Born in Amsterdam, Blumenfeld spent his early childhood in France and moved to New York with his family in August 1941. He is the son of Erwin Blumenfeld, an internationally renowned and heavily influential photographer who specialized in fashion imagery, especially female nudes. Major magazines on both sides of the Atlantic used his work for cover photos and spreads, and the younger Blumenfeld recently published a collection of his father’s prints, The Naked and the Veiled: The Photographic Nudes of Erwin Blumenfeld.

Growing up in Manhattan where his father kept a midtown studio, Yorick attended Columbia Grammar School and matriculated to Harvard in 1950.

A French, British, and Russian History and Literature concentrator at the College, Blumenfeld found himself under the tutelage of now-legendary Russian history scholar Richard Pipes. Pipes, the Baird Professor of History Emeritus, guided Blumenfeld through his undergraduate years, an academic journey that culminated in his thesis, “Gogol and Russian Censorship.”

Blumenfeld argued that censorship acted as a fuel for global creativity, resulting in some of the world’s best-known works of artistry.

“We hotly disagreed,” he says of his experience with the noted scholar. “But it was a very good experience to disagree with Richard Pipes.”

He pauses a moment. “He did appreciate me, I think,” he says reflectively.

Beyond academics, Blumenfeld was also involved in musical theater at Harvard. He stayed behind the scenes, designing sets for the Lowell House Musical Society and, with a friend, submitting a script for the Hasty Pudding Theatricals.

“I liked writing, I didn’t like being on stage,” he recalls.

A WORLD OF NEWS

The script was not selected for production. But soon after graduation, Blumenfeld began making a career of his writing. After postgraduate work at the London School of Economics, he moved to Washington, D.C. to work as an editorial research reporter at Congressional Quarterly.

In the waning days of 1962, after the Philia experiment had come to a halt, Blumenfeld had a chance meeting with Washington Post owner Philip Graham in Paris. “He hired me on the spot,” Blumenfeld recalls.

Graham was less than a year away from his suicide.

“Phil was very erratic—a great man but off the wall,” Blumenfeld said. He later became friends with Graham’s wife Katharine, who took over the Post upon her husband’s death and was a formidable force in Washington society until her own death in 2001.

The chance meeting in France was the beginning of a seven-year career at Newsweek. Blumenfeld started as a cultural correspondent based in Paris, and later became the Eastern European Bureau Chief. His work included two major cover stories: profiles of dictators Nicolae Ceausescu of Romania and Josip Broz Tito of Yugoslavia. Blumenfeld later wrote a book on his experiences, See Saw: Cultural Life in Eastern Europe.

The 1980s brought Ronald Reagan, and a shift in Blumenfeld’s career.