Category: Holocaust
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More book promotion
We seem to have had some success getting coverage from local TV and print news outlets. Here’s a front-page story in the Charlottesville Daily Progress. And here’s a short piece from Philadelphia’s Jewish Exponent. Local TV news outlets also produced short spots: Here’s one from Philadelphia’s 6ABC and a second from Charlottesville’s NBC29.
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Aharon Pick’s memoir has been translated
The project that began in 2020 to translate the Holocaust memoir written by my grandfather’s childhood friend, Aharon Pick, has come to fruition. Indiana University Press published the English version, using Pick’s original title, “Notes from the Valley of Slaughter.” It is available from the publisher or via Amazon. Here is the publisher’s website with…
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Postscript: Berlin
My month in Vilnius was followed by a few touristic days in Berlin. For American children in the 1950s, this may have been the first non-U.S. city to enter our consciousness, via newsreels, cartoons and the general sense that WWII was still very much with us. For Jewish children, moreover, this was Mordor – the seat…
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Graveside
Kedainiai today is a town of about 25,000, situated near the geographical center of Lithuania, supported mainly by agriculture and ag-related processing. There’s a fertilizer plant, an ice-cream dairy and a number of cucumber-packing businesses. (Even in my grandfather’s day the town was famous for its cucumbers.) Sadly, though, for Jews like me, the most…
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Kedainiai
I came to Lithuania for two reasons. One was to revive my flagging Yiddish language skills. The other was to revisit Kedainiai, which I did this weekend. As some know, I have been obsessed with this place since about 1990, when I discovered my grandfather’s memoirs about his home town, called Keidan in Yiddish. As…
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Shadows
It may be just an accident of geography that the Jewish Holocaust museum here is only a couple of blocks from the Lithuanian Museum of Genocide Victims. Or it may have been someone’s politically pointed choice. At any rate, it’s a very short walk between two perspectives that co-exist uneasily here. The Holocaust exhibition, in what…
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Fania
Fania Brantsovsky’s title at the Vilnius Yiddish Institute is librarian, but it probably should be legend, or living memory. She was raised in Vilna, went into the ghetto with her family in 1941, escaped in 1943 and fought with the Jewish partisans until 1945. After the war she worked as a statistician. The other day…
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