Chicago music critic Howard Reich avoided writing about his family and the Holocaust until it became his calling
The moment that crystallized Howard Reich’s future in music, writing and Judaism occurred when, as a 16-year-old living in the largely Jewish Chicago suburb of Skokie, Ill., he found the 1951 Best-Picture winning musical “An American in Paris” showing on the family TV. George Gershwin, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants, wrote the film’s music,…