Thirty years ago, Leslie Epstein raised hackles with his fictional take on the Lodz ghetto A Jewish policeman and a German soldier direct pedestrian traffic in the Lodz ghetto. The sign reads: Jewish residential area, entrance is forbidden. (Photo: Paul Mix, courtesy of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.) More than six decades later, Theodor …
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 University of Toronto, presents a less dispiriting narrative. In researching the book, she interviewed …
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 will screen at the New York Jewish Film Festival opening today, could have been …
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.
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 doesn’t seem very Jewish. Neither, for that matter, does Juliette Binoche, the magnificent French …
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 I.L. Peretz, the eminence grise of Yiddish letters. Peretz did not respond, so Bergelson …
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. …
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 …
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 …
