By Dan Friedman
Austin Ratner has won the $100,000 top prize for his debut novel “The Jump Artist,” the fictionalized story of Philippe Halsman, a Jewish photographer who was charged — by an anti-Semitic Austrian court — with the murder of his own father on a hike in the Alps. Read an excerpt from the book, a review, and blog posts by the author.Read More
By Laura Hodes
Joseph Skibell’s third novel, “A Curable Romantic,” evokes the spirit of “Candide” with a Jewish postmodern twist in order to ask the same question as Voltaire: How can we be optimistic in the face of evil?Read More
By Allison Gaudet Yarrow
In this week’s Yid Lit podcast, host Allison Gaudet Yarrow sits down with author Julie Orringer. Her new novel “The Invisible Bridge” serves as a reminder that in a field as crowded as artistic representations of the Holocaust there is always something new to say, so long as there are individual stories to tell. The narrative, a follow-up to her celebrated story collection, “How to Breathe Underwater” takes the Hungarian Shoah for its backdrop.
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In a field as crowded with artistic representations as the Holocaust, it’s easy to assume that there is nothing new to say. Julie Orringer reminds us that there always is, so long as there are individual stories to tell.Read More
By Ezra Glinter and Dan Friedman
The finalists for the 2010 Sami Rohr Prize have been announced. The prize, the largest one in Jewish writing ($100,000 to the winner, $25,000 to the first runner-up), alternates each year between fiction and nonfiction and this year its nonfiction’s turn. The winner will be announced at the end of January. The 2010 award ceremony will be held in Jerusalem on March 31. The five finalists are surveyed below.
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By Joshua Furst
On September 10, 1928, a Latvian Jew was bludgeoned to death as he and his son hiked the Tyrolean Alps. The man’s son, Philipp Halsmann, 22 years old at the time, was convicted of the murder and spent the next two years in prison in Austria. In the appeal, Halsmann’s lawyer decimated what little evidence there was, but on the strength of an “experts’ report” from the medical facility of the University of Innsbruck, conjuring a brutal and embittered psychological portrait of the boy out of little more than the physical evidence of his father’s body, the sentence was upheld. Jewish and Jewish-sympathetic intellectuals and powerbrokers across Europe rallied for Halsmann’s release, condemning the verdict for what it was, a bald case of antisemitism, and Halsmann was eventually freed.
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By Austin Ratner
Eduard Severin Maria, one of the elder princes of Auersperg, led a hunt that day in the valley. His horse fell and was later found beheaded in the grass.Read More
