More in ‘Romania’

Somebody give Ulysses S. Grant’s publicist a raise: Despite the fact that the 18th president has been dead for nearly 125 years, prestigious historian Sean Wilentz positively fawned over him in last Sunday’s New York Times. The reason? Some Republicans wish to replace Grant’s visage on the $50 bill with that of President Ronald Reagan. ...

So it turns out the Nobel Prize for Literature has gone not to the Israeli novelist Amos Oz, as some people were predicting, or to Philip Roth, who others (though fewer others, it seemed) thought was a leading contender. Instead, the winner of this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature is Herta Mueller, a Romanian-born German ...

It was the first week in September, and in cowboy boots and jeans, camera slung over my shoulder, I crunched through the springy thick tangle of undergrowth that carpets the old Jewish cemetery in Radauti, a market town in the far north of Romania, near the Ukrainian border. Around me stretched the crowded, ragged rows ...

First, the mayor of Constanta, Romania’s largest port city, dressed up in a Nazi uniform and goose-stepped in a fashion show (he apologized yesterday). Later this week, a more complicated train of events also gave rise to concerns of anti-Semitism in this Eastern European country. On Monday, Romanian police raided a Bucharest fertility clinic and ...

Many of us walked away from the movie Valkyrie, about Nazi officers’ failed plot to kill Hitler in 1944, pondering the moral quandaries facing patriotic Germans during World War II, or wondering why Tom Cruise’s character alone among the Germans did not speak with a British accent, or mourning the 121 minutes of our lives ...

• Representatives of 46 countries at the Prague Holocaust Era Assets Conference have issued the Terezin Declaration, a document aimed at easing the process of property restitution. [JTA]
• Medical students in Romania are suspected of buying bones from a Holocaust mass grave for educational use. [EJP]
• Israeli settlement Modiin Illit exemplifies the conflict over a ...

Gregor von Rezzori, the only son of a loveless marriage, entered the world at an unpropitious time—1914—and in an inauspicious place—the city formerly known as Czernowitz, capital of the region known as Bukovina, in the final days of the Hapsburg empire. He was a refugee before his first birthday and would never find a way ...

Born in the Bronx in 1927, Mitchell Berkowitz has vivid memories of his Yiddish-speaking neighbors and the early-morning sound of horse-drawn milk wagons. As a child during the Depression, he spent summers in upstate New York, where farmers rented out rooms to working-class Jewish families to make ends meet; the rooms were called kuch alayns, ...