Sid Davidoff, a lawyer who joined John V. Lindsay’s youth-driven campaign for mayor of New York in 1965 and, after victory in the election, became one of Lindsay’s chief lieutenants in City Hall, died on Nov. 16 in the Dominican Republic. He was 86.

Mr. Davidoff’s knowledge of the city’s streets — gleaned, in part, from driving a truck to sell the insecticide DDT to tenement dwellers, waiting tables, and booking rock ‘n’ roll bands — paid off when he shepherded Mr. Lindsay around during the 1965 campaign.

Mr. Davidoff met Mr. Lindsay when, as a young congressman, Mr. Lindsay spoke at NYU. “I knew he was going somewhere,” Mr. Davidoff told The New York Times in an interview in 1967.

After Mr. Lindsay was elected, Mr. Davidoff’s first job with the city was as an assistant buildings commissioner. “I came into my office,” he recalled, “and a civil servant said, ‘Can I help you, sonny?’ “yes,” I said, ‘you’re sitting at my desk.’”

When reporters questioned his credentials for the job, Mr. Davidoff was unfazed. “I’ve lived in buildings all my life,” he said.

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 lox-smiths, turning a 22-foot-wide shop into a world-renowned enterprise. Early on, the Zabars had five small stores, scattered along Broadway from West 80th to 110th Streets in Manhattan. Over time, they consolidated the operation into a single market generating nearly $55 million in yearly sales and sprawling across roughly 20,000 square feet at Broadway and West 80th Street. In a typical week, Zabar’s sold 2,000 pounds of smoked fish and 8,000 pounds of coffee to 40,000 customers.

“Money is not why we do this, not why we’re here seven days a week,” he told Edible Manhattan in 2022. “It’s a way of life for us. It’s kind of old-fashioned.”

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 mergers and acquisition, First Amendment cases and criminal defense. He argued before the Supreme Court on behalf of Texaco and represented the maverick investor Herbert J. Siegel, who became a billionaire after helping to clear the way for Warner Communications to merge with Time Inc. in 1989. He took leaves of absence from his law firm to work on former U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy’s successful 1964 U.S. Senate race in New York and on Mr. Kennedy’s 1968 presidential campaign.

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, when her family immigrated to Johannesburg on one of the last refugee boats allowed into South Africa.

From being an object of exclusion and persecution, she became a witness to it. And like many other refugee Jews, she became a determined opponent of apartheid.

Addressing the state Parliament of North Rhine-Westphalia in Germany in 2023, Ms. Weiss said, “Racism, antisemitism and misanthropy know no borders. These are injustices that must be fought everywhere.”

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 in an interview with New York Magazine in 2005. “It’s Brooklyn, it’s policemen, it’s reputed gangsters, it’s government witnesses, it’s federal prosecutors, it’s Brooklyn D.A. people, it’s detectives, it’s the F.B.I., it’s the D.E.A. Everything.”

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 Terezin concentration camp, north of Prague. While living there from 1941-1945, he faced the daily prospect of being transported to Auschwitz. Some of his most memorable short stories and novels touched on the horror of those years.

His writing also dwelled on the communist era, including the aftermath of the Prague Spring in 1968. Their optimism was thwarted when the Soviets sent an estimated 750,000 Warsaw Pact troops to suppress the Prague reforms later that year.

While his work is suffused with angst, it is also offset, Mr. Klima once said, by an underlying optimism. “My books may seem somewhat depressing,” he said, “but they always offer a little hope. I could not write a book without hope.”