Benjamin Ivry is a frequent Forward contributor.
Benjamin Ivry
By Benjamin Ivry
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The Schmooze Eating and Drinking with Shabbetai Zvi
Leyb ben Oyzer’s “Description of Shabbetai Zevi” (Bashraybung fun Shabetai Tsvi) is a fascinating Yiddish text, apparently never wholly translated into English, but available in a sparkling new translation into French by Nathan Weinstock, published in November 2011 by Les éditions Honoré Champion. “Description of Shabbetai Zevi” first appeared in 1718 in Amsterdam, where its…
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The Schmooze Cioran and the Jews Redux
As the centenary of the Romanian-born French writer Emil Cioran winds down, further attention honors the author who died in 1995, including “All Gall is Divided: The Aphorisms of E. M. Cioran” translated by Richard Howard, due out in March from Arcade Publishing, and a hefty collected works of over 1700 pages, out from Gallimard’s…
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The Schmooze Éliette Abécassis, ‘Hereby Permitted’ to Readers
Perhaps the brainiest current romance novelist is the French Jewish writer Éliette Abécassis, born in 1969 in Strasbourg to an Orthodox Sephardic family. Her father, Armand Abécassis, is an historian of Jewish spirituality and prolific author himself. Éliette Abécassis teaches philosophy at the University of Caen and also writes middle-brow, accessible fiction about the storm…
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Culture Tragic in Novels, Lucky in Friends
A terminal alcoholic who drank himself to death in 1939 at age 44, Joseph Roth, whose ideas about Judaism were often complex and contradictory, has long been an object of fascination. With the publication of his letters, attention has redoubled on the novels and journalism of that passionately pugnacious Austrian-Jewish writer. His work, and especially…
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The Schmooze A Rebel Reviewed by Trotsky
A picaresque 20th-century Jewish literary life is being celebrated with a vibrant new biography. The novelist Jean Malaquais, born Vladimir Jan Pavel Israël Pinkus Malacki in Warsaw in 1908, is the subject of “The Rebellious Malaquais” by Geneviève Nakach, out from Les éditions Le Cherche Midi in November. Malaquais’ first novella, “Marianka,” about an anti-Semitic…
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The Schmooze A Big Hand for Surgeon Raoul Tubiana
Jewish childhood experiences can determine a lifetime, as a recent heartfelt memoir, “In Your Hands: a Surgeon Traverses the Century,” published on October 20 by Les éditions France-Empire, demonstrates. Its author, Raoul Tubiana, was born to a Jewish family at Constantine in north-eastern Algeria in 1915, and is a longtime resident of France. Still thriving…
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The Schmooze Never Mind Bismarck, Listen to Grünfeld
Who left more of a legacy to mankind, a German chancellor or a Jewish pianist? At the end of January, excited headlines announced that a previously unknown 1889 recording of the voice of Prussian ruler Otto von Bismarck was discovered by a scholar digging in the archives of sound pioneer Thomas Edison. An overlooked find…
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The Schmooze Neurologist and Anti-Nazi Partisan Davide Schiffer
The French Jewish neuropsychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Boris Cyrulnik has written widely about the importance of “Creative Disobedience” and how when faced by the Nazis, badly-behaved children often had more useful survival strategies than polite, well-trained ones. The eminent Italian neurologist Davide Schiffer has produced a memoir of his own war years, underlining the truth…
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