A Newspaperman’s Life: Rosenfeld At Northshire Sunday

SARATOGA SPRINGS — On Sunday, January 19 at 3 p.m., Northshire Bookstore, 424 Broadway in Saratoga Springs will host a reading, discussion and signing with Harry Rosenfeld, author of From Kristallnacht to Watergate: Memoirs of a Newspaperman. How does one boy from a Polish family of furriers and tailors become an editor at two of the greatest American newspapers in the twentieth century and a key figure in overseeing the breaking of the Watergate scandal? In his book, Harry Rosenfeld traces his ambition to become a journalist back to his childhood in Hitler’s Berlin. He saw his father taken away by the Gestapo in the middle of the night, witnessed the burning of his synagogue and walked through streets littered with the shattered glass from Jewish businesses. When his family escaped to America, Rosenfeld felt a responsibility to ensure that what had happened in Nazi Germany could not happen here. “Looking back,” he writes, “I discerned a theme underpinning much of my journalistic labors: holding to account the accountable, the more powerful the better.” It was this lifelong endeavor for accountability that led Rosenfeld to demand standard-setting coverage during his years as an editor at the New York Herald Tribune and the Washington Post, earning the Post the Pulitzer Prize Gold Medal for Public Service. Rosenfeld reminds us why journalism matters, and why good journalism is essential to our democracy. Bob Woodward praises From Kristallnacht to Watergate, “A terrific memoir by one of the great newspapermen of the era. Harry Rosenfeld was one of the key editors on Watergate. Not everyone will agree with all the details, but this is real history, illuminating and told honestly with a deep sense of the moral obligation of the press.” For more information, call (518) 682-4200 or visit northshire.com.