Walter Abish, a widely admired if not widely read American author whose early life consisted of hasty escapes from hostile forces in Nazi-era Austria and revolutionary China, died on May 28 in Manhattan. He was 90.

“Though he has published relatively late and little,” John Updike wrote in a review of Mr. Abish’s

memoir, Double Vision: A Self-Portrait, in The New Yorker in 2004, he “projects a distinctive presence in  contemporary letters.” Overall, Mr. Abish published three novels, three collections of short stories, a volume of poems, and the memoir.

His most acclaimed novel was How German Is it, which explored the complex interplay between modern Germany, with its strong postwar economy and ordered society, and its roots in the Nazi era. The book won a PEN/Faulkner prize for fiction in 1981 — one of a string of accolades that punctuated Mr. Abish’s life as a writer and scholar at several American universities and colleges. He became a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1998.

Boris Pahor, a novelist in the Slovene language, who was best known for his descriptions of life as a member of the Slovenian minority in pre-WWII Fascist Italy, and as a Nazi concentration camp survivor, died May 30 in Trieste, Italy. He was 108.

In his novel Necropolis, he visits the Natzweiler-Struthof camp 20 years after his relocation to Dachau. Following Dachau, he was relcated three more times: to Mittelbau-Dora, Haerzungen, and finally to Bergen-Belsen, which was liberated on April 15, 1945.

Pahor, a prominent figure in the Slovene minority in Italy, was awarded the Legion of Honour by the French government, and the Cross of Honour for Science and Art by the Austrian government, and was nominated for the Nobel prize for literature by the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts.

George Shapiro, a Hollywood talent manager who oversaw the careers of comic personalities like Jerry Seinfeld, Andy Kaufman and Carl Reiner, died on May 26 at his home in Beverly Hills, CA. He was 91.

Mr. Shapiro was most closely associated with Jerry Seinfeld, The New York Times said. He signed Seinfeld as a client soon after watching him perform at the Comedy Store in Los Angeles in 1980, and  lobbied NBC to build a series around him. He was an executive produced of the hugely popular sitcom.

Mr. Shapiro first watched Andy Kaufman perform at the Improv comedy club in Los Angeles in 1975 and was impressed by his bizarre, idiosyncratic act. He soon signed him and persuaded him to join the cast of the sitcom “Taxi” in the role of Latke.

Other clients included Robert Wuhl and the producer and writer Bill Lawrence, who is known for the TV series “Spin City” and “Scrubs.”

Andrée Geulen was not Jewish, but because of her, 300-400 Jewish children were saved during the Nazi occupation of Belgium. For that she was honored in 1989 by Yad Vashem as a Righteous Among the Nations, as recognition given to non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews from the Nazi genocide.

She was a young Belgian teacher at an all-girls boarding school in Brussels in the 1940s when her Jewish students were no longer showing up for school. She soon learned why: They and their families had been rounded up by the Gestapo and sent to a camp in Mechelen, northeast of Brussels — a way station on the road to Auschwitz.

She volunteered to help a clandestine group, the Committee for the Defense of Jews, that spirited Jewish children out of harm’s way, to convents, monasteries, boarding schools, farms and families around the country that were willing to hide them. She said in testimony after the war, “I had some addresses, and I saw it as a race between myself and the Gestapo, who would get to the family first.”

She died at 100, on May 31, in a Brussels nursing home, the last survivor of a cadre of women who, working for the committee, together rescued some 3,000 Jewish children. They could not tell the parents where their children were heading for fear of exposing the families or the institutions hiding them.

After the war, Ms. Geulen fetched many hidden children and reunited them with parents who had emerged from their own hiding or who had survived the camps. She found apartments for the families, solicited charities to pay for adequate furnishings and negotiated with manufacturers for mattresses, blankets and sheets to give to the families.

One of the children was Helene Weiss, then an 8-year-old whom Ms. Geulen took to a farm owned by a Catholic family. When Mrs. Weiss, now 89, a retired bookkeeper living in Baltimore, learned of Ms. Geulen’s address at an event for hidden children, she wrote her a letter of gratitude for risking her life. “I sent her pictures of my children and grandchildren,” Ms. Weiss recalled in a phone interview, “and said, ‘If it weren’t for you, they wouldn’t be here.’”

Charlotte Frank, who blazed a career path beginning as a fourth-grade teacher in New York City to become a policymaker codifying ambitious curricula for millions of students, died on May 26 at her home in Manhattan. She was 93.

The daughter of unschooled Eastern European immigrants, Dr. Frank was recruited in 1980 to oversee curriculum and instruction for the New York City school system by Chancellor Frank J. Macchiarola. She is credited with bringing new thinking to the teaching of reading and math, helping to modernize sex education and supporting the instruction of evolution by barring science textbooks that taught creationism. During her tenure, Ms. Frank argued for universal full-day kindergarten and initiated summer programs to instruct teachers at all levels in how to counter racial prejudice in classrooms.

Isaac Berger, known as Ike, who won three Olympic medals, six World Championships (twice winning gold), and eight U.S. national championships in weightlifting during the 1950s and ‘60s, died June 4.

Berger is remembered for his feats of strength, performing massive lifts while competing in the featherweight class. He was the first featherweight in history to lift more than 800 pounds in the snatch and clean and jerk events. Also, he was the first American featherweight to press double his bodyweight.

At the 1957 Maccabiah Games, Berger was the first athlete to break a world record in any sport in Israel. His gold medal was presented by Israeli Prime Minister David Bens Gurion, who called Berger the “gibor Yehudi” or “mighty Jew.” He was inducted into the U.S. Weightlifting Hall of Fame in 1965 and the International Jewish Sports Hall of Fame in 1980.

A.B. Yehoshua, the acclaimed Israeli novelist whose storytelling offered human portraits that captured the conditions in a land fraught with political strife, died on June 14 in Tel Aviv. He was 85.

In an oeuvre of 11 novels, three short-story collections, and four plays, he tackled as variety of narrative forms — from surrealist to historical — and delved into uncommon subjects. “Critics praised him for his nuanced understanding of the contradictory impulses that bedevil people and his capacity to find tender humor amid sorrow and despair,” The New York Times said.

Mr. Yehoshua won the National Jewish Book Award for fiction for Mr. Mani in 1992. He also won the Israel Prize, awarded annually by the state for important cultural contributions, and in 2005, he was shortlisted for the first Man Booker International Prize, then given for an entire body of work.