Benjamin Ivry is a frequent Forward contributor.
Benjamin Ivry
By Benjamin Ivry
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The Schmooze Who is Itta Shedletzky, ‘Kafka Specialist’?
A scrum of Israeli lawyers and Swiss bank clerks crowded a Zurich bank vault recently, after a Tel Aviv family court ordered the opening of four safe deposit boxes belonging to the heirs of Max Brod’s secretary containing manuscripts by Franz Kafka. A similar crowd had already visited safe deposit boxes in a Tel Aviv…
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The Schmooze Frédéric Chouraki’s Yom Kippur Comedy
France’s Frédéric Chouraki is one of Europe’s most frivolous and insouciant young Jewish novelists. Chouraki’s 2008 “Ginsberg and Me” (“Ginsberg et moi”), from Les Éditions du Seuil, is a fictional jape about Simon Glückmann, an observant young French Jew who meets and seduces the elderly American poet Allen Ginsberg in a Paris gay sauna. Hijinks…
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The Schmooze Alain Elkann Remembers Mama
Alain Elkann, born in 1950, is perhaps best known for his “Life of Moravia,” in which he was the chosen interlocutor of the famed novelist Alberto Moravia.The Jewish Italian author and journalist has also published two books of conversations with the chief rabbi emeritus of Italy, Elio Toaff, “To Be A Jew” and “The Messiah…
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The Schmooze Bernard Frank: France’s Much-Missed Literary Wit
In 2006, when the French Jewish author Bernard Frank dropped dead of a heart attack while dining with a cardiologist friend at a fancy Paris restaurant, readers felt it was a fitting end for this waspish gourmet with a fine talent for conviviality. Since his death at age 77, Frank’s articles on books, gourmet food…
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The Schmooze The Discreet Photography of Esther Bubley
Fans of photography are discovering that a “slender, soft-spoken unobtrusive, curly-haired Midwestern Jewish girl,” as journalist Melissa Fay Greene calls Esther Bubley, was one of America’s most sensitive camera artists from the 1940s onward. Greene’s “The Photographs of Esther Bubley” from D. Giles Limited tells how Bubley was born in Wisconsin in 1921 to a…
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The Schmooze Gary Graffman, Prodigious Pianist
This summer’s upcoming International Keyboard Institute and Festival (IKIF) at New York’s Mannes College offers many prospective delights, not least being the scheduled July 22 recital by the brilliant young Israeli pianist Einav Yarden. Piano buffs will also be thrilled to know that one of the deans of American music, pianist Gary Graffman, will be…
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The Schmooze Down Memory Lane: Frankfurt’s Judengasse
Frankfurt’s now-destroyed Jew’s Alley, or Judengasse, was the city’s Jewish ghetto from 1462 until 1796, a crowded home to Germany’s largest Jewish community. A new book from Vallentine-Mitchell Publishers “The Frankfurt Judengasse” further explores the ghetto’s lore, presenting research from a 2004 academic conference co-sponsored by Frankfurt’s Goethe University, The Frankfurt Jewish Museum, the Judengasse…
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The Schmooze ‘On the Brink of Oblivion’: Paula Jacques’s Egyptian Lore
Paula Jacques, the Cairo-born French novelist of Egyptian Jewish descent, has long been a lively presence on the Paris literary scene. Born Paula Abadi in 1949, she moved to France as a teenager, after rebelling against the “regimentation” of a “Marxist kibbutz” in Israel during a short stay there. Less regimented, although doubtless just as…
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