What Ever Happened to Italy’s Jews?

We usually think of historical fiction as storytelling that attempts to simulate the events and atmosphere of the past—but what if historical fiction recreated not the past itself, but the historian's process of trying to put the past back together?

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- Leah Falk for Jewniverse


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The Best Little Jewish Publishing House in London

Peter and Martine Halban run England’s most cosmopolitan and finely curated Jewish and Middle Eastern-themed literary press

By Vladislav Davidzon for Tablet Magazine

Last month, readers at London’s celebrated annual Jewish Book Week were introduced to a strikingly polished Holocaust memoir titled Motherland, written by Rita Goldberg, a professor of comparative literature at Harvard. Goldberg reconstructs the complex trajectory her family followed from Germany and through Amsterdam, Belgian war resistance cells, DP camps, independence-war-era Israel and then America. The book focuses on Goldberg’s mother as she begins to lose her memory to Alzheimer’s in the late 1980s, yet as with any Dutch Holocaust memoir, the book is by necessity inextricably shadowed by and linked to the story of Anne Frank. Unlike most Dutch Holocaust memoirs, the connection in this case is a deeply abiding one: Hilde Jacobsthal was a childhood friend of Anne Frank’s; her father and Otto Frank cofounded a liberal synagogue together in Amsterdam after immigrating from Germany; and Otto Frank was the godfather of the book’s author.

Because Goldberg’s book recounts a far longer swath of history than the average Holocaust memoir, it charts the generational rather than merely singular effects of the tragedy of European Jewry on individual psychology. It is 100 pages into the narrative before Jacobsthal takes refuge in Belgium, where she spends a year and a half hiding out in the castles of anti-Semitic minor nobility. (She looked after their children and did their laundry, rebuffed their son’s advances by day while working as a courier for the resistance by night.) Jacobsthal’s childhood playmates Anne Frank and (her sister) Margot died of typhus in Bergen-Belsen in April of 1945, a few months before she arrived there to work as nurse and interpreter.

One of the surprising things about Motherland is that it was an unsurprising choice for its publisher, Halban, the bantam-sized English press that recently celebrated its 25th anniversary, whose own story is inseparably intertwined with the personal stories and illustrious European Jewish parentage of its founders. Peter and Martine Halban belong to the family of the great British-Russian philosopher and historian of ideas Isaiah Berlin, whose distinct liberalism hovers over the slim, battlement-topped white tower at 22 Golden Square in London, where England’s most cosmopolitan and finely curated Jewish and Middle Eastern-themed literary press makes its home.

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Secret of the Megillat Esther

By Avi Lazerson for Jewishmag.com

The secret of the Megillat Esther is deduced from its name. The word Megilla has two meanings and the word Esther has two meanings. Megilla traditionally is interpreted to mean a rolled document such as the scrolls that were rolled up in the ancient and medieval periods of history (before the invention of paper). The second meaning of the word is to expose, from the word in Hebrew, âìåé. The word Esther is traditionally interpreted to mean a women's name. The second meaning of the word is concealment, from the Hebrew word to hide, ìäñúéø.

Using the second meaning of each word Megilla Esther literally means to expose the hidden.

In the Megilla itself we find a very interesting phenomena. This is the only book in the twenty four books of the Bible, the five books of Moses, the Prophets, and the Holy Writings which does NOT have in it, even one time, the name of G-d. Yet it is included as a Holy Book. Why is it that not only the name of G-d is not mentioned, but even a hint of the existence of G-d is not mentioned?

To understand why this is, it is necessary to understand miracles. What is a miracle? Very simply speaking, we say that a miracle is a change in the state of nature for a specific event. As an example, the splitting of the Red Sea, when the Jewish People left Egypt was a miracle. Why? Simply because the nature of the water is not to stand upright but to fall down until it reaches the lowest place possible. When the Jewish People left Egypt, the sea split in half. Each side stood like a wall, and the sea floor became a dry path. This existed only as an escape route for the Jewish People at that time. This is called a miracle. This was a suspension of the laws of nature for a particular time and purpose.

Another example was the turning of the water of the Nile into blood. A large body of water like the Nile (picture the mighty Mississippi) with all it's tributaries suddenly turning into sickening blood! It's not natural. Yet this was also a suspension of the laws of nature for a particular time and place.

Now one of the most popular questions of today seems to be: If G-d did miracles for the Jewish People then, why doesn't he do it for us now? It's a good question. The answer is this: The truth is that there are two types of miracles: the hidden miracles and the open miracles. What is the difference between them? Simply, the open miracles are like the examples above. The hidden miracles are different. A hidden miracle is one that happens in the guise of nature. The event that G-d wants to take place, takes place, but in a totally natural manner, in a manner that can be called a "coincidence".

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‘The Museum of Extraordinary Things’ Is Extra Ordinary

In her latest novel, Alice Hoffman renders the brutal world of Lower East Side immigrants in the romantic hues her readers expect

By Adam Kirsch for Tablet Magazine

Today, the building at 23 Washington Place in Manhattan, just off Washington Square, is known as the Brown Building, and it is part of NYU’s ever-growing Greenwich Village empire. But in 1911, it was called the Asch Building, and its eighth, ninth, and 10th floors were occupied by a sweatshop called the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, where some 500 workers, mostly young Jewish and Italian girls, produced women’s blouses. When fire broke out there on March 25 of that year, nearly 150 workers died, in part because their bosses had locked the exit doors from the outside. The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire was the deadliest disaster in New York City until the collapse of the World Trade Center 90 years later.

The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire was not the only great conflagration to shake New York City in 1911, however. Just two months later, on May 27, the Coney Island amusement park Dreamland caught fire and burned to the ground, after workmen preparing for the summer opening accidentally knocked over a pail of boiling tar. This blaze, while big enough to incinerate blocks of Coney Island and call out firemen from all over Brooklyn, claimed no human victims, which is why it is so little remembered today. Instead, it killed the dozens of wild animals who were part of Dreamland’s menagerie, including a lion and an elephant. One of the strangest exhibits at the park was a demonstration of incubators for premature babies, then a new invention; happily, all the babies were rescued.

None of the extraordinary things in The Museum of Extraordinary Things, the new novel by Alice Hoffman, beats the true stories of those two fires. Set in New York in the first half of 1911, with flashbacks to the previous decades, Hoffman’s novel is bookended by vivid set-piece descriptions of the disasters. A New Yorker herself, she describes the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire using images that invoke the iconography of Sept. 11. The parallel is doubtful in some ways—Sept. 11 was an attack, not an accident, and the casualties were worse by several orders of magnitude—but the vision of falling bodies is something both disasters had in common:

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