Deaths elsewhere

Last update: November 8, 2009 - 10:15 PM

Esther Hautzig, 79, whose memoir of growing up in exile in Siberia, "The Endless Steppe," has become a classic of children's literature, died Nov. 1 in New York City. She had Alzheimer's disease.

Hautzig had been born into comfortable circumstances in present-day Vilnius, Lithuania, then part of Poland, where her family ran a jewelry store. In 1941, after the Soviet Union and Germany signed a nonaggression pact that put Vilnius under Soviet control, Hautzig's family was arrested for being capitalists. At 10, she was shipped with her parents and grandparents in a cattle car to the Siberian city of Rubtsovsk.

She spent all of World War II there, attending school and learning to live with hunger, privation and loss. More than 20 years later, after Hautzig had settled in the United States, she wrote "The Endless Steppe."

She wrote her book for children when publishers told her that her story would not appeal to adults. It won several awards and was acclaimed as a worthy successor to Anne Frank's powerful memoir, "The Diary of a Young Girl."

Art D'Lugoff, 85, whose famed New York City nightclub, the Village Gate, featured performers from jazz great Duke Ellington to 1960s counterculture rocker Jimi Hendrix to comics Lenny Bruce and Woody Allen, died Wednesday in New York City. Among his claims to fame, D'Lugoff hired blacklisted singers Paul Robeson and Pete Seeger and fired Dustin Hoffman as a waiter.

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