Currently Browsing: memoir 23 articles
Shemini Atzeret / Simchat Torah 5784/2023: A collective memoir
Perhaps we should mourn the festivity that was taken away from us, just as we mourn the deaths and suffering that occurred during that festival. JewThink solicited contributions from British Jews reflecting on their experiences of the festival. Let us remember these ruptures even as we try and come to terms with the wider rupture.
Who By Fire
Martin Elliot Jaffe recalls Leonard Cohen In The Sinai. “I was afraid at first that my quiet and melancholy songs weren’t the kind that would encourage soldiers at the front—but I learned that these wonderful kids don’t need glorious battle anthems—now between battles they don’t need glorious battle anthems. Now between battles, they’re open to […]
Althea McNish
To mark the Windrush anniversary, Gloria Tessler remembers her late friend, Althea McNish. This year marks the 75th anniversary of the Empire Windrush which first docked in Tilbury on June 22, 1948. What should be a happy event, celebrating the diversity of culture in Britain, has been marred, of course by the trauma experienced by […]
Little People
Excerpts adapted from Stephen Pogany’s Modern Times: The Biography of a Hungarian-Jewish Family. ‘You’re not a Jew!’ snaps my mother, with a sudden and unexpected rush of anger. For an instant, I’m confused, uncertain of what to say or what to think. Was I adopted? Have I been the victim of an elaborate, well-intentioned deception, […]
All About Eva
In this exclusive extract from his new book, All About Eva: A Holocaust-Related Memoir, with a Hollywood Twist, Vincent Brook reminisces about his German Jewish parents’ experiences in Nazi Germany and their early years as refugees in Los Angeles, where Vincent’s mother, Eva, had an extramarital affair with famed Polish Jewish actor Alexander Granach. When […]
Borowski’s Brutal Vision
Donald Weber reviews Here in Our Auschwitz and Other Stories by Tadeusz Borowski. The publication of the Polish writer Tadeusz Borowski’s Here in Our Auschwitz and Other Stories is a significant event for students of Holocaust literature. Sent to Auschwitz as a political prisoner in 1943, at the age of 21, and released from Dachau […]
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 […]
When Wisdom of the Catfish met the Gefilte Fish
In the first part of her memoirs, Carole Bent reflects on her Jewish upbringing and childhood. My Jewishness sits with me lightly until a word, a sight, or a slight pushes it to the front of my mind where it repeatedly pulses, demanding to be seen or heard. It is stubborn yet subtle, demanding attention […]
Howard Jacobson, Prestwich and Me
Sue Fox reflects on her hometown connections with the author Howard Jacobson. The writer, Howard Jacobson, who is older and much cleverer than me acquired his sense of humour in North Manchester. He grew up streets away from our Prestwich home, in Bowker Vale. It now has a MetroLink Station on the route from Piccadilly in […]
The Diaper Diaspora
Marc Kaye remembers being born Jewish on a US Army Base in Germany. In screenwriting, it is often recommended to place your protagonist in very extenuating circumstances – situations that he would never expect to find himself in. For a Jewish mother, I would think that taking a Jewish son and placing him both in […]