Benjamin Ivry is a frequent Forward contributor.
Benjamin Ivry
By Benjamin Ivry
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The Schmooze Their Pen-Pal Adolf
Understanding how a nation can embrace anti-Semitic tyranny is a complex problem. “Letters to Hitler”, out in May from Polity Books, helps explain the matter. Historian Henrik Eberle, co-author of “The Hitler Book,” has selected from thousands of letters written by Germans of all ages from 1925 to 1945 from a collection found in Moscow’s…
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Culture No Straight Path From Dogma to Dissent
Vasily Grossman has received many well-deserved tributes as a dissident writer who dared state what is now the obvious — that when reviewing the wreckage inflicted upon humanity by such dictators as Stalin and Hitler, there are more similarities than differences to be found in their legacies. Paying tribute to this conclusion, and to the…
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Culture Not Your Grandmother’s Grandmothers
The Story of a Life: Memoirs of a Young Jewish Woman in the Russian Empire By Anna Pavlovna Vygodskaia, translated by Eugene Avrutin and Robert Greene Northern Illinois University Press, 202 pages, $22.95 Journal (1918-1920) By Nelly Ptachkina, translated into French by Luba Jurgenson Les Éditions des Syrtes, 267 pages, $29.39 All too often, accounts…
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Culture Death in Petrópolis
Viennese-born Jewish author Stefan Zweig and his second wife, Lotte Altmann, committed suicide together as refugees in Brazil in February 1942, but Zweig’s works, whether fiction, biographies or letters, have never seemed more alive. Seventy years on, the former home in Petrópolis where he died, now known as Casa Stefan Zweig, is scheduled to [open…
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The Schmooze For Yo-Yo Ma, Glick Was Worth Hearing
On June 7, Toronto’s Beth Tikvah Synagogue will host a special concert to honor the tenth Yahrzeit of Canadian composer Srul Irving Glick. Toronto’s Holy Blossom Temple already did the same on April 22, five days after his actual passing a decade ago. Son of a cantor, Glick (1934-2002) grew up to be a composer…
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The Schmooze Letters from a Dying Hungarian Architect
Instructional letters from parents to children, such as those from Lord Chesterfield or Madame de Sevigné, can make delightful reading. But few have the emotional charge of “Paper Kisses: Letters of a Jewish Father from Prison 1942/43,” published in February by Klett-Cotta Verlag. They were written by the Hungarian Jewish architect Pál Meller (known as…
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The Schmooze Lizzie Doron, Novelist of Tel Aviv’s Bitzaron
Some urban areas can inspire literary careers. Lizzie Doron, born in Tel Aviv in 1953, was raised in that city’s Bitzaron neighborhood, where traumatized Holocaust survivors lived in a “kind of refugee camp,” speaking a macaronic blend of languages in which Yiddish featured prominently. When at age six, Lizzie and her friends were sent to…
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The Schmooze Denying Robert Faurisson
French anti-Semitism is a recurrent struggle, most recently shown by the Cannes Film Festival’s abrupt cancellation of “The Anti-Semite” — a film starring Dieudonné M’Bala M’Bala, a French comic with a history of anti-Semitism. Dealing with another strand of the trait, French historian Valérie Igounet’s useful “The Story of Holocaust Denial in France,” from Les…
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