This month, Mercury House publishes Zosia Goldberg’s memoir, “Running Through Fire: How I Survived the Holocaust,” as told to Hilton Obenzinger. The full introduction, by novelist Paul Auster, is printed here with permission. ‘I thought fast. I was lucky and got an idea.” These two short sentences come toward the end of “Running Through Fire,”…
Journey Through the Inferno By Adam Boren Unites States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 200 pages, $15.95. * * *| Yesterday: My Story By Hadassah Rosensaft United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 207 pages, $15.95. * * *| A principal value of Holocaust survivor memoirs is that they focus on the victim as subject rather than object. They…
Laura Brahm is a freelance writer in Washington, D.C. After Such Knowledge: Memory, History, and the Aftermath of the Holocaust By Eva Hoffman PublicAffairs Books, 288 pages, $25. * * *| Several years ago, writer Eva Hoffman sat in a dreary New York restaurant with an elderly man she’d never met before. He’d sought her…
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…
Those Who Save Us By Jenna Blum Harcourt, 482 pages. $24. * * *| Holocaust literature and film, in its frequently noble attempts to render unspeakable atrocity, has sometimes drawn its moral lines too easily between good and evil, victims and perpetrators. The danger of this kind of demarcation is that it tempts future generations…
In the April issue of the magazine Moment there is a short item about the possible Jewish roots of flamenco or Spanish gypsy music. “Although not everybody finds Jewish overtones in the rhythmic dancing, the wailing style of songs, and the lush, intricate guitar playing,” writes Moment contributor Debra Bruno, “many believe that flamenco is…
Israel will be 56 on April 25. They’ve been 56 trying years, so you’d think she wouldn’t be dancing as much as when she was younger. But the country seems to defy all odds. Though she dances differently than she did when she was young, she still dances with uncommon vigor and creativity. When Israel…
JERUSALEM — El Al may stop flying immigrants to Israel from certain destinations after it is privatized, sources in the World Zionist Organization said. In a recent closed meeting of the WZO’s financial committee in Jerusalem, participants said with the takeover of El Al by Arkia, a privately owned Israeli airline, it may stop unprofitable…
TOKYO — From my seat at the Seder table on the first night of Passover, I could see the lights of Roppongi, a fashionable entertainment district near the heart of Tokyo, where the streets were lined with club-goers and illuminated by ubiquitous neon signs. We were a small group huddled together, wandering Jews in a…
David Wendt teaches ninth-grade English at Keokuk High School, a public high school in Iowa where the 700 students are almost all of German descent. The town has 30 churches for a population that barely exceeds 10,000. Most of the students have never left the town — or met a Jew. Wendt, who is known…
The unfolding chaos in Iraq is threatening the Bush administration’s ambitious plan to promote democratic reforms in the Middle East, experts and diplomats said. The administration’s so-called Greater Middle East initiative, which is to be presented formally during a meeting of the G-8 group of industrialized nations in early June, has already elicited criticism from…
