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, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews, a chronicle 20 years in the making. […]
Jewel in the Crown Read More »
Dorota Maslowska’s first novel, ”Snow White and Russian Red,” is a blustery romp through the disaffected world of post-Communist Polish youth. Stranded in a country that’s no longer Communist but isn’t yet integrated into the West, young Poles compensate for their sense of political and economic abandonment with drugs and sex. Maslowska describes their disdainful
LAST Sunday, as photographers gathered in front of the Millennium Theater on Brighton Beach Avenue in Brooklyn, a muscular man in a bulletproof vest dramatically hoisted a cardboard box full of ostensibly illegal DVD copies of the Russian-American spy thriller ”Nelegal” (”Illegal”), a film that was having its U.S. premiere that night. ”Oleg, your hat,
Pirates by the Sea Read More »
When Lisa Hock’s son Corey was about to turn 13 and she began looking for an alternative to the routine and occasional excess of banquet-hall bar mitzvahs in Toronto, her hometown, she hardly imagined that he would end up reciting the blessings while shuffling through sand on a Caribbean island. But Corey wasn’t on the
Discovering Jewish Roots on Caribbean Soil Read More »
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 Nerve—chronicles his travels with Hans Breuer, a wandering shepherd who is also an accomplished
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 the Caucasus. The Bolshevik Revolution rendered Nussimbaum—who became enchanted by the region’s inclusive
Recently I purchased online a used copy of “The Rise of David Levinsky,” Abraham Cahan’s epic 1917 tale of a penniless immigrant’s dubious evolution into a spiritually vacant New York tycoon. It turned out to be infested with notes made by a previous reader. I huffed my way through 200 pages of fatuous marginalia —
Marginal Contributions Read More »
Liev Schreiber pulls a switch on Everything Is Illuminated. download the artist selects 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 grandfather’s life during the Holocaust, was that the American’s “self-discovery” tour was actually
The Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, scheduled to begin tomorrow, has provoked ferocious opposition from those who view it as a concession to Palestinian terrorism. There have been periodic warnings of civil war, but, as of press time, the only war to break out in Israel has been between colors: anti-disengagement forces are orange,
MILA GORBATOFF, a Russian-Jewish immigrant who fled the rampant anti-Semitism in Ukraine in 1988, lights a menorah every Hanukkah to commemorate her bond to a previously forbidden faith and the new freedoms that made it possible. After Hanukkah ends, another fixture of the holiday landscape appears in the living room of her apartment in Brighton
That Tree by the Menorah Read More »