Sussen Is Now Free of Jews: World War II, the Holocaust, and Rural Judaism, Gilya Gerda Schmidt (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012), xvi + 416 pp., hardcover $70.00

2014 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 118-120
Author(s):  
G. J. Horwitz
2015 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 11-20
Author(s):  
Ruth G. Biro

Recent personal documentary works about major historical events of the twentieth century, e.g., World War II, the Holocaust and the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, offer their readers a rich and multifaceted narrative, or a history that is also "his story," "her story" and that of entire families, cohorts and communities. Often, these works are accompanied by visual artifacts such as photographs, family tress, maps etc., or supported by concise historical surveys. Thus these memoirs complete the work of historians with the lived experiences of the few that represent many. Such is the case with two 2013 books by Charles Farkas and Nick Barlay depicting their mid-twentieth century Hungarian families, one Christian and one Jewish, through two World Wars and the anti-communist uprising, culminating in their escape to the West and in the two authors looking back upon the Hungarian past of their families.


2009 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
pp. 112-130

Katja Weber and Paul A. Kowert, Cultures of Order: Leadership, Language and Social Reconstruction in Germany and Japan (Albany: State University of New York Press 2007)Reviewed by Rainer BaumannSimon Green, Dan Hough, Alister Miskimmon, and Graham Timmins, The Politics of the New Germany (London and New York: Routledge, 2008)Reviewed by David P. ConradtJeffrey Herf, The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda during World War II and the Holocaust (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006)Reviewed by Thomas FreemanMarc Fenemore, Sex, Thugs and Rock’n’Roll: Teenage Rebels in Cold-War East Germany (New York: Berghahn Books, 2007)Reviewed by Henning WrageFrancis R. Nicosia, Zionism and Anti-Semitism in Nazi-Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008)Reviewed by Klaus L. Berghahn


2015 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 21-27
Author(s):  
Evi Blaikie

How did the rich and the super-rich Hungarian Jews in Budapest fare during the 1930s, World War II and the Holocaust, and beyond? Two new books deal with their stories: Marianne Szegedy-Maszák's "I Kiss Your Hands Many Times" and Katherine Griesz's "From the Danube to the Hudson". Szegedy-Maszák was able to use her journalist's profession and skills to explore and vividly present her family's story in a work that can likewise satisfy the historians, the romantics and all those who like a “good read.” Griesz’s epic family memoir encompasses the same time period and topic as Szegedy-Maszák's book in its portrayal of a multi-generational Hungarian Jewish family's fate in the crisis -full mid-twentieth century, as seen and interpreted by its female descendant decades later.


2016 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 325-331 ◽  
Author(s):  
James E Young

Without direct reference to the Holocaust or its contemporary “counter-monuments,” Michael Arad’s design for the National 9/11 Memorial at Ground Zero is nonetheless inflected by an entire post-war generation’s formal preoccupation with loss, absence, and regeneration. This is also a preoccupation they share with post-Holocaust poets, philosophers, artists, and composers: how to articulate a void without filling it in? How to formalize irreparable loss without seeming to repair it? In this article, I imagine an arc of memorial forms over the last 70 years or so and how, in fact, post-World War I and World War II memorials have evolved along a discernible path, all with visual and conceptual echoes of their predecessors. As Maya Lin’s design for the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial was informed by earlier World War I and even World War II memorial vernaculars, her design also broke the mold that made Holocaust counter-memorials and other negative-form memorials possible.


2007 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 26-29
Author(s):  
mayer kirshenblatt ◽  
barbara kirshenblatt-gimblett

Mayer Kirshenblatt remembers in words and paintings the daily diet of Jews in Poland before the Holocaust. Born in 1916 in Opatóów (Apt in Yiddish), a small Polish city, this self-taught artist describes and paints how women bought chickens from the peasants and brought them to the shoykhet (ritual slaughterer), where they plucked the feathers; the custom of shlogn kapores (transferring one's sins to a chicken) before Yom Kippur; and the role of herring and root vegetables in the diet, especially during the winter. Mayer describes how his family planted and harvested potatoes on leased land, stored them in a root cellar, and the variety of dishes prepared from this important staple, as well as how to make a kratsborsht or scratch borsht from the milt (semen sack) of a herring. In the course of a forty-year conversation with his daughter, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, who also interviewed Mayer's mother, a picture emerges of the daily, weekly, seasonal, and holiday cuisine of Jews who lived in southeastern Poland before World War II.


Author(s):  
Emily Robins Sharpe

The Jewish Canadian writer Miriam Waddington returned repeatedly to the subject of the Spanish Civil War, searching for hope amid the ruins of Spanish democracy. The conflict, a prelude to World War II, inspired an outpouring of literature and volunteerism. My paper argues for Waddington’s unique poetic perspective, in which she represents the Holocaust as the Spanish Civil War’s outgrowth while highlighting the deeply personal repercussions of the war – consequences for women, for the earth, and for community. Waddington’s poetry connects women’s rights to human rights, Canadian peace to European war, and Jewish persecution to Spanish carnage.


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