Music, film, literature, painting, theater, the cultural works that define modern artistic life.
During his 1934 to 1937 exile in Voronezh, Osip Mandelstam wrote the Voronezh Notebooks, including the cycle Verses on the Unknown Soldier.
Read the full story →Osip Mandelstam helped found the Acmeist movement in Russian poetry and wrote its manifesto, The Morning of Acmeism (1913).
Read the full story →After finding a 1941 missing-person notice for fifteen-year-old Dora Bruder, Patrick Modiano spent years tracing her life, and his book about her led Paris to name a promenade in her memory.
Read the full story →In his 1958 Bremen Prize speech, Paul Celan said that amid all his losses, language alone had remained within reach.
Read the full story →From 1959 until his death in 1970, Paul Celan taught German language and literature at France's elite École normale supérieure.
Read the full story →In 1959 Paul Celan published German translations of the poems of Osip Mandelstam, the Jewish poet who died in a Soviet camp.
Read the full story →Confined in the Czernowitz ghetto in 1941, Paul Celan translated Shakespeare's sonnets; in 1967 he published 21 of them in German.
Read the full story →In Bucharest from 1945 to 1947, Paul Celan worked as a publishing reader and translator, rendering Chekhov and Lermontov into Romanian.
Read the full story →Paul Heyse, author of 177 short stories, edited a 24-volume treasury of German novellas whose introduction set out the falcon theory, long treated as the model account of how a novella is built.
Read the full story →In The Drowned and the Saved (1986), Primo Levi reflected on Auschwitz forty years later and introduced the idea of the 'grey zone', now central to Holocaust ethics.
Read the full story →Primo Levi closely supervised the German translation of If This Is a Man, published in 1961, which he considered perhaps the most important translation of all.
Read the full story →Months after returning from Auschwitz, chemist Primo Levi wrote If This Is a Man. First printed by a small press in 1947, it became one of the most widely read accounts of the camps.
Read the full story →In 1956 René Goscinny and Jean-Michel Charlier tried to win comic artists and writers better pay, rights to their work and professional recognition, and Goscinny lost his job for it.
Read the full story →In 1947 Robert Capa and his friends founded Magnum Photos, a cooperative owned by its photographers, who kept the rights to their pictures and were free to document history on their own terms.
Read the full story →On June 6, 1944, Robert Capa went ashore on Omaha Beach with the first-day assault and took the blurred, famous images that showed the world what the invasion of Normandy looked like.
Read the full story →After the Holocaust annihilated the Jews of Buczacz, S. Y. Agnon composed A City in Its Fullness, a vast body of legends and chronicles devoted to his hometown.
Read the full story →In A Guest for the Night (1939), S. Y. Agnon described a narrator's return to his ruined Galician hometown, one of the great Hebrew novels of the twentieth century.
Read the full story →With the support of patron Salman Schocken, S. Y. Agnon's collected stories were published in four volumes in 1931, establishing him as a central figure of Hebrew literature.
Read the full story →During the Siege of Paris in 1870 and 1871, Sarah Bernhardt converted the Odéon theatre into a military hospital and nursed more than 150 wounded soldiers.
Read the full story →Sarah Bernhardt carried French theatre on tours across the Americas, Europe, Russia and Australia, and after losing a leg in 1915 still performed for soldiers near the front.
Read the full story →Saul Bellow returned to Chicago in 1962 and taught on the University of Chicago's Committee on Social Thought for more than 30 years.
Read the full story →In 1953 Saul Bellow translated Isaac Bashevis Singer's Yiddish story 'Gimpel the Fool' into English, helping introduce Singer to English-speaking readers.
Read the full story →In The Bloody Hoax, Sholem Aleichem told of two student friends who swap identities, so that the Christian student becomes the victim of a blood libel accusation.
Read the full story →Sholem Aleichem's last novel, Motl, Peysi the Cantor's Son, follows a boy not quite nine from a poor shtetl to a new life in New York. It was unfinished at his death in 1916.
Read the full story →Sholem Aleichem, often called 'the Jewish Mark Twain', created Tevye the Dairyman, whose stories became Fiddler on the Roof, performed from Broadway to Tokyo.
Read the full story →Written in exile in 1941, Stefan Zweig's Chess Story (Schachnovelle) became his most successful and most widely read work, inspiring several films.
Read the full story →Stefan Zweig's Sternstunden der Menschheit (1927), historical miniatures of turning points, appeared in English as The Tide of Fortune (1940) and as Shooting Stars (2013).
Read the full story →In exile from the Nazis, Stefan Zweig wrote biographies of Erasmus (1934) and of Sebastian Castellio, A Conscience Against Violence (1936), celebrating tolerance against fanaticism.
Read the full story →Stefan Zweig assembled a great collection of autograph manuscripts, including Mozart's handwritten catalogue of his works. His heirs donated it to the British Library in 1986.
Read the full story →After the First World War, Stefan Zweig became a pacifist who worked for understanding between European countries and lasting peace, long before European unity had institutions.
Read the full story →Stefan Zweig wrote the libretto for Richard Strauss's opera Die schweigsame Frau. At the 1935 Dresden premiere Strauss refused to remove Zweig's name from the programme.
Read the full story →Stefan Zweig's memoir The World of Yesterday, sent to his publisher in 1942, has been called the most famous book on the Habsburg Empire.
Read the full story →Mentored as a boy by Oscar Hammerstein II, Stephen Sondheim went on to reinvent the American musical, then founded Young Playwrights Inc. to teach the next generation.
Read the full story →Stephen Sondheim mentored the young composer Jonathan Larson, attending his workshops and giving him notes through the writing of Rent.
Read the full story →Stephen Sondheim's first Broadway credit was the lyrics for West Side Story (1957), written with Leonard Bernstein when Sondheim was just 27.
Read the full story →In 1981 Stephen Sondheim founded Young Playwrights Inc. to introduce young people to writing for the theatre.
Read the full story →Steven Spielberg, who made an early 8 mm Western to earn a Scout photography badge, helped the Boy Scouts of America create a cinematography merit badge, launched in 1989.
Read the full story →Steven Spielberg's 2012 film Lincoln dramatised the passage of the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery, and the National Archives honoured him for it in 2013.
Read the full story →Steven Spielberg made Saving Private Ryan as a tribute to the generation that fought in the Second World War, and in 1999 the Pentagon gave him its Distinguished Public Service Medal.
Read the full story →After Schindler's List, Steven Spielberg used his profits to found the Shoah Foundation in 1994; its archive now holds more than 60,000 testimonies, the world's largest.
Read the full story →Rejected for combat, Vasily Grossman became a correspondent for the Red Army newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda and spent more than 1,000 days at the front, from Moscow and Stalingrad to Berlin.
Read the full story →With Ilya Ehrenburg, Vasily Grossman helped compile The Black Book, a documentary record of the Nazi murder of Jews in the occupied Soviet Union.
Read the full story →In his late novel Everything Flows, Vasily Grossman condemned the Soviet state and wrote of peasants effectively sentenced to death by starvation, a classic testimony to the Holodomor.
Read the full story →After the KGB confiscated Life and Fate, Vasily Grossman wrote to Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, insisting he was 'requesting freedom for my book'.
Read the full story →After the KGB seized Life and Fate, copies kept by friends survived. Andrei Sakharov photographed pages and Vladimir Voinovich smuggled the film abroad; it was published in 1980.
Read the full story →Vasily Grossman's 1944 essay 'The Hell of Treblinka' was among the first accounts of a Nazi death camp and was used as prosecution evidence at the Nuremberg trials.
Read the full story →With his first collection in 1955, Yehuda Amichai became one of the first modern poets to write in colloquial Hebrew, turning prosaic subjects into poetic images.
Read the full story →Yehuda Amichai's 1963 novel Not of This Time, Not of This Place follows a young Israeli born in Germany, drawing on the poet's own life.
Read the full story →Yehuda Amichai's late book Open Closed Open won high praise from poet Anthony Hecht, who called it as deeply spiritual a poem as any he had read in modern times.
Read the full story →Many of Yehuda Amichai's poems have been set to music, by composers including Mohammed Fairouz and Benjamin Wallfisch.
Read the full story →Yehuda Amichai's poetry has been translated into some 40 languages, and Ted Hughes called him one of the most essential poetic voices of the century.
Read the full story →Yehuda Amichai taught literature at an Israeli teachers' seminary and to students from abroad at the Hebrew University, and was poet in residence at New York University in 1987.
Read the full story →Yehudi Menuhin co-founded Live Music Now in 1977 to bring live performances to care homes, hospitals and schools, and founded a school where gifted young musicians could train.
Read the full story →In July 1945 Yehudi Menuhin and Benjamin Britten gave concerts for survivors of the Nazi camps, and two years later Menuhin returned to Germany to play as an act of reconciliation.
Read the full story →“A friend is devoted at all times; a brother is born to share adversity.”