In “Afterworld,” a novella that closes the new story collection “Memory Wall,” O. Henry Prize-winning author Anthony Doerr imagines life inside a Jewish girls’ orphanage during World War II. The novella tells the story of Esther, an epileptic grandmother in Geneva, Ohio, whose seizures bring her back to the time she spent in the orphanage….
The New York literary scene may currently be all caught up in Book Expo America, but in Toronto a smaller literary celebration is being held tonight at the Canadian Jewish Book Awards. Among the honorees are Robin McGrath for her Newfoundland-based novel, “The Winterhouse” (Killik Press) David Sax for his book, “Save the Deli” (Houghton…
There’s been a lot of fantastic Web writing around this week’s PBS premiere of a brand new version of “The Diary of Anne Frank” (see the Forward’s interview with star Ellie Kendrick here). On PBS’s blog, Remotely Connected, author and researcher Alexandra Zapruder, who compiled a collection of Jewish children’s Holocaust journals, wrote about the…
‘Tis the season to tweet, pray and memorialize Jewish thoughts online. In the past year, we’ve seen the Western Wall get a twitter account and Auschwitz develop its own Facebook page. This past week, the Anne Frank Center USA along with the U.N. Holocaust Program launched a twitter account for Anne Frank, asking students who…
Someone on the grounds crew at the Corporation of Yaddo, the artists colony in Saratoga Springs N.Y., has a sense of humor. In the “Breast Room” (so-called because Philip Roth wrote “The Breast” while residing in it) of the West House building, the shower is mislabeled. When one turns the dial from off at the…
Last week, my 15-year-old son, a Facebook junkie like all his peers (and his mother), showed me the newly public only extant video footage of Anne Frank, which has raced around the Internet, mesmerizing many of us. I think I’ve watched it 20 times. The all-too-brief clip of a girl unknowingly at the apex of…
I logged onto the computer last weekend to see that Anne Frank was a trending topic on Twitter. That was largely thanks to the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, which released (as the Bintel Blog reported) a new video, showing the only known footage of Anne, leaning out of a window and watching a married…
We didn’t know how much truth we were telling. This week we ran an article about Francine Prose’s new book on Anne Frank. We entitled Tova Mirvis’s review “Hidden Writer Revealed” because Anne Frank was not only famously hidden from the Nazis but because (certainly according to Prose) her literary talents have also been overshadowed…
מאַטי מענדלאָוויטשעס ברודער, וואָס האָט יאָרן לאַנג געליטן פֿון דעפּרעסיע, האָט הײַיאָר זיך גענומען דאָס לעבן. .
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