Because They Needed Me: Rita Miljo and the Orphaned Baboons of South Africa

Literary Nonfiction. Nature. Travel. In May of 2007, noted American poet and novelist and son of Holocaust refugees Michael Blumenthal went to South Africa to volunteer at C.A.R.E., a rehabilitation center for orphaned and injured baboons founded by Rita Miljo. Rita was a Lithuanian-born childhood member of the Hitler Youth who had gone on to have a life as adventure- filled as Beryl Markham's in West With the Night.

Michael Blumenthal, formerly Director of Creative Writing at Harvard, graduated from the Cornell Law School in 1974 and is currently Visiting Professor of Law and Co-Director of the Immigration Clinic at The WVU College of Law. His collection of short stories, The Greatest Jewish- American Lover in Hungarian History, was published in 2014, and his eighth book of poems, NO HURRY: POEMS 2000-2012 in 2013 by Etruscan Press. He is the author of the memoir All My Mothers and Fathers. His novel WEINSTOCK AMONG THE DYING (Pleasure Boat Studio, 2008), won Hadassah Magazine's Ribelow Prize for the best work of Jewish fiction. His collection of essays from Central Europe, WHEN HISTORY ENTERS THE HOUSE, was published in 1998 by Pleasure Boat Studio. In his free time, he reads and thinks about primates of all sorts.