Comedian Patton Oswalt discusses his rescheduled Mahaiwe show (expect a night of pure escapism!), his approach to comedy amid turbulent times, influences like Jonathan Winters, voice acting, gothic horror in New England, and upcoming projects, including "The Sandman," Season 2.Par The Berkshire Eagle

Richard W. Painter is the S. Walter Richey Professor of Corporate Law at the University of Minnesota Law School and former chief White House ethics lawyer (2005-07) in the second Bush White House. A leading expert on government ethics, corporate law and securities litigation, Painter discusses the perils of President Trump's appointment of billiona…

Mike Walsh and Jake Mendel of The Berkshire Eagle's sports department host a podcast about sports throughout Berkshire County. Sports columnist Howard Herman joins Jake to discuss the return to baseball at Wahconah Park and Joe Wolfe Field. The Pittsfield Suns began their season on May 26 and played their first home game on May 27. Not only did the…

Mike Walsh and Jake Mendel of The Berkshire Eagle's sports department host a podcast about sports in Berkshire County. The Fall II sports season was a large step towards a return to normal, at least in the world of sports. The two-month season is in the books and local schools are turning their attention towards a two-month spring season. Jake and …

Mike Walsh and Jake Mendel of The Berkshire Eagle's sports department host a podcast about sports in Berkshire County. The Mike is muted this week and Jake is joined by Howard Herman to discussing the wide-range of possibilities for local sports to close out this year. Howard offers all the answers regarding Berkshire County sports, which starts wi…

Mike Walsh and Jake Mendel of The Berkshire Eagle's sports department reunite for another episode of the Mendel and the Mike podcast. High School sports are underway and the guys have already been to a handful of games, but Tom Brady is the first topic after the Tampa Bay Bucs won the Super Bowl. From there, the guys share notes from a busy week of…

The first sporting event of the year in Berkshire County officially took place and Jake Mendel and Mike Walsh of The Berkshire Eagle are back to preview the Nordic Ski meet between Mount Greylock and Wahconah. After previewing what the safe and socially-distant meet could look like, the guys dive into what we will hopefully see in Berkshire County …

LENOX — Alexandra Tyer’s father did not like dictators. And so they did not like him.Gustavo Avila got jailed by Cuba’s Fidel Castro when Alexandra was 7 years old. He was released several months later, on the condition that he take his family on the first flight out to Panama. That country granted the Cuban family asylum because Alexandra’s mother…

GREAT BARRINGTON — Andres Huertas didn’t speak any English when his parents moved from Bogota, Colombia, to the Berkshires. It took a drawing of a soccer ball for him to realize that he might be able to communicate in his new country after all. Another 10-year old boy at Undermountain School in Sheffield drew that picture and showed it to Andres as…

PITTSFIELD — Paulino Aguilar survived an encounter with El Salvador’s notorious death squads in the 1980’s. Aguilar taught high school students in gang-ridden San Salvador until he moved to Pittsfield in 2002. He lived on North Street and started work at 3 in the morning at the former Morningside Bakery on Tyler Street. Read more at http://tinyurl.…

Tanea Lavalle lives a long way from Moldova. But so do most of her former classmates and friends from this small Eastern European country, landlocked in between Romania and Ukraine.Lavalle estimates “maybe 80 percent” of her classmates and friends have left this former Soviet republic. The ones left behind might just be biding their time until they…

NORTH ADAMS — Had Paul de Jong’s Holocaust surviving father decided to accept the job offer in New York, this immigrant’s tale would not have been told. Vrin de Jong, a schoolmate of Anne Frank in Amsterdam, survived the murderous Nazi occupation of The Netherlands, where most Dutch Jews did not. On his first trip to the United States, by boat, in …

Bintou Kanyi told her family in the West African country of The Gambia that she just had some errands to run at the village market. She did not tell them about the airplane ticket to New York.“I ran away,” Kanyi says. “Because if I had told them that I was travelling, there were so many things they could do to stop me.” Kanyi now works as a certifi…

PITTSFIELD — Veronica Torres Martin had an accent in her own country before she had one in the United States. Torres Martin, now 44, is from Chile, but she was born in Germany and lived in Algeria before her parents felt safe enough to return to what was then Augusto Pinochet’s military dictatorship. She was 7 years old. “That’s when I got introduc…

MONTEREY — Sandboarding down the dunes to the pristine beaches, then surfing the ocean waves or fishing or snorkeling in the azure blue waters. Living in Cabo Frio, Brazil, sounds like living in paradise."Read more at http://berkhshireeagle.comPar The Berkshire Eagle

GREAT BARRINGTON — Growing up in Leningrad had to be pretty bleak, right? Surely, escaping the Soviet Union for America must have been most Russians’ dream.“No,” says Natalia Smirnova, laughing. “Growing up in the Soviet Union was great. We had a very nice childhood. Now, being an adult, I understand the value of the free day care facilities for ki…

Read the story: http://www.berkshireeagle.com/stories/meet-arsema-abegaz-education-is-a-lifelong-pursuit-for-this-williams-grad,513686Born in Ethiopia, raised in Botswana and steeped in the very different cultures and languages of those disparate African countries, Arsema Abegaz speaks American English without even a trace of an accent. “Being youn…

PITTSFIELD — They fell in love through their letters; old-fashioned, handwritten envelope-with-stamp snail mail letters. But it took 14 years before the internet sealed the deal.Alan Franco, from Mexico City, and Melissa Schermerhorn, from the Berkshires hilltown of Peru, met in 1994 in the Cozumel tourist resort where he worked. Franco was an ente…

PITTSFIELD — Ahmed Ismail’s bride, Michela, had tears in her eyes, but not necessarily because of wedding emotions. Tear gas and worse filled the streets of Cairo when they got married.Ismail, from Giza, Egypt, and Michela Tagliapietra, from Lenox, met in 2010 when Michela and her mother toured Egypt’s archaeological treasures. Mom and daughter sta…

Her colleagues at Housatonic Curtains stopped sewing when the news broke about the 9/11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. Gloria Escobar-Huertas could sense her co-workers' fear. But she didn’t understand.“At that time I didn’t speak English and nobody around me could explain the situation,” Escobar recalls. “So I didn’t know…

PITTSFIELD — Paul Saldana would have been a pilot if joining the Ecuadorian Air Force hadn’t been beyond his means.OK, sure, as a boy in Azogues, Ecuador, young Paul’s real dream was to become a midfield star of his country’s most illustrious soccer team: Barcelona.But next to the many hours of fútbol practice and pick-up games — “My happiest child…

WEST STOCKBRIDGE — As a child in Indonesia, I’in Purwanti was the ringleader of a band of pint-sized private investigators. “My childhood was very adventurous,” Purwanti says. “I wanted to be a detective. I read a lot of detective books so I would tell my friends every Sunday, ‘hey we need to go solve a mystery!’ “And then we would go out and find …

PITTSFIELD — Baffour Tontoh already has the name, investors and a business plan for the intercity bus company he wants to start back home in Ghana. Roots of that enterprise – Impulse Transportation – will be in Pittsfield, where he has lived for the last six years.“I came here for a reason,” Tontoh says, “and when that is accomplished I will go bac…

WEST STOCKBRIDGE — Talk to Flavio Lichtenthal about his Argentinian childhood and soccer comes up a lot. On the streets of Buenos Aires that’s what boys play.“I was actually a totally mediocre soccer player but when I came to the States I was one of the stars of my high school team,” Lichtenthal says. “Because I could actually kick the ball and mak…

PITTSFIELD — Elegant Stitches, the customized embroidery shop now located at 237 First Street, started in Vivian Enchill’s basement in Pittsfield. Vivian had left Ghana to join her husband Alfred, who had already made the move to the Berkshires. Designing clothes was both her trade and her passion in her home country. So, setting up shop and market…

Viktória Seavey used to hide on Easter Monday to avoid getting a bucket of water dumped over her. OTIS — In their home in Otis, Seavey’s American husband Adam sometimes jokes about restoring the Hungarian Easter tradition of dousing young women. But for the former Viktória Horváth from the small Hungarian town of Kapuvár, the “watering” of girls an…

German Vargas does not like to hear people say bad things about Colombia. “No, Colombia is not dangerous at all,” he says emphatically. “Let me tell you, the best answer to get if you want to know if my country is dangerous or not is to see for yourself.” Vargas moved from Colombia’s capital Bogotá to the Berkshires in 1991. Now 53, he is a barber …

Getting your throat slashed while doing your job as a bus driver in San Salvador makes you appreciate Pittsfield all the more. Surviving an ambush by the same gang members shooting at you for disobeying their demands makes you sleep really well in your Morningside apartment.“It’s everything about security,” Josue Diaz says in comparing his life now…

Jose Villegas came to the Berkshires to heal. Villegas grew up among the millions of people in Caracas, the capital of Venezuela. He studied in Boston and Seattle, returned to his home country to work in its oil industry and then made his career in corporate banking in the United States. “Having come from Caracas, a bustling city, I never thought I…

Shari Yamini’s choice was war or marriage. She had finished her medical studies and wanted to practice medicine. But for a woman in Iran after the ayatollahs took power that meant either the frontlines in the war with Iraq or finding a husband. “I didn’t know which one was better,” Dr. Yamini says and bursts out laughing. So she made a different ch…

This is the story of one of our Berkshires neighbors brave enough to admit that James Taylor is “really not my bag at all”.Also: Marmite is an ingredient in today’s Accents recipe and the legal drinking of beer by school kids as young as 16 will come up. In other words, “Just a very, very different environment,” says Chris Post, comparing life in t…

That thing about Chinese students being pushed by their parents to study really, really hard?“Yeah, it’s true,” says Fei Wen Gang. “Chinese parents really focus on their kids’ education. There is a huge population, so there is a lot of competition,” he says. “Schooldays starts at 7.30 in the morning and often you have classes into the evening.”Six …

Cecilia Del Cid experienced Berkshire Community College as a version of the United Nations, not least because Pittsfield offered her a smorgasbord of international cooking.Twenty years ago, a scholarship brought her from Guatemala to BCC’s Pittsfield campus. Her roommate here in Pittsfield was Bulgarian; classmates were from Finland, Germany and Ja…

Samniang Geller has her mom in Thailand and her “American mom” in Dalton. Her “mom” in the Berkshires, Marilyn Desoe, started out helping her learn English. “We became good friends,” Samniang says. “She understands me really well. She has a huge heart to be able to not only teach me English but guide me with so many things in life that sometimes I’…

Albania’s communist regime was so strict that, looking back, Aleks Gole compares the country of his birth to North Korea. But, he says: “I was a child. I couldn’t understand the system was so bad. I have very good memories. It was very poor and very simple. Everybody was at the same level. Everybody shared. I enjoyed it and I was happy.”Now a 35-ye…

It took a lot of bubble wrap to get Jorge Aguilar’s statue of the “Virgen del Cisne” afely to Pittsfield. The four-foot tall statue was built for him in a workshop in Ecuador, his home country.Aguilar left his hometown of Girón for the United States when he was 16. Now 30 and a proud homeowner and landlord in Pittsfield, he still very much misses h…

Her children are grown up now, but Estervina Davis is still not sure about the American custom of sleepovers. “In my country, you don’t do that,” she says. “Everybody sleeps in their own house. I would have never even asked my parents if I could because I knew they would say ‘no’.” That was an unsettling cultural difference she had to adapt to when…

Maybe it was an honest mistake, maybe not. But either way, it was the moment that Maribel Teyssier passed her English exam. “I went to the supermarket and I pay my groceries with a bill of 50 bucks,” she says. “He gave me change for just 20. I got kind of angry because maybe he noticed that I didn’t know good English.”She pointed out the mistake. T…

The Brazilian community in the Berkshires used to be larger. Thiago Oliveira recalls 75 or 80 worshippers at Sunday services in the Assembly of God Brazilian church in Pittsfield. The 2008 financial crisis caused many of them to leave. Oliveira says, “They returned to Brazil or moved to larger cities in the United States.” Oliveira became pastor of…

Dr. Tony Makdisi, a hospitalist at Berkshire Medical Center in Pittsfield, was inspired to come to the United States by “wanted to be just like” the American doctors who trained him at Damascus University in Syria. He holds on to the hope that Syria can find peace again.Par The Berkshire Eagle

Octavio Hernandez was born, raised and educated in Mexico City. He earned law degree there and for years practiced corporate law in the banking sector in Mexico and abroad: “I managed assets, worked with financial instruments. That sounds a bit dry, but at the time it was very exciting.” Now 58, he came to the Berkshires 15 years ago.…

For Klara Sotonova’s parents in the Czech Republic, 20,000 koruna was a lot of money. The equivalent of about $800, they had saved that sum for when their daughter would get married. And at 19, a wedding was more or less what was expected of her. Preferably soon.Instead, Klara asked for that money to buy a plane ticket to America. It was 10 years a…

Getting threats on your life from more or less anonymous sources is one thing. Having guys with guns show up at your house to kidnap you and your family is something else.“We weren’t actually at the house, we were two miles down the road going into town,” recalls Camilo Manrique. “We got a phone call from the caretaker telling us to get out of ther…

Goundo Behanzin doesn’t want to name the bank that turned down his business loan application. He laughs about it now, proud of his Berkshire International Market on Pittsfield’s North Street.But some resentment lingers when he concludes about the bank: “They were wrong. I am an accountant teacher, but they couldn’t see it.”Behanzin, 56, taught acco…

The Eagle introduces a new feature called “Accents” to, one by one, tell the unique stories of our many immigrant neighbors living and working here in the Berkshires. Reinout van Wagtendonk, a Dutch-born journalist and longtime resident of Lee, is the host and producer of Accents, which consists of a beautifully produced podcast interview you can l…