I and a number of my friends were raised Jewish. In different Sunday and Hebrew schools, we all heard myths that Hitler was Jewish, and some said that his heritage, not the impending Allied victory, caused him to commit suicide. One stubborn boy insists that Hitler’s father was at least half Jewish, and that young Adolf hated his father, causing him to translate his hatred into mass slaughter as an adult....

Along the North Branch of the Chicago River between Irving Park Road and Lawrence Avenue, the flatland slips away to a hidden place. Old couples steal away under the canopy to rest on a bench and watch the mallards dabble. Sometimes great blue herons poke around the shore. This is our Chicago river, strangely evolved descendant of the original meandering wetland stream. Engineers’ transits have simplified its form, channelized its bed, and changed its character....

In some respects, Bruce Tizes’s argument with his neighbors is a typical over-the-fence spat, the kind that goes on all the time in this city. Tizes and his family want to build a three-story addition and a two-story garage behind their property at the corner of Astor and Schiller, and his neighbors don’t want them to. In 1990 he started house hunting, knowing little about Chicago or its neighborhoods. He turned to the Gold Coast at the suggestion of a real estate agent who told him that it was “the one area likely not to decline in value,” says Tizes....

It was with expectations of adulation that the Chicago Public Library recently released its 1996 engagement calendar. It featured pictures of memorabilia from the library’s special collections and a day-by-day recital of significant events from the city’s past. For their part, library officials brush off such mistakes as trivialities and dismiss Bjorklund’s criticisms as meaningless bleatings from an incorrigible sourpuss with too much time on his hands. “I guess Mr. Bjorklund has nothing better to do,” says library commissioner Mary Dempsey....

Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. Not that I lacked the material. Oh no, not with Bob, never that. The column where he does a computer search on variants of the phrase “I’ll be honest with you” and spools off examples, one after the other? (“Why does everyone always have to be so honest?”, Oct. 23) That would have sufficed....

CESARIA EVORA Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “In the sky you are a star that does not shine,” sings Cesaria Evora of her native Cape Verde Islands – islands off the coast of Senegal that Portugal “discovered” and then populated with African slaves in the 15th century – on her eponymous 1995 album. That description might have applied as well to Evora herself until, in the late 1980s (and at the age of 48), she traveled to Paris and began to record the lilting melodies and melancholy lyrics of her homeland for an international audience....

Pere Ubu (Tim/Kerr Records) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Ubu regrouped in ’87 with their old soundman Jim Jones on guitar and extraneous drumming by Chris Cutler. After witnessing one of these dull-ass reunion shows and hearing their equally naff LP Cloudland, I wrote the band off. Their subsequent albums have gone all but unnoticed. But sentimentality is an addictive fruit, so my thoughts have turned to Ubu once again as they pass the two-decade post....

Toru Takemitsu, who died earlier this year at age 66, was arguably Japan’s most versatile modernist composer. Largely self-taught, he claimed to have been influenced by Schoenberg, Messiaen, and the musique concrete movement. During the decade after World War II, Takemitsu was part of the avant-garde of painters and composers in Tokyo who looked to the West for inspiration. He organized experimental workshops and scored, as he did throughout his career, the movies of leading directors, including Kurosawa and Kobayashi....

DEATH AND THE MAIDEN In his 1991 play Death and the Maiden Dorfman attempts to dramatize the dilemma that faces Chile–or any country that wants to bury a murderous past without forgetting the unforgivable. As he asks, not at all rhetorically, in the play’s afterword, “How can those who tortured and those who were tortured co-exist in the same land?” And Dorfman suggests that an implacable hatred may be as terrible as any pragmatic, guilt-ridden forgiveness....

Musical prodigies are endlessly fascinating for their ability to master difficult techniques and compositions–things that other musicians sweat over for years and are sometimes never wholly comfortable with–at ages when their contemporaries are still perfecting tying their shoelaces. It’s even more astounding when they manage to call up emotional depths that they’d seem–by virtue of their minimal experience with life–to be years from achieving. But even prodigies need encouragement and performance opportunities, and the Young Artists in Concert series at K....

Imagine a ballet performed by two cement mixers, a forklift, and a Hyundai Excel and you’d come pretty close to Goat Island’s It’s Shifting, Hank. These four high-octane, physically mismatched performers under Lin Hixson’s direction have been presenting their richly poetic, collision-heavy physical endurance pieces for seven years in Chicago and around the world. It’s Shifting, Hank was born in 1991 out of the question: “Why were you in pain in such a beautiful place?...

Inside Englewood Technical Preparatory Academy, a bell sounds at mid-morning and kids begin to change classes. Six-foot-three Hal Baskin is moving about quickly, looking like a sequoia in a stand of maples. A sequoia in blue jeans with a flattop and Fu Manchu mustache. “Ladies and gentlemen, get a move on, straight up,” he says to a clump of students who appear to be loitering. He spies a cornrowed idler. “Get in class, else I’m going to hit you up the side of the earlobe....

As You Like It Regrettably, fresh breezes don’t always blow through revivals of As You Like It; its magic can succumb to directors who miss the romance and ram home the easy class contrasts–court versus country–that fuel the humor. Touchstone’s sneering dismissals of the “country copulatives” and melancholy Jaques’ puncturing of the pastoral idyll are amusing, but they’re counterweights to the play’s obsession: measuring love against the standard of nature....

Sure makes me hungry–how aboutyou? From a restaurant press release: “As patrons enter Tommy Gun’s Garage through the back door under the ‘El’ tracks, they encounter Frenchie, the mechanic and ask for an oil change. Frenchie knows the password, and the doors open on the Fabulous Roaring Twenties–when ladies hemlines were up, their necklines were down, and men always accessorized with a firearm. A 1928 Model A Ford sits near the entrance, silent movies are shown against the back of a stage, and there is a life-size replica of the St....

Its relocation from the Voltaire basement to the spacious Live Bait stage has done nothing to diminish the warmth and intimacy of Rena Malin’s The Fall From Precious. Indeed, a second viewing of this one-woman show (directed by the redoubtable Nancy Scanlon) only confirms the remarkable specificity of the experiences Malin relates: a conversation with a septuagenarian celibate in Paris, for example, or the triumph of single-handedly defying a crowd of abusive bullies....

Salpicon has been compared to Frontera (where chef Priscilla Satkoff used to work), ever since it opened in the spring. Thrilled by the prospect of another fabulous regional Mexican restaurant–and wary of disappointment–I’ve been hesitant to indulge. But a night last week seemed to call for margaritas. We found damn fine ones–mixed from an elaborate tequila list–and the sort of outraged debate they can inspire. By comparison, the dishes that paraded across our table held our attention only briefly....

Laetitia Sonami Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But with electronic music, which can be programmed and sampled, the hands can become nearly irrelevant. A musician friend of mine composes entire scores solely by typing commands into a computer (you don’t need hands to type–a pencil in the mouth will do). To “perform” the piece he presses a button, which he could do just as well with his nose....

Dear Reader: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » What the story missed, however, and what is the most outrageous aspect of the Chicago Review incident were the university’s ugly smears against the Catholic community and Catholic Church. These were embodied in the complaint that the church was critical of the university in those days over the then new Hyde Park urban renewal plan. According to the Reader article, U....

D-Day Deux Plummer was perplexed. Shiller belongs to the human rights committee, whose chairman, Alderman Lorraine Dixon, he’d been briefing. Through that channel alone, not to mention all the others, he’d have expected her to hear about the invasion. “Everybody seems to have known about it, so it’s hard to believe she didn’t,” he said this week. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Anyway, Plummer apologized and now they’re meeting....

It doesn’t look like the kind of place where magic would be done: a dusty, dark, cavernous space barely furnished, except with oddments–a Ping-Pong table so covered with papers it couldn’t possibly be used, a lone punching bag. Photographer William Frederking used to share this floor of an old manufacturing building on South Michigan with a demolition company he swears was named Smash. Whenever he’d have dancers in for a shoot, he says, the Smash employees would file past his studio, peering at the folks in their underwear....