A selection of poems by Nina Pick.
Grandchild of Holocaust survivors, and an integrative spiritual counselor, Pick works to revive Judaism through the gifts of female spiritual leaders and heal intergenerational trauma. She’s a Reiki Master, a Waldorf educator, and a fellow at the Yiddish Book Center’s Wexler Oral History Project.
By Glenn Harcourt
Harris’s Carmilla is much more than just a well-told and engaging story with an affirmative if transgressive LBGTQ plot. It engages us also in the way it transforms its original source material, and about how that transgression can also be a liberation, as long as one is willing to be the price.
By Antoinette LaFarge
“Two summers on the island of Spitzbergen,” wrote Louise Brigham in 1909, “taught me, more than all previous experiments, the latent possibilities of a box.” The book she published that year, Box Furniture, is indeed a testament to the possibilities of a box—and not just any box, but specifically the packing crates then used to ship all kinds of ordinary consumer goods. Brigham found in those humble, cheaply made boxes inspiration for a unique system of furniture design based entirely on recycled packing crates.
By Susan Power
Our experience of time and space has been radically disrupted by the threat of the pandemic; its scope and sobering impact both intimate and distant. Yet this existential crisis can promote a new way of being in the world. With so many aspects of our lives on hold, the current moment offers a rare opportunity to reflect upon the “state of things.” Like the eponymous 1982 film by Wim Wenders, which revolves around a science fiction film cast and crew stranded together on location when the production is stalled due to sudden lack of funds, Liat Yossifor’s latest body of work was on its way to Sydney, Australia for a solo show at Fox Jensen Gallery scheduled to open on March 28 when it became stranded in shipping crates, postponed in the voyage to its destination, and ultimately consigned to a screen…
Hsuan Hsu explores how director Bong Joon-ho uses sense of smell to elucidate socioeconomic divides in his Oscar-winning film, Parasite. Hsu also places the movie into the context of the very real wealth divide in contemporary South Korea.
Austrian artist Deborah Sengl, who published her art book “The Last Days of Mankind” with DoppelHouse this past December, discusses her recent exhibit, “Broken Soldiers.” In the following interview with Alois Kölbl, she explores her […]
By Monica Strauss
Around the turn of the century in Olmütz, a small town in the Czech Republic, (known as Olomouc in present day) a Jewish community flourished. With its impeccable examples of Gothic and Baroque architecture and connection to the Hapsburg Empire, it was known as the “Moravian Rome”. However, its young people were increasingly turning to cosmopolitan Vienna for intellectual stimulation. When the onset of World War I sent many of them home to Olmütz, they tried to maintain that high level of cultural exchange they had experienced in the Kaiserstadt.
By Peter Sichrovsky
I had no problems with anti-Semitism, neither in elementary school nor later in high school. The teachers stayed behind, often talking about their experiences during the war, some of them also open about being in the SS, but they left me alone. Life was far more difficult for my parents. … My mother did not want to talk to me about any of the former Wehrmacht officers who were my teachers now.
At the annual German Studies Association conference in September, the Austrian Cultural Forum featured Austrian author Erich Hackl’s Three Tearless Histories (DoppelHouse Press, 2017). The book is a collection of three personal histories about individuals affected by mid-century fascism, including the Austrian resistance fighter Gisela “Gisi” Tschofenig, who was killed in 1945, six days prior to the liberalization of the Schörgenhub work education camp where she was detained. In “Tschofenig: The Name Behind the Street,” Hackl recounts her improbable wedding in the Dachau concentration camp and attempts to resurrect her accomplishments amidst a family squabble that threatens to bury her forever.
Based on interviews with award-winning filmmaker Helena Treštíková, Hitler, Stalin and I (DoppelHouse Press, 2018) is the oral history of Heda Margolius Kovály. In the book Heda recounts her experiences under fascist and communist oppression in 20th century Czechoslovakia. In the following interview, Treštíková and Kovály’s son and translator Ivan Margolius give more context to the book and its publication.
The Nomadic Journal 