Benjamin Ivry is a frequent Forward contributor.
Benjamin Ivry
By Benjamin Ivry
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Culture Remembering Composer Vivian Fine on Her Centenary
September 28 marks the centenary of Vivian Fine (1913-2000) a Chicago-born composer who was profoundly influenced by Yiddishkeit. As Fine, who died in 2000 at the age of 87, told the composer Elizabeth Vercoe in a 1992 interview, her mother came from a “Russian Jewish family and started to work herself when she was 14….
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Culture Pope of Literature, Marcel Reich-Ranicki, Dies at 93
A memoir, “The Author of Himself: The Life of Marcel Reich-Ranicki published by Princeton University Press in 2001, recounts the unlikely story of how a Polish Jewish escapee from the Warsaw Ghetto managed to become the so-called “Pope of Literature” (Der Literatur-Papst) in postwar Germany. The critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki, who died yesterday at the age…
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Culture Searching For Jews in British Children’s Literature Beyond the Stereotypes
● Jews and Jewishness in British Children’s Literature By Madelyn Travis Routledge, 200 pages, $125 American book mavens who have delighted in growing up reading works by zesty authors who have a strong sense of Jewish identity, such as E. L. Konigsburg and Maurice Sendak, should be aware that readers in other countries are not…
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Culture The Midrashic Achievement of Poet John Hollander
The American Jewish poet John Hollander died on August 17 at age 83. At a 1990s New York literary gathering, I praised his translation of a poem by Jorge Luis Borges, “The Golem.”. Hollander demurred modestly, not adding as he did to the poet Edwin Honig in 1985: “My mother’s family traditionally believes that my…
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News Iconic Opera Singer Regina Resnik Dies at 90
The American Jewish mezzo-soprano Regina Resnik, who died on August 8 at age 90, was admired for her high-flying dramatic delivery and stage presence in roles from Mistress Quickly in Verdi’s “Falstaff” conducted by Leonard Bernstein to the Countess in Tchaikovsky’s “Pique Dame” conducted by Mstislav Rostropovich. In 1987, in the Kander and Ebb musical…
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Culture Remembering Charlotte Delbo on the 100th Anniversary of Her Birth
August 10 marks the hundredth anniversary of the birth of the non-Jewish French writer Charlotte Delbo, who was deported to Auschwitz and survived to bear witness. Delbo’s prose and verse writings were reprinted by Yale University Press under the title “Auschwitz and After,” while her plays — including some never previously printed — were recently…
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News Journalist Henri Alleg, Warned of Torture Dangers, Dies at 91
After 9/11, when the legitimacy of waterboarding and other torture methods during interrogations became a topic of fierce media debate, the French Jewish journalist Henri Alleg, who died July 17 at age 91, seemed uncannily prescient. Alleg, a newspaper editor in Algeria in the 1950s, was imprisoned and tortured by French authorities for supporting Algerian…
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Culture How Dogs Went From Feared Enemy to Jew’s Best Friend
‘If you are already a dog, at least do not be a pig.” “A cantor in his old age barks like a dog and eats like a pig.” “A wife is like a dog in the house.” These and other Yiddish proverbs may be seen as objectionable today, but all reflect the complex and contradictory…
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