Edward Serotta
By Edward Serotta
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Culture How the World Came to an End 75 Years Ago
It was seventy-five years ago this week that the Jewish world of Eastern Europe came to an end. On June 22, 1941, Adolf Hitler’s armies, accompanied by Hungarian, Romanian, Slovak and Italian troops, attacked Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union, along with the Baltics, which were then occupied by the Soviet Union, and Soviet-occupied eastern Poland. The…
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Culture PHOTOS: The Last Jews of ‘The Fiddler’s’ Shtetl
With Fiddler on the Roof opening on Broadway to rave reviews, we republish an article Edward Serotta wrote for the German newspaper Die Zeit on January 8, 1998, after he stumbled upon the former shtetl where Sholem Aleichem first started writing. None of those mentioned in this article are still living, or remain in Bogoslav…
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Opinion When a Syrian Girl Named Halla Melted My Heart in Vienna
That was some dinner. Good friends, great food. Think I’ll grab this tram and switch to another one in front of the Parliament. OK, here I am on the platform, waiting for my second tram. Midnight. What’s this on the bench? A mother, a sick-looking baby, two children, two men. Obviously Syrians. Oh how sad….
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Culture Journalist Profiles Nine Extraordinarily Influential Emigres
The Great Escape: Nine Jews Who Fled Hitler and Changed the World By Kati Marton Simon & Schuster, 288 pages, $27. My grandmother used to satirically refer to “Die Grossen Ungarischen Jüdischen Übermenschen,” or “The Great Hungarian Jewish Superhumans,” because this subset of Jews were always so relentless in praising their own. But though we…
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Opinion Balkan Tolerance Worth Its Weight in Euros
The first time I visited Bulgaria was in the winter of 1985. As the overnight train from Istanbul lumbered through the country, the only thing I saw in abundance were statues to “Our Soviet Liberators.” In Sofia, I walked past a flatbed truck unloading cabbage before a grocery store that had not yet opened. A…
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Yiddish World Yiddish street signs: Commemoration or marginalization?
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Looking Forward Class assignment: Get to know your murdered Jewish neighbors