Jewish Life in Harbin, China: A Conversation with Jean Hoffmann Lewanda by Susan Blumberg-Kason Interviews [email protected] Tue, 01/07/2025 - 07:08 Shalama and Paul, Shanghai, 1950. Photo courtesy of Jean Hoffmann LewandaI met the author Jean Hoffmann Lewanda for lunch this past November in New Jersey, not too far from her home in suburban Philadelphia. Jean is the author of a new book, Shalama: My 96 Seasons in China (Earnshaw, 2024), the story of her mother’s childhood in Harbin, China, and young adult years in Shanghai. Jean’s first book, Witness to History: From Vienna to Shanghai: A Memoir of Escape, Survival and Resilience, is an edited edition of her father’s memoir tracing his escape from Nazi-controlled Vienna to the safe shores of Shanghai in the late 1930s. Jean and I originally met online thanks to mutual friends who are historians and the authority on everything Old Shanghai. When we met in person in November, we spoke for hours about publishing Jewish Chinese stories. We expanded this conversation over email. Susan Blumberg-Kason: Thank you, Jean, for continuing our lovely conversation back in November. I don’t remember coming across other authors who have personal connections to both the old Shanghai and Harbin Jewish communities, each of which numbered in the thousands. Your mother was the daughter of Russian Jewish refugees, and your father was an Austrian Jewish refugee. Was it unusual for people in these... Continue reading at 'World Literature Today'
[ World Literature Today | 2025-01-07 13:08:24 UTC ]
Doreen Cunningham has won £10,000 for her memoir Soundings: A Journey with Whales at this year's Royal Society of Literature Giles St Aubyn Awards. Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2020-12-03 05:13:41 UTC ]
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Booksellers reported a significant drop in customer traffic and a commensurate drop in sales, but online orders were way up, forcing bookstores to adapt. Barack Obama's memoir and Jeff Kinney's latest were the most popular titles over the Thanksgiving weekend at stores surveyed by 'PW.' Continue reading at Publishers Weekly
[ Publishers Weekly | 2020-12-03 05:00:00 UTC ]
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Former U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey’s Memorial Drive—a harrowing memoir of a daughter reckoning with the brutal murder of her mother at the hands of her stepfather—has been optioned by Sony Pictures Television for development as a drama series. Recently heralded by the Washington Post... Continue reading at Literrary Hub
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Girls Aloud star Sarah Harding will publish her memoir with Ebury Press in spring 2021. Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2020-12-02 19:07:37 UTC ]
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JASON HARDY DOESN’T PRETEND to know the solution to America’s criminal justice problem. There are a little more than two pages of policy proposals buried in the epilogue of The Second Chance Club: Hardship and Hope After Prison, Hardy’s memoir about his time as a probation and parole officer in... Continue reading at Los Angeles Review of Books
[ Los Angeles Review of Books | 2020-12-02 16:00:48 UTC ]
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Weidenfeld & Nicolson will publish Forever Young, a memoir from Oscar-winning actress Hayley Mills about her early years. Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2020-12-02 06:29:05 UTC ]
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“The Babur Nama” is the autobiography of the polymathic founder of the Mughal dynasty. Continue reading at The New York Times
[ The New York Times | 2020-11-30 19:59:24 UTC ]
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Hodder Studio will publish Ellie Taylor's memoir My Child and Other Mistakes: How to Ruin your Life in the Best Way Possible next summer. Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2020-11-29 12:35:38 UTC ]
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Nikesh Shukla is launching his first podcast series “Brown Baby” in January 2021 in partnership with Acast, ahead of his forthcoming memoir of the same name. Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2020-11-29 12:07:08 UTC ]
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Ten days ago, with the coronavirus and the election continuing to dominate the media-industry conversation in the US, Ben Smith, media columnist at the New York Times, briefly steered attention overseas, publishing an interview with the French leader Emmanuel Macron under the bait-and-switch... Continue reading at Columbia Journalism Review
[ Columbia Journalism Review | 2020-11-25 13:32:28 UTC ]
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Ebury Press will publish Ali Millar's debut memoir The Last Days, which will recount the author’s experience growing up as part of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2020-11-25 07:36:54 UTC ]
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The parts of J.D. Vance’s controversial memoir that didn’t make it into the movie. Continue reading at Slate
[ Slate | 2020-11-24 17:07:44 UTC ]
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Queer activist Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore’s book is alive with the existential nausea of being displaced. Continue reading at The Washington Post
[ The Washington Post | 2020-11-24 13:00:00 UTC ]
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Barack Obama's A Promised Land (Viking) has soared straight into the UK Official Top 50 number one spot in its first week on sale. Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2020-11-24 12:37:14 UTC ]
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Cash’s memoir is the story of a man whose penchant for letters suggests a desire to hold on to the present. Sealing up the envelope means ending the letter; it means allowing our fantasies and stories to be finished, read, and judged. The post The Stories We Become: On William Cash’s... Continue reading at The Millions
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On foreign policy, Obama’s memoir reveals a president fully aware of many of his shortcomings, and ambivalent about many of his accomplishments. Continue reading at Slate
[ Slate | 2020-11-20 21:32:35 UTC ]
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Critical responses to Barack Obama’s memoir suggest less what’s in the book than what we’ve always wanted from him. Continue reading at Slate
[ Slate | 2020-11-20 20:45:30 UTC ]
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Interviews Since 2003, Jessica Cohen has published over twenty books translated from Hebrew to English. Among other honors, she shared the 2017 Man Booker International Prize with author David Grossman for her translation of Grossman’s A Horse Walks... Continue reading at World Literature Today
[ World Literature Today | 2020-11-20 16:36:29 UTC ]
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Roald Dahl holds a special place in my childhood. I still have vivid memories of reading Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Matilda in school (we even read his rather unsavory memoir Boy; his accounts of boarding school bullying haunt me to this day!) and of watching the delightful early ’90s... Continue reading at Electric Literature
[ Electric Literature | 2020-11-20 12:00:50 UTC ]
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FASCISTS LOVE Dune: Denis Villeneuve’s film adaptation was highly anticipated on white nationalist sites such as Counter-Currents and the Daily Stormer. As soon as the trailer dropped, they began poring over it for signs of deviation from their pet interpretations of Frank Herbert’s 1965 science... Continue reading at Los Angeles Review of Books
[ Los Angeles Review of Books | 2020-11-19 18:00:46 UTC ]
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