Sunday Sentence

by Erika Dreifus on
Disabled

Another Sunday in which I participate in David Abrams’s “Sunday Sentence” project, which asks others to share the best sentence(s) we’ve read during the past week, “out of context and without commentary.”

“As Proust knew, all love depends not just on current infatuation but on retrospective jealousy; lacking a classy old lover, a Marquis de Norpois, to be jealous of, I was jealous of the men in Montreal health-food stories who had sold her millet and lecithin granules.”

Source: Adam Gopnik, “Bread and Women,” in The New Yorker (subscription required)

800px-Breads_(1)

Kristallnacht in Poetry & Prose

by Erika Dreifus on
4
The shattered stained glass windows of the Zerrennerstrasse synagogue after its destruction on Kristallnacht. Pforzheim, Germany, ca. November 10, 1938. (USHMM/Stadtarchiv Pforzheim)
The shattered stained glass windows of the Zerrennerstrasse synagogue after its destruction on Kristallnacht. Pforzheim, Germany, ca. November 10, 1938. (USHMM/Stadtarchiv Pforzheim)

“Kristallnacht, literally, “Night of Crystal,” is often referred to as the “Night of Broken Glass.” The name refers to the wave of violent anti-Jewish pogroms which took place on November 9 and 10, 1938, throughout Germany, annexed Austria, and in areas of the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia recently occupied by German troops.”

“Kristallnacht figures as an essential turning point in Nazi Germany’s persecution of Jews, which culminated in the attempt to annihilate the European Jews.”

Both of my paternal grandparents had arrived safely in the United States before the Kristallnacht of November 1938. And yet, among the stories my grandmother told over the years, the tale of how her parents and other loved ones back in Germany experienced the horrific events lodged in my mind and in my heart. (more…)

Jewish Literary Links for Shabbat

by Erika Dreifus on
Disabled

Photo Credit: Reut Miryam Cohen
Every Friday morning My Machberet presents an assortment of Jewish-interest links, primarily of the literary variety.

  • Marjorie Ingall considers the plethora of poultry in new Jewish children’s books.
  • Over on The Whole Megillah, there’s an exciting announcement about the first “Whole Megillah Conference on Jewish Story,” scheduled for May 2014 and covering children’s writing, memoir, poetry, and fiction.
  • If you’ve got a blog post to contribute to the next Jewish Book Carnival, you have until Monday (November 11) to send it in to this month’s host. Details here.
  • I plan to take some time this weekend to peruse the latest issue of Blue Lyra Review, a journal whose self-described aim “is to bring together the voices of writers and artists from a diverse array of backgrounds, paying special homage to Jewish writers and other communities that are historically underrepresented in literary magazines.”
  • A reminder: This weekend marks the 75th anniversary of Kristallnacht. (Some of my own family history from that episode turns up in one of the stories in my collection Quiet Americans.)

    • Shabbat shalom.