(Haaretz) — The world’s oldest Holocaust survivor, Alice Herz-Sommer, died Sunday at the age 110 in London. Herz-Sommer, a pianist, born in Prague, was the subject of a documentary “The Lady in Number 6: Music Saved My Life”, nominated for an Oscar this year. “Young people take everything for granted, whereas we, the elderly, understand…
The other night, over frozen peanut-butter pie, I spoke to my children about Auschwitz. A Sabbath guest had mentioned his father’s unfortunate childhood and I seized the opportunity to discuss tattoos. My teenage children knew of the terrible numbering technique but my eight-year-old was baffled. Genocide makes for awkward dessert conversation. “On their arms?” wondered…
● Kafka: The Years of Insight By Reiner Stach Translated from the German by Shelley Frisch Princeton University Press, $35, 720 pages In September 1913, Franz Kafka, employee of the Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute of Prague and recently the author of two flawless, utterly disturbing stories — “The Judgment” and “The Metamorphosis” — took a…
● Franz Kafka: The Poet of Shame and Guilt By Saul Friedländer Yale University Press, 224 pages, $25 If ever there was an author whose works resisted analysis, it’s Franz Kafka. What does it mean, after all, that Gregor Samsa wakes up in “The Metamorphosis” and finds himself turned into a bug? In “Franz Kafka:…
Summertime, when the living is said to be easier and vacations beckon, can favor us with more reading time. But heat doesn’t necessarily mean light — and not all our book suggestions, split evenly between new releases in fiction and nonfiction, are typical beach fare. Though cineplexes fill with frothy comedies and special-effects epics, publishing…
Jean Starobinski, the 92-year-old Swiss literary theorist and Jewish historian of ideas, is still a productive bundle of energy. With three compelling new books out recently, “The Ink of Melancholy,” “Accusing and Seducing: Essays on Jean-Jacques Rousseau,” and “Diderot: a Fiendish Babble,” the man whom poet Michael Butor called a “prince of reading” is not…
A collection of yet unseen Franz Kafka writings, stashed for four decades in a Tel Aviv apartment, will be made public and transferred to Israel’s national library, according to an Israeli court ruling published on Sunday. The papers had been held by Eva Hoffe and Ruth Wiesler, two sisters who argued in a more than…
Crossposted from Haaretz Ruth Wiesler, one of two sisters claiming to be the heirs of Franz Kafka’s manuscripts, and who had been battling the State of Israel over their possession, has died at age 80. Wiesler and her sister, Eva Hoffe, claimed they inherited the manuscripts from their mother, Esther Hoffe, who had been the…
100% of profits support our journalism
