Benjamin Ivry is a frequent Forward contributor.
Benjamin Ivry
By Benjamin Ivry
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The Schmooze Sonny Berman: The Jazzing Jew
Earlier this year, the Library of Congress website analyzed an unpublished 1946 jazz recording which the Library acquired last year of a jam session in Oklahoma City featuring trumpeter Sonny Berman, a talent well worth remembering. Born Saul Berman in New Haven in 1925, Sonny was sassy, no-holds-barred, and witty, blithely adept at be-bop as…
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The Schmooze Irritated by Koestler, Nauseated by Sartre
The Polish Jewish author Yuli Borisovich Margolin wrote the gulag memoir “Trip to the Land of Ze-kas,” translated into French in 2010. Its title refers to the Soviet secret police term “Ze-Ka” (or Z/K) for doomed prison laborers who were worked to death in the early 1930s. Margolin, a resident of Palestine who was arrested…
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Culture Stephen Spender’s Jewish Roots
For most of his life, London-born poet Stephen Spender (1909–1995) felt close ties to the Jewish people; he himself was one-quarter Jewish (his mother, Violet Schuster, was from a Jewish family originally from Frankfurt), but his 1941 marriage to Natasha Litvin, a pianist from a Lithuanian Jewish refugee family, strengthened the connection. This is affirmed…
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The Schmooze The Erotic Appeal of Israeli Literature
Jean Mattern, who is in charge of purchasing foreign rights for literature at Les éditions Gallimard, is a key player in introducing contemporary Israeli authors to French readers, including Amos Oz, Alona Kimhi, Eshkol Nevo, and Zeruya Shalev. A regular attendee at the Jerusalem International Book Fair, Mattern, who reads Hebrew fluently,, is also a…
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The Schmooze An Italian Moses and Mountaineer
Italian author Erri De Luca shares two passions with the Biblical lawgiver Moses: mountaineering and the Hebrew language. Such is the message of “And He Said,” translated from the Italian original which appeared from Feltrinelli Editore last year.. Born in 1950 in Naples, Luca was a militant leftist in “Lotta continua” (Continuous Struggle), a group…
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The Schmooze The ‘Jewish Mother’ of Psychoanalysis
One historian wrote: “If, metaphorically, Sigmund Freud was the father of psychoanalysis, Sándor Ferenczi was the mother.” If so, then every day is Mother’s Day for the analyst born Sándor Fränkel in northeastern Hungary to Polish Jewish parents in 1873 (the family name was later changed to sound more Hungarian). In January, Karnac Books published…
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The Schmooze An Unknown Poet Who Deserves To Be Known
In 1943, a refugee German Jewish poet wrote “A Black Woman on the Harlem Express” which apostrophizes an African-American passenger sitting opposite her on the Manhattan subway: “Do you know that we are secretly sisters?/ You, dark brown daughter of the Congo,/ and I, the pale European Jewish child.” Alluding to a shared identity as…
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Culture Benoit Mandelbrot Influenced Art and Mathematics
Born in Warsaw in 1924 to a Lithuanian Jewish family, Benoit Mandelbrot survived Nazi-occupied France to become one of the most creative thinkers of the 20th century. Mandelbrot, who died of pancreatic cancer in a Cambridge, Mass., hospice in 2010, left behind “The Fractalist: Memoir of a Scientific Maverick”. He coined the term “fractal” in…
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