Jwriting

Cordelia Edvardson was born in 1929 in Berlin as the illegitimate daughter of the German writer Elisabeth Langgasser and an unidentified Jewish father. Langgasser was a well-known German Catholic writer whom the Nazis considered Jewish. Burned Child Seeks the Fire is the harrowing account of how she was summoned to …

Isak was a specialist in thrashing. Seven children. She immediately got thrashed. Seventeen! Zipa couldn’t lie. When she happened to mention that she’d seen the upholsterer again, she got thrashed again. One day she showed her whipped behind in Fritiof’s workshop and told the whole story. Fritiof wanted to rush …

Peter Weiss is considered to be one of the major European writers of the postwar period, a reputation based almost exclusively on his German works written after 1958, especially his plays Marat/Sade (1964) and Die Ermittlung (The Investigation, 1965; a version of the Auschwitz trial) and his prose memoir/novels Abschied …

Hamdu and Samya began to meet in the park behind the Knesset. They preferred mornings, when Israeli children are at school and the area is deserted, save for the odd German pensioner from the Rehavia quarter taking the air. To arrive there together would have been unwise. Each took a …

What concern is it of mine? Everybody has his story. Everyone has been a child. Once I ran in the middle of a cornfield though I wasn’t allowed to. The sun danced like an orange at the bottom of the slope. The kosher butcher had his long white beard tied …

What then is my Judaism? A natural fact, an inherited characteristic, or the sum of all life experiences? I used the phrase ‘fellow believers.’ But my fellowship does not rest on religion. Honestly—I know nothing about it. In my childhood home one didn’t celebrate religious festivals; one considered priests, prelates, …

One day he got a letter. Annie wrote that she couldn’t come to his hideout in Krakow, but she had managed to get something that could be very helpful to him, namely a passport and a paper with an invitation to visit a company in Sweden. She had managed to …

Georg Klein was born to an assimilated Jewish family in the Hungarian-speaking part of eastern Czechoslovakia in 1925 and survived the Second World War in Budapest. He moved to Sweden in 1947. For more than three decades he has led the Department of Tumor Biology at the Karolinska Institute in …

I didn’t know how many days they had kept me in that little windowless closet. Luckily for me I had no tendencies toward claustrophobia because otherwise I could already have been on the verge of a breakdown. I tried to keep my mind alert by thinking about Nathan, the children, …

Marianne Ahrne was born in Lund in 1940. She received her master’s degree from Lund in 1965 and was a student at the Swedish Film Institute school from 1967 to 1969. During the 1970s she directed several films; she is today perhaps equally well known as a film director and …