Long after the Kindertransport, the trauma remained
Jonathan Lichtenstein’s memoir “The Berlin Shadow” argues that the legacy of the Kindertransport rippled through the next generations.
After the Holocaust, displaced by indifference and paralysis
In David Nasaw’s “The Last Million,” the plight of Jewish refugees in DP camps offers a warning about the troubling aftermath of war.
Who would marry a Nazi leader — and why?
James Wyllie’s “Nazi Wives” examines Magda Goebbels, Emmy Goering and other “women at the top of Hitler’s Germany.”
Imagine, if you will, a sort of Yiddish ‘Brigadoon’
Max Gross has written a fantasy, but also an indictment of human fallibility, modernity, and the troubled relationship between Jews and gentiles.
An extraordinary yearning to understand a father’s life
A Polish Jewish immigrant from a large Hasidic clan in Warsaw, Eli Tannen led a sometimes difficult, decidedly nonlinear life.
Is it time to start taking beauty pageants seriously?
“In reality, the history of pageants mirrors the many monumental changes related to a woman’s place in society.”
50 shades of unconditional longing in a tale of erotic obsession
Daphne Merkin’s “22 Minutes of Unconditional Love” is an erotic, metafictional tale of female submission.
What Trump (and Masha Gessen) can teach us about autocracy
For Masha Gessen, the Moscow-born author and Vladimir Putin’s biographer, Trump is an aspiring autocrat.
Philip Roth’s ‘terrible gift of intimacy’
Roth could seem to be “a beguiling but remote citadel: august, many-towered, lavishly defended.” Benjamin Taylor knew him better.
The suicide epidemic of World War II
In Demmin, a town of just 15,000, as many as 1,000 people took their own lives.