fbpx
Category

diary

Young Manhattanite’s diary of old is new again

She learned that her building was expanding its bike room and had cleaned out an area where these trunks, whose owners had moved on, had sat unopened for decades. Amid the chaos, a building porter told her that he had found a young girl\’s diary and gave her the small book with its crackling leather cover and chrome lock.

Diary writer Hillman says sharing story is ‘my duty’

It was not until several years ago that Laura Hillman completed her Holocaust memoir, \”I Will Plant You a Lilac Tree\” (Atheneum, 2005), which reads like a teenager\’s journal of life in eight labor and concentration camps. The lyrical, brutally honest book recreates her youthful musings — echoing the most famous of the Holocaust diarists, Anne Frank.

Novel Tears Down a Sacred Shrine

One of the more surprising moments in recent music history comes midway through the celebrated 1998 indie rock album, \”In the Aeroplane Over the Sea,\” by the band Neutral Milk Hotel. Hiding in an otherwise understated tune are some startling lyrics:

I know they buried her body with others.

Her sister and mother and five hundred families.

And will she remember me fifty years later?

I wish I could save her with some sort of time machine….

It is, as many a hipster could tell you, an album about Anne Frank. Its singer and lyricist was a shaggy-headed 27-year-old named Jeff Magnum. As far removed as his native Louisiana was from Amsterdam, his songs give the unmistakable impression that he is a man in love with a 15-year-old girl who had been murdered more than five decades earlier.

Mother Weathers Terror’s ‘Storm’

Either excoriated as illegal conquerors or praised as pioneers, Jews living in the territories conquered by Israel in the Six-Day War are never portrayed neutrally.

New Aspects of Anne

\nLet\’s say it right up front: The four-hour television miniseries \”Anne Frank\” is the most powerful film on the Holocaust in recent memory, not excepting the fabled \”Schindler\’s List.\”

Let’s Review

Phobia: 1. A compulsive or persistent fear of any specified type of object, stimulus or situation. 2. An exaggerated or persistent dread of or aversion to.
Sitting in the front row of the McCadden Theater in Hollywood was my personal pit of snakes. I would rather be buried alive, in the dark, on top of a skyscraper covered with mice than be reviewed. But there he was, a theater critic from Backstage West trade paper, perched right in the front row to review my one-woman show.

New Articles

More news and opinions than at a
Shabbat dinner, right in your inbox.

More news and opinions than at a Shabbat dinner, right in your inbox.

More news and opinions than at a Shabbat dinner, right in your inbox.