Jasha M. Levi

Born Jewish in 1921 in Sarajevo, I felt the ripples of Hitler's rise to power in Europe, took part in student demonstrations which overthrew the pro-Nazi Belgrade government in 1941, escaped capture by the German Quislings, and became a rubric in the Geneva Convention as Civilian Internee of War in Asolo, Italy. There I taught school to refugee children and took them to matriculate at the Venice Ghetto schools. After the fall of Mussolini in 1943, I fled again from invading German troops and lived underground in Rome until in June 1944 general Clark liberated it. Back in Dalmatia, on the Adriatic Coast of Yugoslavia, I fought against the German troops until the end of war in Europe.

As a barely 24-year old Yugoslav newsman, I covered the Paris Peace Conference in 1946. In 1948, I was editor of the center spread of the government daily Borba in Belgrade, dedicated to the Tito-Stalin rift. We had standing orders to report to our stations in the mountains should the Soviets invade Yugoslavia, but they didn't and life continued normally. In 1951 I reported from the Korean Peace Talks in Panmunjom and in 1953 got a permanent assignment to the UN and the White House. By that time I had four book on foreign policy published in Serbo-Croatian.

In November 1956 i sought asylum in New York in protest over Tito's refusal to support the Hungarian Revolution in the Security Council, presided at the time by the Yugoslav Ambassdor. I got my five minutes of fame in The New York Times front-page article and went on to make it in New York, starting as an electrician helper on a Wall Street brokerage construction, a draftsman for the renovation of a steakhouse and a hotel in Manhattan, freelancer for PARADE and The New Republic, toy salesman at Saks Fifth Avenue and finally as an embosser at the lowest rung of Recording for the Blind (RFB).

Later, as RFB's Associate Director, i introduced raised line drawings to accompany recorded texbooks and developed a 4-track, half speed system for economical cassette recording used also by the Library of Congress for the next 25 years, when wireless digital recording took over.

After retiring in 1948, i took to gardening, lecturing and writing about life in the turbulence of the 20th Century.