Cultures in Counterpoint

About the Book

From his memoirs…

“Cultures for me are like knowledge: you don’t subtract the old knowledge if you add new knowledge.” (Prelude.)

“Looking back, I remember mornings when I could be playing Bach cantatas loudly on my record player, while my father would be tying his phylacteries preparing for his morning prayer in the next room, and my mother would be arguing with her dressmaker in French, Turkish or Greek as the case may be.” (Prelude.)

“I am sometimes asked, as other [World] Bank retirees must be, about my fondest work-related memories, such as places visited. It gave me the greatest pleasure to visit two countries—Armenia and Kyrgyzstan—on assignment, both visits coming 8-9 years after my formal retirement. I had never thought I would see Mount Ararat from the Armenian side of the Turkish border some day. Equally memorable was the opportunity to speak pure, Turkic (central Asian) Turkish in Kyrgyzstan, to visit the small Jewish synagogue there, thousand of miles from the Holy Land, and to have lunch with the American president of the American College in the capital city, my Turkish, Jewish and American identities (I was a U.S. citizen by then) converging in the same place and on the same day.” (Chapter 10)

About the Author

Bension (Ben) Varon, an economist, was born and raised in Istanbul, Turkey. He met Barbara Frass, the subject of this book, at the University of Pennsylvania, which they were both attending in 1961. Th ey were married in 1962 and moved to Northern Virginia when Mr. Varon joined the World Bank in Washington, D.C. Mr. Varon is the author of three monographs on his Varon heritage and Cultures in Counterpoint: Memoirs of a Sephardic Turkish American, Xlibris, 2009. He continues to live in Fairfax, Virginia and can be reached through Benvaron@aol.com.