For the righting of historical wrongs, to simply transfer property continues to perpetuate violence. True reparations require far more work.
Tag: Holocaust
Reading Against the Line: Translation, Fascism, Erasure
I’m just wary of the tendency to glorify revolutionary violence and masculinity.
“Who Knows If They Found Any Burial At All?”
In the novels and short stories about Ferrara that he published in the 1950s and ’60s, Giorgio Bassani uncovered the Fascist side of his hometown that many ...
Charlotte Salomon’s Triumphant “No”
Charlotte Salomon’s short life was haunted—by the rise of the Nazis, who ultimately took her life, but also by her family’s history of severe mental illness ...
Stumbling Over a Violent Past
When Jennifer Teege was 38, she discovered a book in Hamburg’s central library that dramatically transformed her self-conception and her life: I Have to Love My Father, Don’t I? The book concerned ...
Hard Labor: On the Complete Works of Primo Levi
Turin, the provincial capital of Piedmont in northwestern Italy, sometime in the mid-1950s. In a comfortable apartment block on Corso Re Umberto, a 19th-century boulevard running southwest of the ...
Modiano’s Memoryscapes
Patrick Modiano’s reputation as a writer of wartime Paris was sealed in 2014 by the Nobel Prize, which recognized him “for the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies ...”
Far Outside and Deep Within:More Novels on World War II
Even in the paroxysm of publishing around the centennial of the First World War last year, novels about the Second World War dominated, as they usually do, historical fiction about the 20th century ...
Polish Dreams
I often joke that everything I know about Israel I learned from comic books. As a secular Jew with deep ambivalence about Israel, this quip has served as a shield against being engaged on the topic ...
Positive Discomfort
The cover of Miriam Katin’s graphic memoir Letting It Go is striking: against a backdrop of horizontal bars of red, white, and yellow, a woman dressed in black has opened her palm to release a ...