Vox Tablet

A short-story collection that revolves around the Holocaust is a tough sell. Make it colorful, or optimistic, and it’s pure fairytale. Dwell on the ugliness, the death and depravity, and it becomes perverse–or simply unbearable. Besides, what is there left to say?

Then along comes In the Land of Armadillos, by Helen Maryles Shankman, a New Jersey-based writer and painter. The eight stories in the collection are interwoven, and all but one take place in or around the remote Polish town of Wlodawa. Shankman shows us a world in which German officers, Poles, and Jews regularly cross paths. It’s a...

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When we think of Groucho Marx, we think of a giant of comedy. From his cigar to his wisecracks, Groucho, along with his brothers, established the fundamentals of American comedy. Indeed, it was he who first said he’d want no part of a club that would have him as a member—a notion made famous by a Brooklyn-bred heir named Woody Allen.

As critic Lee Siegel argues in Groucho Marx: The Comedy of Existence, Marx’s humor was predicated on disdain toward others—he was hardly a cuddly character, or a champion of the downtrodden, as critics and fans alike have painted him. Groucho and his brothers were all about disrupting social norms and...

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As Christmas 1963 approaches, a statue of the baby Jesus goes missing from the town manger in Skokie, Illinois. Its theft causes great distress to nearly everyone, including 9-year-old, flaxen-haired Suzie Louise Anderson. In the hopes of becoming her hero and solidifying their love, Suzie Louise’s young boyfriend, a Jew, cobbles together a posse to try to recover the stolen figure, and to restore joy and peace to the girl’s life.

Read by Ken Marks, ‘For the Love of Suzie Louise’ is adapted from the novel My Surburban Shtetl, by Robert Rand. Sound design is by Jonathan Groubert.

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The antithesis of nearly every Holocaust movie ever made, the Hungarian film Son of Saul is slim on happy endings. Directed by László Nemes, it tells the story of a member of the Sonderkommando, the Jews who ushered their co-religionists off the trains into the showers and who, after the gassings, cleared those showers out to ready them for the next batch of victims. Saul, portrayed by Géza Röhrig, is shaken out of his numbness and despair by the body of a child who survives the gassing and suddenly, amid the true-life rebellion of the Sonderkommando in October 1944, engages in his own form of resistance.

With a camera that rarely takes...

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The steady stream of people currently fleeing Syria for Europe is a sobering sight, but it’s not a new one. The plight of refugees all over the world is age-old. Cynthia Kaplan Shamash was a child refugee in 1972, when her family—among Iraq’s last Jews—tried to flee their homeland. Their first attempt was thwarted, and the family landed in jail. A second attempt was a success; Cynthia is now a dentist in the United States, but the family’s itinerancy came with great personal losses.

In The Strangers We Became: Lessons in Exile From One of Iraq’s Last Jews, Shamash details her family’s exile from Iraq to Israel to the Netherlands. She joins Vox...

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Mimi Stillman is a world-renowned flutist heralded by the New York Times as “a consummate and charismatic performer.” Stillman is the founder and artistic director of the Dolce Suono Ensemble, a Philadelphia-based chamber group. Also a historian, she brings both interests—history and music—to bear on her latest release, an album called Freedom.

Freedom features compositions by Richard Danielpour, David Finko, and the late

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Best known for his seven-volume masterpiece A La Recherche du Temps Perdu (In Search of Lost Time), French writer Marcel Proust is considered to be one of the finest novelists of the 20th century. Though born into upper-class society—his Catholic father was a doctor and his Jewish mother came from a well-known Jewish family—Proust did not show much ambition or aptitude as a young man. Indeed, he was a dilettante and man about town who spent his time having love affairs and squandering an inheritance.

As biographer Benjamin Taylor makes clear in Proust: The Search, all...

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The name Guggenheim is synonymous with modern art. That's thanks to Solomon Guggenheim and his famous museum on Fifth Avenue in New York City. Credit also goes to his niece Peggy, who championed icons like Jackson Pollock and Wassily Kandinsky and established influential galleries in New York, London, and Venice, where she eventually settled. Guggenheim also lived a unique personal life; she was twice married—once to the painter Max Ernst—and claimed in her memoirs to have had a thousand lovers, including Samuel Beckett.

How did she become a key figure in the modern art landscape? What personal demons did fight along the way? What is her legacy? These are questions writer Francine Prose tackles in...

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