Most of Melita’s family perished in the Holocaust. She began to exhibit her work in 1991, when her family was once again destroyed by war, this time in ex-Yugoslavia. To survive reality, she created another world for herself where the story of her family could continue. Her paintings represent chapters of the story of her life. The painting that describes it best is ‘The Dybbuk” inspired by the play “Between the Two Worlds” by S. Ansky, which tells a story of fated love. Dybbuk, a wandering soul of a dead person who could enter and possess the body of a living person, was a popular figure in Jewish folklore in Central and Eastern Europe.
Melita Kraus was born in a non-observant Jewish family in Croatia in 1954. Most of her family perished in the Holocaust. While she was growing up, her family didn’t practice any Jewish rituals, nor was there any talk about them. Today, she uses her art as a way of honoring her family and all the victims of the Holocaust.
Boris Khersonsky and Ludmila Khersonsky write poetry that speaks to the crisis of our time, when refugees run from bombardments, and nonstop propaganda flows from TV. The setting is Ukraine at the start of the twenty-first century, but it is eerily recognizable anywhere.
A new book of poems by New York poet and essayist Sergei Shabalin. In Russian.
Sailor, artist, lawyer, and writer, Dmitri Bystrolyotov was one of a team of Soviet spies operating in the West between the World Wars. He seduced women to learn great secrets of foreign states, but was then arrested and tortured in the Gulag, where he began to document the crimes against humanity of the regime he had served.
This book features biographies of the author’s family members, detailing with the effect of the war on their lives.
