The Remarkable Last Column of Village Voice Founding Editor Jerry Tallmer

From his room at the DeWitt Rehabilitation & Nursing Center on the Upper East Side in late October, Jerry Tallmer filed a typically frank essay to The Villager. Titled “Blue Moon Johnny; I Wasn’t My Brother’s Keeper,” it now reads, in the wake of the author’s death Sunday at age 93, as a vivid and painful reminder of the fractured family circumstances that the Village Voice founding editor was able to overcome.

From the column:

My mother, Ilona Lowenthal Tallmer Müller-Munk, never really liked my brother, equating him with my father — Johnny’s and my father — whom she had run away from in the 1930s to go live in a flat on Third Avenue, next to the roaring rattletrap Third Avenue el, with Berlin-born artist and silversmith Peter Müller-Munk.

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