Currently Browsing: Alex Gordon 5 articles
Overcriticism and Forgiveness
Alex Gordon reflects on his father’s Jewishness. In 1935 my father met his idol, the French writer Henri Barbusse, winner of the Goncourt Prize. Barbusse, a member of the French Communist Party who also met with Stalin, sought to persuade my father, a newly minted graduate in literature from Kiev University, to become a communist. […]
The Scream in Kiev
Alex Gordon presents an original story. My grandfather Ilya Gordon was an assistant pharmacist in a Kiev pharmacy. He made and sold medicines, weighed portions of medicines on scales, and was always accurate in his work. He was allowed to settle outside the Pale of Settlement in Tsarist Russia and move from the shtetl […]
The Unloved Grandson in Beloved Kiev
Alex Gordon THE UNLOVED GRANDSON IN BELOVED KIEV At school in Kiev I had absolutely no ability to write compositions in Russian with their introduction, main part, and conclusion. I got a “C” on my school-leaving certificate in Russian literature because of an unsuccessful composition I wrote on my final exam. This was not […]
Uncle Boris the Prophet
Alex Gordon remembers his great uncle Boris, Kyiv, and the Holocaust. My grandmother Rosa’s brother Baruch, whom we all called Boris, was a prophet. Why did my grandmother’s brother stop being called by the Jewish name Baruch and start being called by the Christian name Boris? Spinoza’s name was Baruch, which means “blessed” in Hebrew. […]
Cinematic Story
Alex Gordon remembers his role in The Beast. I don’t like movies as a genre. I don’t watch movies, I don’t know actors, I prefer reading books. I belong to the minority of non-movie lovers. There are different minorities: religious, national, sexual. I belong to a cultural minority of film haters. And I was the […]