Alan Arkin dies at 89

(JTA) - Alan Arkin knew he was going to be an actor from the age of five.

"Every film I saw, every play, every piece of music fed an unquenchable need to turn myself into something other than what I was," he wrote in his 2011 memoir, "An Improvised Life."

What he was was the son of Ukrainian and German Jewish immigrants in Brooklyn, where he was born in 1934. But over the course of a long and unusually peripatetic career, he managed to turn himself into a conflicted Russian submarine officer ("The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming," 1966), a struggling Puerto Rican widower ("Popi,"...