A guest post from S. Nadia Hussain, about the recent loss of her great uncle, Masud Chowdhury, one of the early members of New York’s Bengali community, who came to the city in 1946. Reposted from the blog Nadia Won’t Shut Up (Read more about Nadia at the end of the post.) Saturday, January 16, …
John Ali: Baltimore, Chester, & Beyond In this interview, John Ali, Jr. describes some of his memories of growing up with his father, Mustafa “John” Ali, a seaman from Sylhet, in the 1930s. John, Sr. had jumped ship in Baltimore in the 1920s, married John, Jr’s mother, Mamie Chase, and for a time moved their …
In November 2013, I spoke to Amina Ali Cymbala, whose father Mohamed Ali, was one of a group of Bengali ex-seamen who settled on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, and married within the Puerto Rican community there. Part of our conversation follows below. She also shared the photo here to the left, which shows …
In his one-man show “Dishwasher Dreams,” actor and writer Aladdin Ullah draws on the story of his father, Habib (pictured in the suit and fedora in the upper corner of this page), a steamship worker from the region of Noahkali, East Bengal, who jumped ship and made his way to New York’s Lower East Side …