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Jewish Agricultural Colonies in Ukraine - my family
One of the unanswered questions in my family’s history was why so many Jews left Lithuania and moved to Ukraine in 1880-1925. Ukraine certainly had richer agriculture and a more tolerable climate, but...
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US soldier Eddie Leonski's murder spree - in wartime Australia (1942)
Edward Joseph Leonski (1917–1942) was the 6th child in a Polish-American family in New Jersey. Leonski grew up with a manic depressive mother and an alcoholic father, two brothers with prison records...
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Night Train to Lisbon
Night Train to Lisbon is a 2013 drama film directed by Bille August and starring Jeremy Irons as Raimund Gregorius. Based on the German novel Night Train to Lisbon by Pascal Mercier, the film is about...
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Helen Duncan - the last witch gaoled in Britain (1944)?
Witch hunts reached their peak in Britain (and other Protestant countries) in the 17th century, when the church viewed witches as women who worked in conjunction with the devil in order to harm decent...
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Abraham and David Roentgen, 18th century furniture designers
Many modern furniture fans would not have known the name Roentgen, had it not been for New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. 60 gorgeous examples of Roentgens luxury furniture were lent from European...
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Elmyr de Hory - best art forger ever?
Jonathon Keats wrote about famous art forgeries with the rather provocative title Forged: Why Fakes are the Great Art of Our Age (published by Oxford UP 2013). He noted that the Fauvism of Derain and...
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Narrative history in mural art - USA and Australia (Tasmania)
The Great Depression of the 1930s was hideous for millions of unemployed workers across the world. Returned servicemen, who had given their all to the war effort in 1914-18, believed that home would be...
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Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Oscar Slater and a lack of British justice
Oscar Joseph Slater (1872–1948) was born Oscar Leschziner in Germany, changing his name when he moved to London in the early 1890s, where he worked as a bookmaker. Within a couple of years Slater was...
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Canada: a History of the Jews in Newfoundland and Labrador
Theodor Herzl, World Zionist Council president, sought support from the world’s great powers for the creation of a Jewish homeland. At the Sixth Zionist Congress at Basel in 1903, it seemed as if it...
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19th century Orientalist paintings
European scholars, soldiers, administrators and tourists were flooding into Egypt, Turkey and other exotic countries in large numbers during the 19th century. So we can expect that they would want to...
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Covent Garden Market - before and after
Spitalfields Life blog was discussing the markets of Old London and noted that only Smithfield, London’s oldest wholesale market, continues trading from the same building. Leather Lane, Hoxton Market...
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French Riviera Art Trail - early 20th century
Aix en Provence’s most famous resident was Paul Cezanne (1839-1906) who was born and died in that city. So I was not surprised when the post “Cezanne and Zola's favourite brasserie ...in Aix” was read...
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Had Florence Nightingale ever been a nurse, pre-Crimea?
As I noted in an earlier post, William and Frances Nightingale, both from committed Unitarian families, married in 1818 and went on a long European tour. Their daughters Frances Parthenope and...
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Garden bridge over the Thames
The revival of the Thames’ South Bank over the past two decades has created a vibrant and artistic district attracting large number of visitors to its art galleries, theatres, music halls, restaurants...
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Classical concerts in a Nazi camp
A short film has just come out in time for the Jewish Film Festival called The Lady in Number 6. The summary was follows. “This is a film about the remarkable Alice Herz-Sommer, a renowned concert...
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Paris and Baron Haussmann: what happened to the city's gorgeous arcades?
I love Paris’ gorgeous shopping arcades, built in the late 18th century. But I couldn’t understand why so few survived.Here is an article written by Spud Hilton and published in the San Francisco...
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sculpture - the Divine Sarah Bernhardt
There was a great to know about the French actress Sarah Bernhardt (1844–1923). Consider her: 1. rather tragic childhood with an unknown father and her half absent mother2. being sent to a Catholic...
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The arrogance of wealth - no justice in a USA court
Aspiring singer Blanche Chesebrough had talent and beauty, but no money, so marriage to handsome Roland Molineux might have solved her problems. Son of a politically powerful New York family, Roland...
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Marvellous Melbourne and temperance palaces
I have read Home Away From Home: celebrating 125 years of the Victoria Hotel (2007) by Katherine Sheedy. Marvellous Melbourne had gone through a period of amazing growth, based in significant part on...
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John Monash - Australia's Greatest Living Citizen 1918-1931
My father, an engineer who studied at Melbourne University in the late 1930s, is 91. I asked him to select his greatest hero and it was a no-brainer: John Monash the engineer.Well before the war, John...
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