Michael Feldman, 36, Financial Analyst
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Michael Feldman, a financial analyst with Intrepid Capital Management, died Saturday at 36. He had been suffering from late-stage lung cancer, diagnosed in April.
Feldman was the model for Andy, the husband in Karen Schwartz’s Brooklyn Chronicles, a fictionalized memoir about the couple’s life in Carroll Gardens that ran weekly in the New York Sun in 2004 and 2005.
Born October 13, 1971 in Philadelphia, Pa., Feldman studied economics and philosophy at Columbia University. While still at Columbia, he discovered a talent for buying curios and selling them at a hefty markup. For a time he maintained his own booth at a flea market outside Philadelphia. He worked for several years as a computer technician, but found the work dull, said Benjamin Alsup, a college friend. Feldman killed time by napping and reading novels. After becoming engaged to Ms. Schwartz, he enrolled in business school. In 1998, he graduated from the University of Chicago with an MBA. He worked briefly for the Boston Consulting Group before joining Intrepid Capital, a private equity firm where he specialized in healthcare investments.
After coming to Carroll Gardens from the Upper West Side, Feldman and Ms. Schwartz moved to Hastings-on-Hudson. The move upstate was in part inspired by the birth of their second child, Benjamin, whose production was a theme of Ms. Schwartz’s stories in the Sun.
“He was a man of deep and sometimes abiding enthusiasms,” said Mr. Alsup, who recalled Feldman’s forays into food processing. “He became disturbed by the price of beef jerky,” and purchased drying racks for his home kitchen, Mr. Alsup said. “It was only passably good, which did not deter him from making it,” he added.
Feldman continued to work at his job through last fall, when his disease, diagnosed at a late stage, overtook him. At his funeral on Monday, friends and family members recalled him cheerfully bearing up under the strain of treatments, baking and cooking for his children while wheelchair bound and letting his toddler daughter fool with the adjustable bed at his hospice.
Feldman is survived by Ms. Schwartz, his children, Sarah and Benjamin, his brothers, David and Edward, and his parents, Susan and Arnold Feldman of Bala Cynwyd, Pa.
