Saul Zabar who, across more than seven decades as a principal owner of the Upper West Side food emporium bearing his family name, kept New Yorkers amply fortified with smoked fish, earthy bread, tangy cheese, and pungent coffee, died on Oct. 7 in Manhattan. He was 97. “I really came into Zabar’s as a temporary assignment,” he told The New York Times in 2008. He never left. Instead, he became one of New York’s leading [...]

Peter M. Fishbein, a prominent litigator who helped build the New York law firm Kaye Scholer into a national powerhouse, represented the disgraced savings-and-loan mogul Charles H. Keating Jr., and was sued by the government and accused of concealing his client’s corruption, died on Sept. 25 at his home in Harrison, NY. He was 91. Mr. Fishbein, a partner at Kaye Scholer since 1967, was regarded as a lawyer of broad talents. He worked on [...]

Ruth Weiss, a South African journalist who covered apartheid in the early 1990s and later wrote about the brutal white regime in Rhodesia, died on Sept. 5 in Aalborg, Denmark. She was 101. Her long life and the hundreds of articles and many books she wrote were shaped by twin experiences of discrimination: first, as a girl, when her life was upended after the Nazis came to power in 1933, and then, three years later, [...]

Bruce Cutler, a combative New York criminal defense lawyer who won acquittals three times for the mob boss John J. Gotti, and whose intimidating cross-examinations of witnesses became known as a “Brucification,” died in Brooklyn on Oct. 6. He was 77. Bald, stout and barrel-chested — The New Yorker once said he resembled Telly Savalas crossed with Jesse Ventura — Mr. Cutler embraced a pit bull approach to jurisprudence. “It’s my whole life,” he said [...]

Ivan Klima, the Czech novelist whose survival of two totalitarian regimes — one Nazi, the other communist — made him one of Eastern Europe’s most perceptive distillers of the human condition under authoritarianism, died on Oct. 4 at his home in Prague. A writer of more than 40 books, also a dissident, teacher and critic, Mr. Klima was deeply affected by an early experience in his life: incarceration as a boy by the Nazis at [...]

Jerome A. Cohen, who pioneered the study of China’s legal system, was one of the first foreign lawyers to practice in China, and who became a voice against human rights abuses there, died on Sept. 22 at his home in Manhattan. He was 95. Mr. Cohen “created the field of the study of Chinese law in the United States,” Stephen Orlins, president of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, said in an interview with The [...]

Mel Taub, the longtime creator of the Puns and Anagrams (PandA) puzzle for The New York Times, died on Sept. 14 at his home in Austin, TX. He was 97. By his own estimate, Mr. Taub contributed some 350-400 PandAs to The Times. A hundred or so are archived at xwordinfo.com, a website created by Jim Horne, a puzzler enthusiast.

Aron Bell, who had been a teenage member of a daring brigade of Jewish partisans that during WWII attacked German troops in Belorussia and rescued some 1,200 Jews from near-certain death, died on Sept. 22 at his home in Palm Beach, FL. He was 98. The Bielski partisans, run by three of Mr. Bell’s older brothers, formed after the arrest and murder of the siblings’ parents in December 1941. On its website, the U.S. Holocaust [...]

Susan Stamberg, an original National Public Radio (NPR) staffer who went on to become the first U.S. woman to anchor a nightly national news program, died Oct. 16. She was 87. Colleagues considered her a mentor, a matchmaker, a founding mother — always tough, and always true to herself. Stamberg’s stories and segments over the decades spanned the human experience, from examining matters of state to illuminating pointillist details of artistic achievement. She was recognized [...]