Eric Barbier’s biopic of the late French novelist and diplomat Romain Gary, Promise at Dawn, is filled with a succession of melodramatic moments befitting his intense and picturesque life. Based on his eponymous best-selling autobiographical novel, it unfolds mainly in Poland and France — where he was formed as a boy and a man — in […]
Yossi Ghinsberg’s vivid memoir, Back To Tuichi: The Harrowing Life-And-Death Story Of Survival In The Amazon Rainforest, is by far one of the most memorable books I have had the pleasure of reading. Published by Random House in 1993, it recounts the author’s near fatal trek into the jungles of Bolivia in 1981. An Israeli […]
Disaster was barely averted when Britain evacuated some 300,000 British, French and Belgium troops trapped in the French port of Dunkirk in the spring of 1940. Britain’s prime minister, Winston Churchill, hailed the evacuation as a “miracle.” Germany, having recently conquered France in a blitzkrieg, could have picked them off on the beaches of Dunkirk. […]
Eric Bednarski’s poignant documentary, Warsaw: A City Divided, due to be screened at the Jewish Film Festival in Jerusalem later this year, provides viewers with a fresh look at the Warsaw Ghetto. Established in 1940 on the cynically false rationale of halting the spread of infectious diseases, it was an overcrowded, walled-off dumping ground rife with […]
Nearly 55 years after its inaugural opening at the Imperial Theatre in New York City, Fiddler on the Roof, the iconic Broadway play, is still going strong. Such is its longevity that it has been performed every day somewhere around the globe since September 22, 1964. Based on the stories of Sholem Aleichem, this dark musical has been […]
Secrets abound in Bart Freundlich’s drama, After the Wedding, which opens in Canadian theatres on August 16. Filmed in India and the United States, and adapted from Susanne Bier’s 2006 Oscar-nominated Danish movie, it pits a wealthy entrepreneur against an idealist whose lives are more intertwined than they initially realize. Isabel (Michelle Williams), the director […]
At the height of his 40-year career at 60 Minutes, Mike Wallace was probably the most feared interviewer in the business. Hard as nails, with a no-nonsense style, he was a “rough boy,” as one of his many interviewees, Hollywood actor Kirk Douglas, said of him with a mixture of awe and annoyance. Wallace, a reporter on […]
In this age of female empowerment, Tracy Edwards is a shining role model. Thirty years ago, Edwards had the distinction of being the first women to skipper a boat in the gruelling Whitbread Round-the-World Yacht Race (which has since been renamed the Volvo Ocean Race). She was 26, a slip of a girl, when she […]
Thousands of young Israelis have immigrated to Germany and Austria in the past decade. By some estimates, upwards of 20,000 have made that move. It’s a deeply ironic development, given what happened in these countries during the 12-year Nazi interregnum. In most cases, the Israelis who’ve forsaken their homeland are the grandchildren of German and […]
By the end of the 19th century, the venerable Ben Ezra synagogue in Cairo was falling apart and was in dire need of repair. During the restoration, workmen stumbled upon a massive cache of mouldering documents in the dusty attic ranging from the sacred to the mundane. For approximately 1,000 years, the attic had been […]