, however, the ever present and unbearable noise…

I have avoided until now to write about a subject that is rather painful to me: animal suffering. My awareness to their predicaments probably started with my witnessing the painful death by poisoning of my beloved dog, Putzi, in Quito, when I was 14 years old. It was a shock which remained a searing memory…

Written in late 2016 It is very hard to write about Freya. She remains too present and alive, even more than 10 weeks after she left us. But, I’ll be valiant and try to reminisce about her, although my eyes still get wet with her remembrance. Perhaps it is difficult for others to understand the…

A cultural subject that has attracted my attention over the years has been the western geographic and temporal variability of upsurges in the visual arts, music and literature, especially the former two. I find it most interesting how there are specific periods of great flourishing as well as drought in these arts in each country.…

In my autobiography I mentioned, very briefly, Lucette Descaves as being the second wife of Louis Fourestier, who married her shortly after my grandmother Dola passed on at age 92. He was then 75 and Lucette, 61. She was quite a remarkable person and merits far more than a mere mention in my memoirs. She…

In my joint autobiography, Pétain’s Praise and Other Incongruities, I frequently mentioned and cited Louis Fourestier, the second husband of my paternal grandmother, Julia, alias Dola. I first met Fourestier in 1936 on my arrival in Paris as a two-year old child and then, repeatedly, over the years, as an adult. He was, obviously, the…

One of my great loves, starting in my teenage years, has been music, principally what is considered classical music. That love was, most probably, stimulated by early exposure, first in Paris mostly subconsciously, and then by more direct influence from my father, in Quito. I remember the first piece that I loved to hear, over…