Saul Austerlitz
By Saul Austerlitz
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News Too Devoid of Light To Capture on Celluloid: The Holocaust in Film
Saul Austerlitz is a writer living in New York. Afterimage: Film, Trauma, and the Holocaust By Joshua Hirsch Temple University Press, 213 pages. ***| An astounding and astonishingly little-known fact: Of the murder of 6 million Jews by the Nazis, and the additional slaughter of 4 million Communists, homosexuals, gypsies and others between the years…
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News Delving Into the Alienation of Life in Paradise
Saul Austerlitz is a freelance writer based in New York City. Little Edens By Barbara Klein Moss W.W. Norton & Company, 288 pages, $23.95. * * *| Having spent my formative years in Southern California, I have long been familiar with the sometimes astonishing discrepancy between the paradisiacal environment — in which the burnished sunlight,…
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News Traversing the World, in Search of Jewish Stories
REEL LIFE: In a banner year for documentaries, yet another gem emerges –– ‘Dziga and His Brothers,’ by Yevgeni Tsymbal, center. Other films include, from left to right, ‘Hiding and Seeking: Faith and Tolerance After the Holocaust,’ ‘Alila’ and ‘Kafka Goes to the Movies.’ This year’s New York Jewish Film Festival features a variety of…
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News Upper West Side Adolescence
The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button, Apt. 3W By Gabriel Brownstein W.W. Norton, 224 pages, $13.95. * * *| Contemporary American Judaism of the culturally oriented, lox-and-bagels-on-Sundays variety has always maintained a conflicted relationship with traditionally minded Orthodoxy: Orthodox practice is stigmatized, viewed as a mindless celebration of past tradition that wholly ignores contemporary mores,…
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News Finding Entire Universes in the Gnarled Recesses of the Psyche
Desire and Delusion: Three Novellas By Arthur Schnitzler Ivan R. Dee, 264 pages, $28.50. * * *| Thomas Pynchon once noted that when reference is made to the notion of seriousness in the context of a work of art, what is invariably under discussion is its attitude toward death. Obviously, death has been a primary…
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News The Fictionalized Babel: Twisting a Novelist’s Life Into Novelistic Shape
King of Odessa: A Novel By Robert A. Rosenstone Northwestern University Press, 256 pages, $24.95. * * *| The great Soviet writer Isaac Babel is renowned less for his work than for his status as a symbol of the brutality of the Communist regime. Justly famed for his short story collection, “Red Cavalry,” and his…
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News Co-op Murals Face Plastering
Faded and unkempt, the Hugo Gellert murals in the Seward Park Houses on the Lower East Side of Manhattan are once again at the heart of a budding controversy. This week the co-op’s shareholders are voting — ballots were due Friday — on whether they will be plastered over as part of a modernization of…
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News One Portuguese Jew’s Caffeinated Story of Suspense
The Coffee Trader By David Liss Random House, 384 pages, $24.95 * * *| Blending financial intrigue with historical fiction, David Liss has emerged with his second novel, a compelling mystery titled “The Coffee Trader.” The tale takes place in Amsterdam’s community of conversos, 16th- and 17th-century Portuguese Jews who, after being forced to convert…
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