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 Before the War, They Found a Last Resort in Ostend
Ostend: Stefan Zweig, Joseph Roth, and the Summer Before the Dark By Volker Weidermann, translated from the German by Carol Brown Janeway Pantheon, 176 pages, $24.95 In the summer of 1936, Nazi Germany was preparing for the propaganda triumph of the Olympics, and Spain was exploding into civil war. Meanwhile, in the Belgian North Sea…
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Culture Primo Levi and the Italian Resistance
Primo Levi’s Resistance: Rebels and Collaborators in Occupied Italy By Sergio Luzzatto; translated by Frederika Randall Metropolitan Books, 284 pages, $30 Poet, memoirist, essayist, novelist and chemist Primo Levi (1919-1987) is best known as a cool-eyed survivor and chronicler of Auschwitz. But he was also briefly a Resistance fighter in the mountains of northwest Italy,…
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Culture How We Tell Holocaust Stories Without Survivors
We’ve reached a pivotal cultural moment in Holocaust historiography and memoir, poised between the final thoughts of the last survivors and the attempts of their children — and, more recently, their grandchildren — to make sense of their legacy. It’s a phenomenon with an equivalent in Germany, where the so-called Third Generation has been reckoning…
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Culture Geraldine Brooks Reimagines King David — for Better and Worse
The Secret Chord By Geraldine Brooks Viking, 320 pages, $27.95 Musician and warrior, shepherd and poet, anointed of God and guilt-ridden sinner, the biblical King David is a compelling and contradictory figure. In her latest work of historical fiction, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Geraldine Brooks (“March,” “People of the Book,” “Caleb’s Crossing”) heightens those contradictions,…
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Culture A Distinguished History in Art Theft
Hitler’s Art Thief: Hildebrand Gurlitt, the Nazis, and the Looting of Europe’s Treasures By Susan Ronald St. Martin’s Press, 400 pages, $27.99 In 2012, German investigators broke into the apartment of the Munich recluse Cornelius Gurlitt and confiscated nearly 1,300 pieces of modern art, much of it of murky or suspicious provenance. Gurlitt had inherited…
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Culture Did Dismantling of States Make the Worst of the Holocaust a Reality?
Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning By Timothy Snyder Tim Duggan Books, 462 pages, $30 In two generations, we have witnessed a massive shift in our attitude toward the Holocaust: from regarding it as incomprehensible, defying human understanding, to trying to construct rigorous, often competing historical explanations for its causes and contours. There…
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Culture 12 Can’t-Miss Books for Fall
The tangled relationship between history and myth is one theme that emerges from our idiosyncratic and speculative preview of fall books. It should be fascinating, for example, to compare French Nobel laureate Patrick Modiano’s novelistic deconstruction of the French Resistance with Robert Gildea’s revisionist historical overview of the same subject, “Fighters in the Shadows.” Geraldine…
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Culture The Progress of Poet Maxine Kumin
The Pawnbroker’s Daughter: A Memoir By Maxine Kumin W.W. Norton & Company, 176 pages, $25.95 In her poem “Sonnets Uncorseted,” Maxine Kumin bemoans the sexist attitudes that constrained 20th-century American women poets. Immersed in motherhood and domesticity, she confesses to having been “Terrified of writing domestic poems,/… anathema to the prevailing clique of male pooh-bahs[.]”…
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