What does it mean to be from a place that is no longer on the map? My homeland, the Soviet Union, disintegrated in late 1991, a scant three years after my family had managed to escape its anti-Semitism and lack of opportunity. As an immigrant in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, with a funny haircut and even funnier …
‘Where Is Home, If the Place You Come From No Longer Exists?’ Read More »
For novelist Gary Shteyngart, whose family fled Soviet antisemitism for the United States in 1979, the problem with American Judaism came down to one thing: salami. “One of my most moving memories from childhood is going to Hebrew school in Queens, where they wouldn’t allow meat products, and sneaking in this pork salami,” Shteyngart said …
A year ago, Max Berlin was planning on becoming a journalist after graduating from Hunter College in New York City. A thoughtful young man who had emigrated from Odessa, Ukraine, in 1992, Berlin, 21, had founded a newspaper at Hunter and was in the process of seeking out experienced reporters for insight into the trade. …
In March 1985 at a Soviet orphanage, a severely disabled Russian teenager improbably named Ruben David Gonzalez Gallego was watching television as Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the newly anointed Soviet leader, received well-wishers from abroad. Among them was Ignacio Gallego, the patriarch of Spanish Communism. “Not your grandfather, is it?” someone in the room quipped. “If …
A Prize Novel Full of Truths That Stretch Believability Read More »
Stalin has had a rough time at the hands of Russian novelists in recent years. Though polls continue to show he is venerated by nearly half of his countrymen, the Russian writer Vladimir Sorokin, in his 1999 novel Blue Lard, coupled him — Stalin out front — with the whistleblower who denounced his personality cult, …
Russia may torment Pavel Lounguine, but the filmmaker can’t help himself. He keeps returning to explore their messy relationship. Born in Moscow in 1949, Pavel Lounguine worked as a screenwriter on the trifling fare a Soviet artist resorted to if he wished to refrain from ideological bombast: "children’s films or comedies, or horses—you know, Russian …
PARIS — On Tuesday, French President Jacques Chirac inaugurated France’s official Holocaust Memorial and “renew[ed] our country’s promise never to forget what it proved unable to avoid.” The memorial’s patrons — the French government, a supporting foundation and the Jewish community, among others — intend the museum as “Europe’s institution of reference for the Holocaust,” …
Letter from Paris: Holocaust Memorial Performs a Strained Balancing Act Read More »
A dispatch from Iraqi Kurdistan six months after the American invasion, after being smuggled across the Turkish-Iraqi border. America was cozying up to some strange bedfellows.
The emotional landscape of childhood, with its naïveté and surprise, is so difficult to reclaim that its greatest chroniclers – Lewis Carroll in ”Alice in Wonderland,” Boris Pasternak in ”Liuvers’s Childhood” — have often resorted to fantasy or abstraction. In her first collection, ”There Are Jews in My House,” where all but one of the …
How Tolerance and Terror Marked the Evolving Fate of Jews Under Muslim Rule Last year, a friend and I visited the Jewish cemetery in Fez during a trip to Morocco. The place had the serenity of a shrine, and it was: By our count, no Jew had died in Fez since 1954, mostly because virtually …