BRIN, Herb(ert Henry) 1915-2003

OBITUARY NOTICE—See index for CA sketch: Born February 17, 1915, in Chicago, IL; died of congestive heart failure February 6, 2003, in Reseda, CA. Journalist, publisher, and author. Brin was a poet and founder, publisher, and editor of the weekly Jewish newspaper Heritage. During the 1930s he attended several colleges and universities, including DePaul University and the University of Chicago, but never received a degree. Instead, he pursued a career in journalism, initially working as a reporter in the early 1940s for the City News Service in Chicago. An accident during boot camp in which he broke both feet caused Brin to sit out World War II, so instead he contributed to Yank magazine and continued to write for the Chicago news service. From 1947 to 1954 Brin was on staff as a feature writer and reporter for the Los Angeles Times. He then founded Heritage Publishing Company in Los Angeles and began publishing four weekly newspapers based in Los Angeles, San Diego, Orange County, and Central Valley. He wrote and investigated many of the stories himself that appeared in his papers, including several that reported on the American Nazi Party and stories following up on the Holocaust. One of the latter was a story about Oskar Schindler, a German businessman who saved the lives of thousands of Jews during the Holocaust and who later became the subject of a book by Thomas Keneally and a film directed by Steven Spielberg. Heritage also reported on California politics, and in this area was strongly liberal. In 2001 Brin was forced to close three of his papers because of competition from the larger Jewish Journal, and he handed over management of the San Diego paper to others. In addition to his journalism, Brin was also a respected poet, publishing six verse collections, including Wild Flowers (1966), Ich bin ein Jude (1971), and Poems from the Rubio (1995). He was also the author of four nonfiction books, including The Eichmann Trial (1973) and his autobiography, Shouting for Justice, which he completed just before his death.

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

periodicals

Los Angeles Times, February 13, 2002, p. B21.

online

Mercury News,http://www.bayarea.com/mld/mercurynews/ (March 13, 2003).