Boris Fishman » Nextbook

The Man Who Would Be King

Boris — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 20:14:05 +0000

Thirty years ago, Leslie Epstein raised hackles with his fictional take on the Lodz ghetto

More than six decades later, Theodor Adorno’s claim that “to write poetry after…

Mixed Messages

Boris — Wed, 27 Sep 2006 18:57:41 +0000

Anna Shternshis reveals how Soviet propaganda forged a new brand of Jewish identity

Histories of Soviet Jewry have usually told stories of oppression and resistance. In Soviet and Kosher, Anna Shternshis, a Moscow-born professor of Yiddish language and literature at the…

Forged Reunions

Boris — Wed, 11 Jan 2006 17:35:27 +0000

A picture of post-Soviet provincial life, both Jewish and gentile

In “Roots,” the new film by Pavel Lounguine, a Ukrainian conman named Edik lures several wealthy North Americans on a heritage tour to their ancestral shtetl of Golutvin. The film, which…

Ghetto Music

Boris — Mon, 19 Dec 2005 16:21:40 +0000

When Italians fell for klezmer, Francesco Spagnolo tuned them in to the forgotten sounds of their own people. Audio Interview by Boris Fishman. Listen courtesy of Nextbook.

Spelling Errors

Boris — Fri, 11 Nov 2005 21:08:59 +0000

How Bee Season lost its sting on the screen

The first thing one notices about Richard Gere in his otherwise sensitive performance as Saul Naumann, the domineering patriarch of a Jewish family in existential tailspin in Bee Season, is that he…

Back From the Shadows

Boris — Fri, 17 Jun 2005 20:48:25 +0000

Dovid Bergelson’s skepticism served him poorly in life but sublimely in art

In 1907, a 23-year-old writer from Kiev named Dovid Bergelson decided to send fragments of his latest work, an impressionistic account of shtetl life titled “At the Depot,” to…

Jewel in the Crown

Boris — Thu, 12 May 2005 20:46:45 +0000

For three centuries, Salonica was a vibrant hub of Ottoman life.

The northern Greek city of Salonica—Thessaloniki to the Greeks—passed through Roman and Byzantine hands before falling to the Ottomans in 1430, which is the starting point of Mark Mazower’s Salonica,…

Austrophobia

Boris — Thu, 17 Mar 2005 20:45:15 +0000

Sam Apple encounters a shepherd who sings in Yiddish—and forces him to question his deepest fear.

In Schlepping Through the Alps: My Search for Austria’s Jewish Past With Its Last Wandering Shepherd, author Sam Apple—an editor at the literary sex magazine…

Reorientation

Boris — Sat, 26 Feb 2005 03:42:22 +0000

Tom Reiss on the mysterious Byronic figure from Baku who posed as a Muslim prince.

The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life tells the story of Lev Nussimbaum, born in 1905 in Baku, then a cosmopolitan boomtown in…

A Novel Ending

Boris — Sun, 16 Jan 2005 17:51:29 +0000

Liev Schreiber pulls a switch on Everything Is Illuminated.

The clever subversion of Jonathan Safran Foer’s 2002 novel Everything Is Illuminated, which described a young American Jew’s search through Ukraine for a woman who may have saved his…