The New York Times has an article on the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee’s putting its archives online. The organization, which is known as “the Joint” (except perhaps among old-school gangsters) will be making its massive archives of photographs (100,000) and information (containing 500,000 names) available with a searchable index. The Times has a slideshow […]
Yesterday I posted about an article defining the influence of Tolstoy’s novella The Death of Ivan Ilych on the psychological and medical approach to death. It turns out that the usefulness of Russian literature goes beyond the medical profession, as Thomas de Waal points out in an excellent article in Foreign Policy. With a tip […]
The Best Translated Book Award’s longlist was just announced and its 25 titles contain a handful of novels from this part of the world: Poland: Stone Upon Stone by Wiesław Myśliwski, In Red by Magdalena Tulli Hungary: Fiasco by Imre Kertész, Kornél Esti by Dezső Kosztolányi Serbia: Leeches by David Albahari French novels dominate the […]
The term “New Russians” used to refer to gaudily-dressed, designer-label loving, luxury-car driving, loud-talking Russians who struck it rich after the collapse of the Soviet Union. But now there’s another kind of New Russian touring the US at the moment. Five new Russian writers are on a tour of the East Coast, sponsored in part […]
In the 1974 film The Gambler, James Caan plays a Jewish college professor in New York named Axel Freed with an addiction to risk that causes him to fall into major gambling debt to some heavy-handed loan sharks. In the first classroom scene we see him in Freed waxes poetic about the issues in Dostoevsky’s […]
“ … but what is a dream except the continuation of reality, or is reality the continuation of the dream?” – Ladislav Klíma, Glorious Nemesis In 1924 the first Surrealist Manifesto was published, elevating the blurring of dream and reality to an artistic imperative. That same year Franz Kafka was buried in Prague’s New Jewish […]
Documentary film commemorates humor and humanity of Czech writer who lived through and documented history’s darkest days Approaching the anniversary of Czech-Jewish writer Arnošt Lustig’s death on Feb. 26, 2011 at age 84, a new documentary film celebrating his life and work is being released, titled Arnošt Lustig – devět životů (Arnošt Lustig – Nine […]
I’m not sure where on the scale of literary ambitions getting your face on a postage stamp should be ranked, but Prague-born writer Franz Werfel has just achieved this distinction. I have to admit to never having read a word Werfel wrote, though I have read a lot about him over the years. Last summer […]
I have already written a little bit about Polish fantasy writing in reviewing The Polish Book of Monsters, so now here is something from the fantastical side of the Czech Republic and Hungary. Czech monsters At the Czech Literature portal there is a long outline of Czech fantasy, dating back to its pre-1989 origins and […]
At various times since the fall of the Iron Curtain there have been outbreaks of fear that hordes of criminals would cross the Czech, Polish, Slovak, Slovene and Hungarian borders to pillage the wealth of Western Europe. In 2012, it looks as if this long awaited crime wave is actually coming to pass, though in […]
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