Those Americans who are familiar with the name Claude Lanzmann most likely know him as the director of “Shoah,” his monumental 1985 documentary about the extermination of the European Jews in the Nazi gas chambers. As it turns out, though, the story of Lanzmann’s eventful life would have been well worth telling even if he had never come to direct “Shoah.” In addition to film director, Lanzmann’s roles have included those of journalist, editor, public intellectual, member of the French Resistance, long-term lover of Simone de Beauvoir and close friend of Jean-Paul Sartre, world traveler, political activist, ghostwriter for Jacques Cousteau — I could go on, but it’s a good deal more entertaining to hear Lanzmann himself go on, and thanks to the publication in English of his memoir, “The Patagonian Hare,” we now have the opportunity to do so. (previously)
posted by Trurl
on Apr 16, 2012 -
6 comments
Almost immediately upon my arrival in my first teaching job, I became the go-to guy for the Holocaust. Of course, this was partly due to my dissertation, but in larger part, I suspect, because of my Jewishness. This was fine with me for a number of reasons. First, as a junior faculty member, this identification, though merely professional, could only help in my quest for tenure. An expert on the Holocaust carried infinitely greater weight, I thought, than an expert on ministerial instability during the French Third Republic.
Dissolution: My life as an accidental Holocaust expert—and why I decided to quit
posted by timshel
on Feb 25, 2012 -
13 comments
Poetry in Hell contains a complete collection of poems recovered from the Warsaw Ghetto's
Ringelblum Archives. The project, which took ten years to complete, gives English translations of poems that are shown in their original Yiddish.
[more inside]
posted by zarq
on Jul 23, 2010 -
9 comments
Tony Judt's
acceptance speech for the 2007 Hannah Arendt Prize: "Let me suggest five difficulties that arise from our contemporary preoccupation with the
Shoah, with what every schoolchild now calls 'the Holocaust.'"
posted by anotherpanacea
on Jan 29, 2008 -
30 comments
"I would like to do better, to be better than I am". He's the French New Wave
maverick and Academy Award winner (
at 26, for his first short) who, to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz -- with considerable personal pain and the admission that "
no description, no picture can reveal the true dimension" of what happened in the camps -- made what François Truffaut called "
the greatest film ever made", duly
censored by French authorities. Four years later he baffled audiences with "
the first modern film of sound cinema",
shattering the rules of chronology to describe the “anguish of the future”: even if all he ever wanted was "
to stop death in its tracks"
(French language link),
only for one minute. But he is also the unabashed lover of
la bande dessinée who
learnt English by reading comic books and
in the Seventies dreamed (French language link) of making
"Spider-Man" into a movie (the Hollywood studios were not convinced), the
MGM old-school musical and
operetta nut so in love with design that "
half of the fashion photography of the past 40 years owes a debt" to him. Now,
Alain Resnais' new
work, just shown
at the Venice Film Festival where
his buddy David Lynch was awarded a lifetime achievement Golden Lion, is a French film
inspired by an
English play with 54 short scenes, music by the X-Files's Mark Snow. (more inside)
posted by matteo
on Sep 8, 2006 -
20 comments
In 1945-46, some of the (very few) Polish Jews who had survived the Final Solution returned -- sick, poor, wounded -- to Poland. In Elie Wiesel's words, "they had thought all too naively that antisemitism, discredited 6 million times over, had died at Auschwitz with its victims.
They were wrong." In 2001 Princeton professor
Jan T
Gross published
the story of the 1941 destruction of the Jewish community at
Jedwabne, Poland, and proved how Jews were rounded up, clubbed, drowned, gutted or burned to death not by German forces as previously believed
but by mobs of their own non-Jewish neighbors. Now professor Gross tells the story of the
Kielce pogrom in his new book, "
Fear". Of course, the Kielce butchery took place in 1946 -- more than a year
after the end of WWII and defeat of Nazism. More inside.
posted by matteo
on Jun 25, 2006 -
107 comments
"They are demanding that I kill the children of my people with my own hands"On October 4, 1939, a few days after Warsaw's surrender to the Nazis,
Adam Czerniaków was made
head of the 24 member Judenrat, the Jewish Council (write "Czerniakow" in the linked page's search box) responsible for implementing German orders
in the Jewish community (interactive map of the Warsaw ghetto). On July 22, 1942 --
Tisha B'Av, the "
saddest day in Jewish history" -- the Judenrat received instructions that
all Warsaw Jews were to be deported to the East (exceptions were to be made for Jews working in German factories, Jewish hospital staff, members of the Judenrat and their families, and members of the Jewish police force and their families. Czerniaków tried to convince the Germans at least not to deport the Jewish orphans). Czerniaków kept a diary from September 6, 1939, until the day of his death. It was published in 1979 in the English language as the "
The Warsaw Diary of Adam Czerniaków: Prelude to Doom", edited by one of the
most prominent Holocaust
scholars,
Raul Hilberg. More inside.
posted by matteo
on Feb 17, 2006 -
23 comments
