Showing posts with label Jews. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jews. Show all posts
Wednesday, February 4, 2015
Story of the Jews: Schama
heard about book from Phil Ritzenberg on Sunday 3/30/14, at Susan di Sciora's retirement dinner. He said it'd been reviewed in the Sunday Times.
Also made into a film, or TV program.
Also made into a film, or TV program.
Sosúa
http://goo.gl/3rzLjy
* read email from Forum on Migration (http://goo.gl/a69gxT). Tried to recall whom I had contacted (just remembered: José Moya: https://barnard.edu/profiles/jose-moya).
* searched my gmail for forum, and came up with https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/?shva=1#label/Forum+on+Migration/127876818b889453
* mentions boom "Dominican Haven," which 2 libraries own; it has subject heading of Jews -- Dominican Republic -- Sosúa.
* and right below it is a subject heading: Jews -- Dominican Republic -- Sosúa -- Fiction. : Sidransky, A. J.
* which is this book
* read email from Forum on Migration (http://goo.gl/a69gxT). Tried to recall whom I had contacted (just remembered: José Moya: https://barnard.edu/profiles/jose-moya).
* searched my gmail for forum, and came up with https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/?shva=1#label/Forum+on+Migration/127876818b889453
* mentions boom "Dominican Haven," which 2 libraries own; it has subject heading of Jews -- Dominican Republic -- Sosúa.
* and right below it is a subject heading: Jews -- Dominican Republic -- Sosúa -- Fiction. : Sidransky, A. J.
* which is this book
Thursday, September 26, 2013
Free Spirit
Safran, Joshua. Free spirit: growing up on the road and off the grid New York : Hyperion, 2013.
Saturday, March 24, 2012
The House of Rajani
A patron asked for this book. No library on Long Island owns it; only a handful of academic libraries do own it. Curious, I looked into it a bit. I found two reviews in the Guardian (UK). One, by Linda Grant (author of The Clothes on Their Backs, which I tried to read and didn't like), is not favorable (and with her own political views, in fact, sprinkled in): Revelatory as this reopening of the interred past may be for Israeli readers force-fed on the victors' version of history, the novel has a strongly didactic tone, as if one of the country's New Historians had turned their hand to fiction.
A second review, by the Guardian's Middle East editor, Ian Black, is favorable. He titles his review Palestine's catastrophe foreshadowed, and subtitles it Israeli writer Alon Hilu's acclaimed historical novel tackles the most sensitive of Zionist taboos head-on.
Edward Said's Orientalism has been invoked by some to deconstruct the book's themes of sexual and colonial domination. But it is the menacing shadow of future catastrophe – the unique experience of the Palestinian nakbah – that gives the story both its dramatic force and contemporary relevance: moves are under way in Israel to stop official funding for nakbah commemoration.
While Grant concerns herself with literary criticism, and tells of its being changed some from its original Hebrew writing to the English translation, Black writes about Hilu himself. Hilu says his own taboo-breaking views were partly moulded by his background: parents who immigrated to Israel from Syria and who did not share the dominant Ashkenazi (European Jewish) experience, with its emphasis on the Holocaust, and with no affinity for Arab life, language and culture.
The author's website has some blurbs from favorable reviews.
Sounds quite interesting.
A second review, by the Guardian's Middle East editor, Ian Black, is favorable. He titles his review Palestine's catastrophe foreshadowed, and subtitles it Israeli writer Alon Hilu's acclaimed historical novel tackles the most sensitive of Zionist taboos head-on.
Edward Said's Orientalism has been invoked by some to deconstruct the book's themes of sexual and colonial domination. But it is the menacing shadow of future catastrophe – the unique experience of the Palestinian nakbah – that gives the story both its dramatic force and contemporary relevance: moves are under way in Israel to stop official funding for nakbah commemoration.
While Grant concerns herself with literary criticism, and tells of its being changed some from its original Hebrew writing to the English translation, Black writes about Hilu himself. Hilu says his own taboo-breaking views were partly moulded by his background: parents who immigrated to Israel from Syria and who did not share the dominant Ashkenazi (European Jewish) experience, with its emphasis on the Holocaust, and with no affinity for Arab life, language and culture.
The author's website has some blurbs from favorable reviews.
Sounds quite interesting.
Wednesday, July 20, 2011
Friday, April 22, 2011
Saturday, April 16, 2011
Buenos Aires
Hunting Eichmann : how a band of survivors and a young spy agency chased down the world's most notorious Nazi. Neal Bascomb. Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 2009.
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
Being Indian, being Israeli
Migration, diaspora and Indian Jews in Israel --
Where are the Indian Jews today? Immigration and the Israeli setting --
Emigration from India: "When we came to the land of milk and honey" --
Accountants as watchmen and clerks digging roads: negotiating work and professions --
Raising Jewish families in Israel: gender, religious practice and life cycle rituals --
Mediating assimilation and separation: community networks, national politics and Indian-Israeli identit
Where are the Indian Jews today? Immigration and the Israeli setting --
Emigration from India: "When we came to the land of milk and honey" --
Accountants as watchmen and clerks digging roads: negotiating work and professions --
Raising Jewish families in Israel: gender, religious practice and life cycle rituals --
Mediating assimilation and separation: community networks, national politics and Indian-Israeli identit
Tuesday, February 8, 2011
The Last Brother
Inspired by the largely unknown story of 1,500 Jews who fled Europe only to be imprisoned in Mauritius from 1940 to 1945 after their ship was refused entry into Palestine (then under British rule), the novel recounts the heartfelt friendship between two boys: David, a Czech orphan, and Raj, an Indian-Mauritian grieving for the two brothers he lost in a flash flood.
Saturday, April 24, 2010
New books
Saw these books on Readers Advisory desk when I arrived at 11 this morning; seemed interesting.
Joe Speedboat. Tommy Wieringa. translated from the Dutch by Sam Garrett.
Nothing happened and then it did: a chronicle in fact and fiction. Jake Silverstein.
Skylark. Dezso Kosztolányi ; introduction by Péter Esterházy ; translated by Richard Aczel.
Stations West. Allison Amend. (Recommended it to a patron; she took it.)
Plus, a patron asked for William Trevor's latest book, Love and Summer.
In NY Times book review: Theodore Roosevelt, Empire Builder.
‘Muriel Spark: The Biography’ (well reviewed in Journal last week)
Wanna laugh and get angry at the same time? Books by Republicans. NO APOLOGY. The Case for American Greatness. Mitt Romney. and one by Karl Rove. Oy.
By SIMON JOHNSON and JAMES KWAK
Joe Speedboat. Tommy Wieringa. translated from the Dutch by Sam Garrett.
Nothing happened and then it did: a chronicle in fact and fiction. Jake Silverstein.
Skylark. Dezso Kosztolányi ; introduction by Péter Esterházy ; translated by Richard Aczel.
Stations West. Allison Amend. (Recommended it to a patron; she took it.)
Plus, a patron asked for William Trevor's latest book, Love and Summer.
In NY Times book review: Theodore Roosevelt, Empire Builder.
‘Muriel Spark: The Biography’ (well reviewed in Journal last week)
Wanna laugh and get angry at the same time? Books by Republicans. NO APOLOGY. The Case for American Greatness. Mitt Romney. and one by Karl Rove. Oy.
‘13 Bankers’
By SIMON JOHNSON and JAMES KWAK
Reviewed by LOUIS UCHITELLE
The Radical Center: The History of an Idea
By SAM TANENHAUS
The Tea Party is new. But this is not the first time we’ve seen an angry populist politics emerge from the American middle class.
Saturday, February 7, 2009
Yiddish Novel With Tolstoyan Sweep
"The Brothers Ashkenazi" is a pitch-perfect 1936 work from I.J. Singer, an older sibling of Isaac Bashevis Singer.
By JOSEPH EPSTEIN
Robert Lowell called Ford Madox Ford's "The Good Soldier" the best French novel in the English language. So, similarly, might one call I.J. Singer's "The Brothers Ashkenazi" the best Russian novel ever written in Yiddish. The book has the grand sweep of Tolstoy, with a vast and wide-ranging cast of characters, a strong feeling for the movement of history, and, playing throughout, the drama of men and women trapped in the machinery of forces much greater than themselves.
I(srael). J(oshua). Singer, born in Bilgorai, Poland, in 1893, was the older brother by nine years of I(saac). B(ashevis). Singer. The Singers' father was a Hasidic rabbi, their mother the daughter of a long line of famous misnagid (or non-Hasidic) rabbis. I.J. Singer spent his early years in the shtetl of Leoncin and his adolescent years in Warsaw, where he became caught up in the Haskalah, or Jewish enlightenment, movement. As a young man he worked as a journalist in Kiev, where his early attraction to socialism was punctured by the brute realities of the Russian Revolution. In 1934 he to moved to the U.S., where he worked for the Jewish Daily Forward. He published seven books in all, of which "The Brothers Ashkenazi" (1936) is the best known.
The tension between religious and secular life among Jews born into orthodoxy gave both Singer brothers an inexhaustible literary subject. In much of Isaac Bashevis Singer's fiction his characters stray from religion and then, after leading lives of dissipation, degradation and disappointment, return to it, where they find a measure of contentment.
Ryan Inzana - The Brothers Ashkenazi
For I.J. Singer things are more complicated. He did not think much of either traditional religion or the secular life of his time, which didn't leave him, as a novelist, a great deal of room to negotiate. Politics taught I.J. the bitter lesson that, however much the extreme left and the extreme right might disagree, the one common ground upon which they met comfortably was anti-Semitism. The Jew as scapegoat in the dark world of Eastern Europe is more than a leitmotif in "The Brothers Ashkenazi"; it is the underlying moral of the novel. "Don't you know," the wives of the striking Jewish workers cry out to their husbands during a bitter strike in Lodz, "it always ends up with Jewish heads bleeding."
"The Brothers Ashkenazi" begins not long after the Napoleonic wars, with the arrival of German and Moravian weavers in the Polish town of Lodz. At first excluded, the Jews gradually insinuate themselves into the town. They began as small-time entrepreneurs, setting up minor factories or sometimes working in their homes with handlooms, putting in long hours and grinding out a living. A handful of Jews worked for large-scale German factory owners, as agents, buyers, managers.
One such is Abraham Hersh Ashkenazi, who, soon after the novel begins, is presented by his wife with twin sons, Simha Meir and Jacob Bunem. Abraham Hersh hears the prophecy from his rabbi that his sons will both know great wealth. This prophecy, which will come true, is a disappointment to their father, who would have preferred they be pious and learned.
The brothers turn out very differently, in talent and in temperament. Simha Meir, the first born by a few minutes, is from an early age clever, conniving, a boy and then man concentrated on the main chance. His brother is physically more gifted -- strong, handsome, charming -- a cynosure. Simha Meir is aflame with ambition; Jacob Bunem, less concentrated, is dedicated to easy living.
At the center of "The Brothers Ashkenazi" is the climb of Simha Meir -- who later abandons his religion and becomes Max Ashkenazi -- to dominance over the weaving industry of Lodz. The machinations behind his climb are set out in impressive detail. In the background plays the subsidiary story of the rivalry and estrangement between the two brothers: Simha Meir, in an arranged marriage, is betrothed and marries the love of his brother's life. Later Jacob Bunem marries into a family of vast wealth, a cause of consternation to Simha Meir.
Conflict is the order of the day in Lodz: between brothers, between owners and workers, between rabbis and miscreants, between Russians and Poles, between Gentiles and Jews, between Polish and Lithuanian Jews. Under capitalism man exploits man, an old saying had it, while under communism just the reverse obtains. So it is in Lodz; no matter who is in command, the city is breeding ground for exploitation, with every kind of hatred polluting the air.
"Simha Meir had the guts of a pickpocket," Singer writes. "In Lodz this was the highest compliment." We learn that "justice isn't a commodity in Lodz," and that "Lodz admired nothing more than wealth." With hundred of dab touches Singer personifies the city as the sinkhole of men set loose without any guiding principles or goals apart from that of gain: "Lodz knew that with money you could buy anything." When credit dries up and inflation hits Lodz, Singer notes that "even the whores in brothels and the doctors who later treated their venereal diseases were paid off with IOUs."
Such idealism as Singer allows in the novel is given to the few revolutionaries who appear in its pages, but theirs turns out to be a naïve revolutionism. Nissan, the son of a poor rabbi, exchanges his father's devotion to Torah for his own to Marxism, into which he invests the same unshakeable faith. He lives to see the revolution he fought for turn into a pogrom, with the corpses of Jews hanging from trees. At one point, Nissan thinks: "Maybe man was essentially evil. Maybe it wasn't the fault of economic circumstances, as he had been taught, but the deficiencies of human character."
Strikes, World War I, the Russian Revolution, the invasion of Lodz first by the Germans, then by the Russians -- all are described by Singer, with pitch perfect artistry and pace. Lenin makes a cameo appearance in the novel, as Napoleon does in "War and Peace," and so do the hapless Czar Nicholas and his Czarina Alexandra. The world turns topsy-turvy, with only Max Ashkenazi's dream of industrial and financial dominance remaining constant, until it, too, is blasted, when, having earlier moved his factory to Russia, he is imprisoned in the new Soviet Union, from which he is saved by his long-despised brother. On the brothers' return to Poland, reconciled at last, Jacob Bunem is killed, in an act of anti-Semitic bullying, by an ignorant Polish officer.
"The Brothers Ashkenazi" ends on a pogrom, which sends all the city's Jews fleeing: to America, to the new Zion recently created in Palestine, to less cruel countries than Poland. "Lodz," Singer writes, "was like a limb torn from a body that no longer sustained it. It quivered momentarily in its death throes as maggots crawled over it, draining its remaining juices." Max Ashkenazi, intent on personal reform, which he is unable to attain, dies soon afterward.
Masterly, pitiless, this great novel forgoes a happy ending to render instead a just one: The city of Lodz and the characters it spawned get all they deserve.
Mr. Epstein is the author of "Fred Astaire" (Yale University Press).
* MASTERPIECE
* FEBRUARY 7, 2009
By JOSEPH EPSTEIN
Robert Lowell called Ford Madox Ford's "The Good Soldier" the best French novel in the English language. So, similarly, might one call I.J. Singer's "The Brothers Ashkenazi" the best Russian novel ever written in Yiddish. The book has the grand sweep of Tolstoy, with a vast and wide-ranging cast of characters, a strong feeling for the movement of history, and, playing throughout, the drama of men and women trapped in the machinery of forces much greater than themselves.
I(srael). J(oshua). Singer, born in Bilgorai, Poland, in 1893, was the older brother by nine years of I(saac). B(ashevis). Singer. The Singers' father was a Hasidic rabbi, their mother the daughter of a long line of famous misnagid (or non-Hasidic) rabbis. I.J. Singer spent his early years in the shtetl of Leoncin and his adolescent years in Warsaw, where he became caught up in the Haskalah, or Jewish enlightenment, movement. As a young man he worked as a journalist in Kiev, where his early attraction to socialism was punctured by the brute realities of the Russian Revolution. In 1934 he to moved to the U.S., where he worked for the Jewish Daily Forward. He published seven books in all, of which "The Brothers Ashkenazi" (1936) is the best known.
The tension between religious and secular life among Jews born into orthodoxy gave both Singer brothers an inexhaustible literary subject. In much of Isaac Bashevis Singer's fiction his characters stray from religion and then, after leading lives of dissipation, degradation and disappointment, return to it, where they find a measure of contentment.
Ryan Inzana - The Brothers Ashkenazi
For I.J. Singer things are more complicated. He did not think much of either traditional religion or the secular life of his time, which didn't leave him, as a novelist, a great deal of room to negotiate. Politics taught I.J. the bitter lesson that, however much the extreme left and the extreme right might disagree, the one common ground upon which they met comfortably was anti-Semitism. The Jew as scapegoat in the dark world of Eastern Europe is more than a leitmotif in "The Brothers Ashkenazi"; it is the underlying moral of the novel. "Don't you know," the wives of the striking Jewish workers cry out to their husbands during a bitter strike in Lodz, "it always ends up with Jewish heads bleeding."
"The Brothers Ashkenazi" begins not long after the Napoleonic wars, with the arrival of German and Moravian weavers in the Polish town of Lodz. At first excluded, the Jews gradually insinuate themselves into the town. They began as small-time entrepreneurs, setting up minor factories or sometimes working in their homes with handlooms, putting in long hours and grinding out a living. A handful of Jews worked for large-scale German factory owners, as agents, buyers, managers.
One such is Abraham Hersh Ashkenazi, who, soon after the novel begins, is presented by his wife with twin sons, Simha Meir and Jacob Bunem. Abraham Hersh hears the prophecy from his rabbi that his sons will both know great wealth. This prophecy, which will come true, is a disappointment to their father, who would have preferred they be pious and learned.
The brothers turn out very differently, in talent and in temperament. Simha Meir, the first born by a few minutes, is from an early age clever, conniving, a boy and then man concentrated on the main chance. His brother is physically more gifted -- strong, handsome, charming -- a cynosure. Simha Meir is aflame with ambition; Jacob Bunem, less concentrated, is dedicated to easy living.
At the center of "The Brothers Ashkenazi" is the climb of Simha Meir -- who later abandons his religion and becomes Max Ashkenazi -- to dominance over the weaving industry of Lodz. The machinations behind his climb are set out in impressive detail. In the background plays the subsidiary story of the rivalry and estrangement between the two brothers: Simha Meir, in an arranged marriage, is betrothed and marries the love of his brother's life. Later Jacob Bunem marries into a family of vast wealth, a cause of consternation to Simha Meir.
Conflict is the order of the day in Lodz: between brothers, between owners and workers, between rabbis and miscreants, between Russians and Poles, between Gentiles and Jews, between Polish and Lithuanian Jews. Under capitalism man exploits man, an old saying had it, while under communism just the reverse obtains. So it is in Lodz; no matter who is in command, the city is breeding ground for exploitation, with every kind of hatred polluting the air.
"Simha Meir had the guts of a pickpocket," Singer writes. "In Lodz this was the highest compliment." We learn that "justice isn't a commodity in Lodz," and that "Lodz admired nothing more than wealth." With hundred of dab touches Singer personifies the city as the sinkhole of men set loose without any guiding principles or goals apart from that of gain: "Lodz knew that with money you could buy anything." When credit dries up and inflation hits Lodz, Singer notes that "even the whores in brothels and the doctors who later treated their venereal diseases were paid off with IOUs."
Such idealism as Singer allows in the novel is given to the few revolutionaries who appear in its pages, but theirs turns out to be a naïve revolutionism. Nissan, the son of a poor rabbi, exchanges his father's devotion to Torah for his own to Marxism, into which he invests the same unshakeable faith. He lives to see the revolution he fought for turn into a pogrom, with the corpses of Jews hanging from trees. At one point, Nissan thinks: "Maybe man was essentially evil. Maybe it wasn't the fault of economic circumstances, as he had been taught, but the deficiencies of human character."
Strikes, World War I, the Russian Revolution, the invasion of Lodz first by the Germans, then by the Russians -- all are described by Singer, with pitch perfect artistry and pace. Lenin makes a cameo appearance in the novel, as Napoleon does in "War and Peace," and so do the hapless Czar Nicholas and his Czarina Alexandra. The world turns topsy-turvy, with only Max Ashkenazi's dream of industrial and financial dominance remaining constant, until it, too, is blasted, when, having earlier moved his factory to Russia, he is imprisoned in the new Soviet Union, from which he is saved by his long-despised brother. On the brothers' return to Poland, reconciled at last, Jacob Bunem is killed, in an act of anti-Semitic bullying, by an ignorant Polish officer.
"The Brothers Ashkenazi" ends on a pogrom, which sends all the city's Jews fleeing: to America, to the new Zion recently created in Palestine, to less cruel countries than Poland. "Lodz," Singer writes, "was like a limb torn from a body that no longer sustained it. It quivered momentarily in its death throes as maggots crawled over it, draining its remaining juices." Max Ashkenazi, intent on personal reform, which he is unable to attain, dies soon afterward.
Masterly, pitiless, this great novel forgoes a happy ending to render instead a just one: The city of Lodz and the characters it spawned get all they deserve.
Mr. Epstein is the author of "Fred Astaire" (Yale University Press).
* MASTERPIECE
* FEBRUARY 7, 2009
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