Charlestonians say that the 1896 statue of John C. Calhoun was raised up so high over the square that protestors couldn’t pelt his image with rotten food, stones, or other signs of displeasure as they had in its initial incarnation which had Calhoun much closer to the ground in 1872. Our host David Slucki regaled… Read More Two (White) Jews in Dixie
After being woken up by a woman dressed in traditional Belarusian costume who brought our breakfast, we went on a tour of the Nanosy Complex. Among the stunning views of the two lakes surrounding the complex was a German bunker from World War I, a bizarre relic that seemed to be pruned back to remind… Read More Recreating a Photograph from 100 Years Ago
In an oversized bus that Clare Fester and Robby Adler-Peckerar procured for Helix, we arrived at the Nanosy Complex, a postmodern, post-Soviet reconstruction of a “traditional” Belarusian village on the beautiful banks of Lake Narach. The village was the brainchild of a very wealthy Russian who enjoyed hunting, fishing, and recreating “authentic” Belarusian villages. This… Read More Exploring the Present through Memory Maps: Volozhin and Smorgon
Our first day in Minsk began with our morning poem (a daily Helix tradition) and then we embarked on a walking tour of the city. As we started out, we learned that the factory across the street from our hotel was the historic factory that features in Moyshe Kulbak’s Zelmenyaners. This late 1920s Kulbak novel,… Read More Life and Death: A Tour of Minsk and Its Surroundings
Minsk—the letters at the airport screamed out my arrival for my second Helix adventure. I had just come from a family cruise in the Baltics, where I had a few harrowing moments like being interrogated by the Russian secret police in St. Petersburg on behalf of my friend from Moscow who had broken the law… Read More Helix 2019, The Adventure Begins
Lately I’ve been thinking about the 1930s, Hitler’s rise to power, and Nazism not just in Germany but around the world. I’m writing a book about a Dutch Jewish cabaret singer, who married a non-Jewish German socialist, who had settled in Holland in 1936. In my search for information about his time in Holland, I… Read More When Nazism Came to Los Angeles
We have been crossing borders for the past three days, since my last posting. As I wrote this we are on the road from Daugavpils (the name in Latvian, Dvinsk in Russian, Dineburg in Yiddish) to Vilnius (known as Vilna in Yiddish and Wilno in Polish) and are crossing the Latvian/Lithuanian border. Both states have… Read More From Lukashenko’s Belarus to the EU: Polotsk, Breslau, Daugavpils, and Lithuanian Shtetls
