More in ‘Soviet Union’

Today in Tablet Magazine, listen in on several Sephardim in Washington, D.C., the subjects of this week’s Vox Tablet podcast, as they enjoy their annual Hannukah gathering while speaking the nearly extinct Judeo-Spanish tongue of Ladino. Josh Lambert reports on forthcoming books of interest (a lot of Holocaust tomes this week). In her family column, ...

Next week the world will mark the fall of the Berlin Wall, which took place 20 years ago. It happens that I was there at the time. I think of it as one of the most memorable events I’ve covered in a long newspaper life, though it is not unalloyed. It instructs that in our ...

The synagogue in Oni, a town in the Republic of Georgia’s northern region of Racha, is a handsome building with arching windows and a rounded architectural dome of a silver color. The inner ceiling is shaped like a giant pop-over, inlaid with a myriad of small skylights. A mural of colorful mountains beneath an impressionistic, ...

Whether we like to admit it or not, those of us too cool to listen to Celine Dion or Bette Midler have a hole to fill in our musical world. We need the kind of music that makes us marvel at its virtuosity while simultaneously causing us to feel as though we are the protagonists ...

Illustration by Yvetta Fedorova

My grandfather, Yakov Milner, was born in November or December of 1915 in the Latvian town of Baltinava, at the edge of the Eastern Front. He claimed as his earliest memory the rumble and menace of artillery. The rest of his childhood memories were almost uniformly idyllic. Until the onset of the ...

For more than 2,000 years, the Jews of Central Asia existed independent of other communities, and developed their own traditions. Their music draws on literary sources from Persian poetry to the Zohar.
Evan Rapport, a graduate student at the City University of New York, introduces music by Roshel Rubinov, Moghulcha-i Dugoh, Menakhem Malakov, and the husband-and-wife ...

As the Soviet Union’s most famous composer, Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975) was many things to many people. For some he epitomized the principled artist, a closet opponent of the Communist regime whose sharp-edged yet deeply anguished music evoked the great suffering of a people under totalitarianism. To others Shostakovich was a Soviet lackey, loyally serving the ...