CULTURE
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The Boy in the Woods ★★★ — Jewish Renaissance
He puts his skills to good use, eventually managing to light a fire. He builds a shelter from fallen branches, forages for berries and traps and roasts a rabbit. With charcoal from charred twigs, he draws the faces of his family onto rocks. Placing them around him, he recites a Hebrew blessing. Despite railing against God, he clings to his…
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Kidnapped ★★★★★ — Jewish Renaissance
Bellocchio’s cinematography is stunning, with many interior scenes in chiaroscuro, lit like a Caravaggio painting. Care has been taken to reconstruct settings and even the speech sounds authentic: Enea Sala, who plays the child Edgardo, comes from Bologna and speaks in the local accent. The acting is first class: Paolo Pierobon as Pius IX can chill with his eyes, while…
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Where words won’t suffice, music leads the charge — Jewish Renaissance
This is a reflective session, beautifully played, of memory, passion, regret, rage and resignation. The album is without liner-note dates, background to the music or composer or musical analysis. We must take it ‘as it is’, provoking the listener to consider how we listen to music and what we expect from it. For the Jewish listener there is an additional…
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Books in brief: Spring reads
Clear a space on the bookshelves as Rebecca Taylor recommends a new crop of books for spring MUSIC OF EXILE: THE UNTOLD STORY OF THE COMPOSERS WHO FLED HITLERby Michael Haas (Yale University Press, £25) In the 1930s, composers and musicians began to flee Hitler’s Germany to make new lives across the globe. Michael Haas’ new book is a detailed…
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All aboard the bookmobile!
An initiative by the National Library of Israel is helping children deal with the trauma of war through the power of books The National Library of Israel (NLI) holds more than five million books, as well as the world’s largest collections of Hebraica and Judaica and a treasure of rare manuscripts and artefacts, so it’s no surprise that words are…
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Finding love amid the horror — Jewish Renaissance
Is it possible to create a believable love story in a setting as hellish as Auschwitz? Barney Pell Scholes talks to the team behind the drama The Tattooist of Auschwitz to find out… Although Heather Morris’s book The Tattooist of Auschwitz was a huge international bestseller when it was published in 2018, debate continues to rumble over its historical accuracy.…
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Memories of Berlin before the breakout of World War II — Jewish Renaissance
Matthew Reisz introduces Barbara Loftus’s beautiful, two-volume collection of artwork, stories and more, which launched earlier this month It was only in 1994 that Hildegard Basch began to speak openly about her experiences of growing up Jewish in pre-war Berlin. This initially led her daughter, the artist Barbara Loftus, to produce a series of haunting works depicting the episode in…
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The Tattooist of Auschwitz ★★★★
The new small-screen adaptation of Heather Morris’s contentious best-seller is an unmissable marvel First published in 2018, The Tattooist of Auschwitz by Heather Morris was a global best-selling book that ran into controversy over its historical inaccuracies. Now, a new limited series attempts to tackle this complex legacy. Both book and series are based on the testimony of Holocaust survivor…
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Passover reading — Jewish Renaissance
For that issue, we asked writers, poets, artists and photographers to choose a part of the Passover story that resonated with them to interpret in any way they wanted. The resulting contributions touched on many of the themes of exile and freedom that were so dear to Ester, encompassing art by David Breuer-Weil, Sophie Herxheimer, Tom Berry and Jacqueline Nicholls,…
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3rd Prize — Jewish Renaissance
Last June, The New York Times reported that ‘Hava Nagila’ had echoed through Monte-Carlo Beach Club at an after party for the Formula 1 Grand Prix. Its recital at a plush Monaco club reflects the secularisation and ubiquity of the century-old Jewish folk number. Yet, even as it assumes increasing status amongst non-Jews, the traditional song still offers a rich…
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