BOOKS

A school of thought of its own
By Laurent Cohen  |  08/10/2009
The correspondence between Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem survived the horrors of the Nazi regime, although Benjamin himself did not live to see the day after. This book of letters paints a portrait in real time of an enlightened Europe sinking into the depths of darkness, and the terror and fear of the Jewish peo...

Twofold revelation
By Laurent Cohen  |  17/09/2009
For forty years, from 1960 to 2000, the French Jewish poet Claude Vigée, who wrote and translated poems dealing mainly with the Jewish fate and its meaning, lived in Jerusalem. Although he was the recipient of numerous major prizes for his monumental and outstanding work and was greatly renowned and honored in Europe,...

An impending intellectual scandal
By Laurent Cohen  |  10/09/2009
André Glucksmann, among the most important modern French philosophers today, was born in France in 1937 to parents who met in pre-Israel Palestine and returned to Europe in order to join the struggle against Fascism. His father was murdered in 1940, while André, his mother and two sisters, both of whom had been born in...

Kingdoms of Jews
By Amos Goren  |  19/08/2010
Jacob Glatstein travelled from New York to his hometown of Lublin in 1934 and wrote two autobiographical novels in wake of that visit: “When Yash Went Forth” and “When Yash Arrived.” Many years later, literary critic Dan Miron translated the two books. The combined efforts of the New York poet and Israeli scholar, who ...

Sándor Márai: a smoldering within
By János Kőbányai  |  20/08/2009
Who is this Sándor Márai, and what else should be know about him and learn from him? What I am about to say may be perplexing: the reader would do well to become better acquainted not with Márai, author of Embers, but Márai, the diarist and traveler. In fact, Sándor Márai’s first real book was a travelogue, a chronicle...