Benjamin Ivry is a frequent Forward contributor.
Benjamin Ivry
By Benjamin Ivry
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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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The Schmooze Mother and Daughter of Fashion
The Strasbourg-born French Jewish novelist Eliette Abécassis has been inspired by themes from the Dead Sea Scrolls to the Shoah. Yet Abécassis, daughter of the noted Morocco-born French historian of philosophy Armand Abécassis, seemed to switch subject matter in 2008 when she wrote “Mother and Daughter: a Novel” (Les éditions Albin Michel) about the fashion…
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The Schmooze ‘Dear Miss’: The Correspondence of Alice Ferrières, Righteous Among the Nations
In 1964, the first French woman to be honored by the Yad Vashem commission with the title “Righteous among the Nations” was a math teacher at a girls’ school in a remote town in France’s mountainous Auvergne region. Alice Ferrières of Murat was a Protestant whose family was affected by 1685’s revocation of the Edict…
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Books Jewish Comics and Graphic Novels, From One Generation to the Next
Fans of comic books and graphic novels are mourning the death of Harvey Pekar, who died today in his Cleveland home at the age of 70. Pekar was mainly known for authoring the autobiographical series “American Splendor,” which documented his lower-middle class Jewish upbringing in Ohio. Pekar also wrote “Our Cancer Year,” after being diagnosed…
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