When I learned that Grace Feuerverger had written her memoir, I was intrigued. What could she possibly say? I wondered. Full disclosure: I have known Grace, my oldest friend’s sister, sporadically since 1958, when she was eight years old. Yet in virtually every respect, Grace — a quiet, soft-spoken and reclusive girl — was practically […]
European Jews trapped in Nazi ghettos and concentration camps during the Holocaust were dependent on life-saving shipments of food, medicine, clothing and money transfers for sheer survival. These parcels and transfers, donated by relatives, friends and Jewish institutions, were morale boosters that prolonged the lives of the recipients. In some cases, they arrived too late […]
The sons and daughters of Nazi dignitaries were children of privilege in Adolf Hitler’s Germany. But after its defeat in World War II, they were often regarded as lepers tarred by their association with a genocidal regime. Tania Crasnianski, a criminal lawyer of German, French and Russian descent whose grandfather served in the German Air […]
Shortly after his appointment as prime minister in 1940, Winston Churchill ordered the detention of thousands of German and Austrian Jewish refugees who had fled to Britain to escape Nazi persecution. Known as enemy aliens, they were rounded up in the prevailing belief that German spies in the country posed a security threat to Britain. […]
For decades, Jews lived under the thumb of Communist regimes in the Soviet Union and its subservient satellite states in Eastern Europe. They were not always treated equally, notwithstanding the communist dogma that every citizen enjoyed equal rights. Joseph Stalin, the Soviet dictator, turned against Russian Jews in the late 1940s, marginalizing them and crushing […]
As Israeli troops swept into West Beirut in mid-September of 1982, they raided a high-rise building housing the offices of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s Research Center on Colombani Street in the heart of the cosmopolitan Ras Beirut neighborhood. In short order, they seized a vast library of books about Israel, Zionism, Judaism and Jews and […]
Algiers was a major trading port in the Mediterranean Sea at the end of the Napoleonic wars in the late 18th century and four decades into the next century. Merchant ships brought in a constant flow of luxury goods prized by the ruling Turkish elite, stevedores loaded outgoing vessels with Algerian grain, wool, meat, leather […]
Tony Bernard’s thoughtful and absorbing book, The Ghost Tattoo (Citadel Press), is dedicated to his late father, Henry Bierzynski Bernard, a Polish survivor of the Holocaust who was traumatized by it. At the very least, his memoir is intensely personal. As he writes, “It is also a part of my long journey to get closer […]
The distinguished American food writer Joan Nathan began writing her latest book, My Life In Recipes: Food, Family And Memories (Alfred A. Knopf), at a sad but portentous time. Her husband of 42 years, Allan Gerson, had just died, and she had reached the golden age of 80. In this, her twelfth book, she covers […]
Marty Glickman was a renowned radio broadcaster, having been the voice of the New York Giants football team and the New York Knicks basketball club for close to half a century. But his real claim to “fame” was his shocking removal from a signature track and field event at the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin. […]