Julia M. Klein, the Forward’s contributing book critic, has been a two-time finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing. Follow her @JuliaMKlein.
Julia M. KleinContributing Book Critic
By Julia M. Klein
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Culture Another Hidden Jewish Girl — But Not Anne Frank
The Cut Out Girl: A Story of War and Family, Lost and Found By Bart van Es Penguin Press, 304 pages, $28 It’s impossible to think of the Holocaust in the Netherlands without conjuring the ghost of Anne Frank. And though Frank and her diary were exceptional, her story embodies the opposing fates of Dutch…
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Culture In Vichy France, The Nazi Era Viewed Up Close
Deposition 1940-1944: A Secret Diary of Life in Vichy France By Léon Werth; edited and translated by David Ball Oxford University Press, 368 pages, $34.95 The French Jewish novelist and essayist Léon Werth spent World War II, buffeted by history but shielded from its worst consequences, chronicling the passivity, inertia and gradual political awakening of…
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Culture For These Doomed Passengers, There Was No Refuge in Cuba
The German Girl By Armando Lucas Correa, translated by Nick Caistor Atria Books/Simon & Schuster, 368 pages, $26.99 The drama of the St. Louis, the ship that once promised last-minute rescue for hundreds of German Jewish refugees, is compelling enough without fictional embellishment. In 1939, the trans-Atlantic liner voyaged from Hamburg, Germany, to an abruptly…
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Film & TV Why Hollywood Used To Be Better For Women
Nobody’s Girl Friday: The Women Who Ran Hollywood By J. E. Smyth Oxford University Press, 328 pages, $29.95 Just the Funny Parts: … And a Few Hard Truths About Sneaking Into the Hollywood Boys’ Club By Nell Scovell Dey Street Books, 336 pages, $27.99 It’s even worse than you suspected. But it was once better…
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Culture Before Sondheim And Miranda, There Was Rodgers And Hammerstein
Something Wonderful: Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Broadway Revolution By Todd S. Purdum Henry Holt & Co., 400 pages, $32 Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II met cute at Columbia University’s Varsity Show. Hammerstein had helped write the musical variety show. Rodgers’s elder brother, Morty Rodgers, a fraternity pal of Hammerstein’s, introduced the two afterward. Rodgers, not…
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Culture Paul Goldberg’s Dizzying Plunge Into The Kingdom Of Uselessness
The Château By Paul Goldberg Picador, 384 pages, $26 As the Age of Trump dawns, fictional Washington Post reporter William M. Katzenelenbogen finds himself broke and out of a job. In his prime, the Russian American Katzenelenbogen – heck, let’s join novelist Paul Goldberg in calling him Bill – was an ace science investigative reporter,…
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Culture A Devastating History Of Genocide — In One Ukrainian Town
ANATOMY OF A GENOCIDE: THE LIFE AND DEATH OF A TOWN CALLED BUCZACZ By Omer Bartov Simon & Schuster, 416 pages, $30 In researching the Ukrainian town of Buczacz, Omer Bartov wanted to uncover his own family history. But only a few traces of that history remained. What “Anatomy of a Genocide” provides instead is…
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Culture A Family, Dispersed And Splintered By The Holocaust
MAYBE ESTHER: A FAMILY STORY By Katja Petrowskaja; translated from the German by Shelley Frisch Harper, 272 pages, $25.99 By Julia M. Klein More than seven decades after World War II and the Holocaust ruptured civilization, we’re still trying to make sense of the fallout. Intimate first-person accounts have ceded ground, in large part, to…
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