Prisoner 174517 had a recurrent nightmare at Auschwitz. He dreamed that he had survived, returned home and told his family about his experience —yet nobody listened. That same prisoner, Primo Levi, who died a little more than 25 years ago, probably by his own hand, has now been subjected to a different nightmare: someone who…
Primo Levi is most commonly remembered as a Holocaust survivor and memoirist, but given his relentlessly humanist concerns, we would dishonor him by forgetting that he was also a man made of more than just his time at Auschwitz. In fact, Levi had two great loves: science — he trained as a chemist at the…
In Italy today, resistance against official anti-Semitism and Fascism has become an unexpectedly current topic. A counterweight is provided by current interest in Holocaust memorials and by an anthology which appeared on January 11 from Einaudi Editore, “Jews Under Persecution in Italy: Diaries and Letters from 1938 to 1945 (Gli ebrei sotto la persecuzione in…
András Mezei (1930-2008) was a major Jewish-Hungarian poet who left behind a retrospective exploration of the Holocaust for our time. There are many voices speaking to us of terror, folly, greed, cruelty and absurdity, but Mezei’s poetry makes them sound like our own voices. His testimony has been published in England, in my translation, as…
Each Thursday, The Arty Semite features excerpts and reviews of the best contemporary Jewish poetry. This week, Jake Marmer introduces three pieces by Ivan Klein. Reading Ivan Klein’s work I imagine a man, sitting alone in an empty room, and talking. Not to anyone specific; probably to himself. In the emptiness his words echo off…
Parkinson’s disease has not deterred the octogenarian Hungarian Jewish Nobel Prize winner Imre Kertész from literary productivity. Adding to justly-praised books such as “Fatelessness,” “Kaddish for an Unborn Child,” and “Detective Story,” still available from Vintage Books, in October Kertész’s French publisher Les éditions Actes Sud released a new translation of “A Galley Slave’s Diary”…
Ruth Franklin is the author of “A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction.” Her blog posts are being featured this week on The Arty Semite courtesy of the Jewish Book Council and My Jewish Learning’s Author Blog series. For more information on the series, please visit: Ah, fall — the season of hot…
“Survival in Auschwitz,” 187 pages. “Fatelessness,” 272 pages. “Anka’s Story,” 140 characters. As far as Holocaust memoirs go, Anka Voticky’s is unlike anything you’ll ever read, er, tweet. The 97-year-old, who originally wrote a narrative memoir for her family’s records a few years ago, is sharing her story on the social media platform Twitter, posting…
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