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Poland, a Green Land

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A Provocative Reflection on Aharon Appelfeld’s Novel

Posthumously, Israeli author Aharon Appelfeld (died 2018) released his final book in English translation this Spring 2023. The haunting, evocative writer of over forty books who acquired the Hebrew language late in life may have come full circle. This last book, Poland, A Green Land’s continuity with Appelfeld’s past writing, points to the confrontation of a second generation of Israeli Jews that grew up in an “Israeli” ethos of forgetting and being alienated from their European Jewish survivor generation (VIEW PDF).[…]

Perspectives for Our Time

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Marking the Polish Translation of Transcending Darkness: A Girl’s Journey Out of the Holocaust

A Conversation with author Estelle Glaser Laughlin

Estelle Glaser Laughlin is a child Holocaust survivor who was born in Warsaw, Poland, in 1929. We are marking the Polish translation of her book Transcending Darkness: A Girl’s Journey Out of the Holocaust. This interview and other testimonies by Mrs. Laughlin will constitute a curriculum unit for Polish High school students.

In September 1939, Estelle’s family lived in Warsaw when Poland was attacked.. Along with her parents and sister, Freda, they were confined to the 1.3 square mile Ghetto area.[…]

An Aid Worker in a Time of Pogrom, Chaos, and Anguish During the Russian Civil War

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Michael Nutkiewicz translated and expanded Eli Gumener’s Yiddish memoir, originally published in Lithuania in 1921. Entitled A Ukrainian Chapter. A Jewish Aid Worker’s Memoir of Sorrow, the memoir depicts the fate of Jewish communities caught in the middle of the Russian Civil War and the challenges of providing relief to Jewish communities. Gumener (1886-1941) was Michael Nutkiewicz’s uncle and worked for major aid organizations between World War I and World War II. Michael was unaware of his story until he discovered the book in his parents’ vast Yiddish library after they passed away. Gumener’s memoir is a highly valuable and rare historical source that focuses on the two most devastating years of pogroms in[…]