Marcos spends most of each year on the move. A typical itinerary might run six cities in Germany, three months in Israel, a month in Spain with his grandchildren, and a long pass through Ukraine to retrace his family’s flight from the 1919 pogroms. He posts as he goes — essays of fifteen hundred to six thousand words on Jewish identity, Israel and the Mideast, the histories of the cities he passes through, and the people he meets along the way. He calls his self-imposed limit fifteen hundred words; he overshoots routinely.
Roots
Marcos’s grandmother Bessie was born in 1903 in Skybyn, a small agricultural village about ninety miles south of Kyiv, in the Pale of Settlement. Skybyn lay in what was then the western Russian Empire and is now Ukraine. Bessie’s father was a poor merchant who sold wheat in the neighboring shtetl of Stavyshche to support seven children, of whom Bessie was the youngest. She was tall and fair-haired, sewed her own peasant-style clothes, and grew up speaking Russian without a Yiddish accent.
In 1919, Bessie was sixteen, married, and a young mother. Pogroms erupted in Bila Tserkva, thirty miles north of Stavyshche, and spread through the region. Estimates put the dead at ten to fifteen thousand Jews in that pocket alone. A White Army band lured the Jewish men of the small hamlet she lived in to a “peace meeting” and killed them — her husband among them. She found him in a heap of stripped bodies in the snow, fled through winter weather for two days, and within days her infant daughter died. She was eighteen, widowed, and childless.
Her cousin Barney Stumacher, recently back in New York from the U.S. Army in WWI, somehow received a letter from the surviving family pleading for help. He went. The trek — documented in the family book Tears Over Russia, written by another cousin — took him through Warsaw under attack, Bucharest, a bribed river crossing, two arrests, a stolen pair of horses, a derailed train, and a final stretch on falsified papers. The original plan was to rescue Barney’s parents and sisters; the wagon train that finally pulled out of Bila Tserkva in late October 1920 carried eighty extended family members on twelve wagons. They reached Kishinev, then Bucharest, then Hamburg, and on April 21, 1921 boarded the Mount Clay. Bessie reached Ellis Island weeks later, married Ben Baker (a Polish-born furrier), and raised three children. They spent most of their free time on the sand at Coney Island.
The newer cousins
A separate branch of the family resurfaced through DNA tests. Oleg, born in Belarus and now American, was identified as a cousin and put Marcos in touch with Vladimir Kotlyar — a Russian high-altitude mountaineer who has summited Everest five times and K2 twice, and finished the Seven Summits. Marcos messaged Vladimir on WhatsApp while Vladimir was climbing Aconcagua; the reply was a casual offer of a helicopter ride to Annapurna Base Camp. By the time Marcos got to Kathmandu, Vladimir had already summited Annapurna, so they buzzed Everest by helicopter instead. Vladimir and his wife Anastasia treated him, in his words, “as well as I’ve ever been treated.”
Israel
Marcos first went to Israel in the summer of 1968, the year after the Six-Day War. He worked on a kibbutz at the northern border, a couple of miles from the former Syrian frontier. Shells still landed occasionally in the fields. He came home with the sense that Israel was an unsolvable problem — the historic homeland of his people, but also someone else’s homeland for centuries — and avoided the country for fifty-seven years.
He went back after October 7, 2023. The trigger was less the attack than the reaction of friends he describes as intelligent, caring, progressive people who, in his telling, knew bupkis about the broader region and held Israel to a standard they didn’t apply to anyone around it. He has since spent extended stretches in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and Haifa, with detours into Ukraine to walk the ground his grandmother walked, and into Germany to write from Munich, Nuremberg, and Dresden.
“Yes, the Jews are definitely ‘my people,’ which is my bad or good luck of the dice, not anything that I ever chose, just something that came about.”
He calls himself a Zionist, by his own narrow definition: someone who believes the Jews had a right to return to a homeland of their own, and that Israel is that place. The question of how to share it with the people already there he treats as a separate, secondary, and probably unsolvable problem.
Subjects
His essays circle a few recurring subjects:
- Jewish history and identity. The two covenants, “Who is a Jew?”, the Pale, the Wandering Jew, the rabbinic shift after the Second Temple, almost-universal literacy as the long lever of Jewish survival in the diaspora.
- Israel and Zionism. Ben-Gurion vs. Jabotinsky, Christian Zionism and the Puritan inheritance, the demographics of non-Jewish Israelis (Bedouin, Arab Israelis, Christians, Druze), the Haredi problem.
- Press and propaganda. The IAGS Gaza-genocide resolution and how AP and Reuters laundered a low-turnout activist vote into “the world’s top scholars say”; the New York Times’ non-retraction of the “starving child” photo.
- Cities, in their own histories. Odesa as Russia’s Miami Beach, Munich as the capital of Nazism, Cali as the world’s salsa capital by way of a 1956 dynamite explosion and a sugarcane fair, Havana under the mob.
- His own backstory. Miami Beach in the 1960s, the union laborer summer, the Cuban classmate whose father turned out to be tied to the JFK investigation, two years of bible study at a Black Baptist church.
Some recent travels
- 2026 — Kathmandu and Mount Everest by helicopter
- 2025 — Hong Kong and Guangzhou; Odesa and Kyiv tracing the 1919 pogrom routes; Munich, Nuremberg, Dresden
- 2024–25 — Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Haifa
- 2024 — Havana
- 2023 — Medellín and Cali
- Earlier — long stints in Buenos Aires (where he danced salsa five nights a week), Seville with his grandchildren, multiple trips to Ukraine
Where to find him
Facebook, under his own name, posts pinned to Favorites. The comment thread underneath is part of the work — old friends from Miami Beach High and Wesleyan, fellow travelers, the occasional sharp dissent.