Scholastique Mukasonga, translated by Emma Ramadan
Forever Elsewhere

In keeping with the inalienable rights of the Storyteller, allow me to invent a different fall from grace.

J. Hoberman
Polish Compassion

Green Border is the filmmaker Agnieszka Holland’s latest confrontation with her country’s brutal history.

Rachel Donadio
Meloni’s Cultural Revolution

“Was fascism back? Was Italy drifting away from France and Germany and closer to Poland and Hungary? Was Meloni’s us-versus-them rhetoric hot air or did it have a real impact? Was Italy a harbinger of the future or a throwback to the past? How worried should we be?”

Isabella Hammad
Acts of Language

“This focus on the speech used tο support Palestinian rights does more than obscure the context in which protesters are speaking; it also obscures the reality about which they speak…. The context here is a quantity of ammunition dropped on Gaza that is equivalent to more than three times that of the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima. A high proportion of those bombs were US-made and supplied. Those bombs were not made of language, and they certainly were not metaphors.”

Free from the Archives

Today would have been Lillian Hellman’s 119th birthday. She was an early contributor to the Review, beginning in our fourth issue with a report from a theater festival in Scotland (“The beautiful city of Edinburgh…was washed with rain during the entire week of the International Drama Conference. God was right”), and continuing in 1965, with a remembrance of Dashiell Hammett, who had been her partner for thirty years, until his death in 1961.

Hellman’s next and final contribution to our pages came eight years later, when she wrote a forthright, bawdy, and unsentimental memoir of playwriting, success, and failure, taking readers from her time hosting college students at the house she shared with Hammett in Princeton (“they were a dull generation, but Dash never much examined the people to whom he was talking if he was drunk enough to talk at all”) to her experience casting Tallulah Bankhead in The Little Foxes (“I still have a diary entry, written a few days later, asking myself whether talk about the size of the male organ isn’t a homosexual preoccupation…. Almost certainly Tallulah didn’t care about the size or the function: it was the stylish, épater palaver of her day.”)

Lillian Hellman
Flipping for a Diamond

“It is hard for me to believe, these many years later…in the guilt I felt for the failure of Days to Come. The threads of those threads have lasted to this day. Guilt is often an excuse for not thinking and maybe that’s what happened to me. In any case, it was to be two years before I could write another play, The Little Foxes, and when I did get to it I was so scared that I wrote it nine times.”

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