“Do the dead know that life still exists, somewhere?” the 17-year-old literature-loving, sex-obsessed Samuel Glass asks in “The Odyssey of Samuel Glass.” Since his adored father’s sudden death, he is desperate to leave the confines of his north London suburban home. His desire to “get away from the doom-laden cloud that pervaded the house” is…
In Egyptian times, Sophia Grojsman says, priests made a tincture of natural oils which they dabbed behind the ears of men and women to soothe their troubled souls. Thus, perfumery was born. “This is medicine for your mind and body,” Grojsman says. “That’s what perfume is.” During more than 30 years in the fragrance business,…
Time magazine has one of the scariest news reports I’ve read in a while. It seems the Cossacks are on the rise again. No, not figuratively — literally. The fanatically religious pan-Slavic paramilitary tribe that terrorized your great-grandmother’s great-grandmother in the old country is recruiting, operating youth training camps, running for office (successfully) in Russia…
Image by Ivan Dribas. Courtesy of Minsker Kapelye. There is a story in my family about my paternal great-grandfather Yosl (Yeysef), who served as a clarinetist in the Russian Army military band. During World War I, he was captured as a prisoner of war and was held in Germany until a year after the war…
On the Yiddish Song of the Week blog, Dmitri Slepovitch writes about “Ikh vel nit ganvenen” (“I Will Not Steal”), a song he recorded in his native Belarus: I recorded “Ikh vel nit ganvenen” (“I Will Not Steal”) in Mogilev, Belarus, from Sterna Gorodetskaya, born in 1946 into the only Jewish family that got reunited…
A Russian-born Jewish lawyer who had been sitting in a prison hospital in Belarus was released from a penal colony yesterday after a lengthy guessing game about his fate and the reasons for his arrest. Emanuel Zeltser, who moved to America during the Soviet Jewry movement, had been sentenced to three years in prison last…
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