Ghetto

We walk through the doors of the small black-box Studio 210, upstairs from the elegant main stage of the Boston University Theatre on Huntington Avenue, and we find ourselves in a hazy, dark nightclub called the Astoria Cafe. A mournful recorded clarinet plays '30s jazz as the lights go down. As they come up again, live musicians -- on piano, cello, another clarinet -- start to play. We don't know it yet, but the musicians are trapped here, as surely as if they were in prison or in hell.

A former top lawyer for the city of Detroit who lost her job for describing a local court as "ghetto" has lost an appeal over her dismissal. A federal appeals court says Friday that Kathleen Leavey's comments in 2009 were not protected under the First Amendment because they were made as part of her job. Leavey, who is white, has said she used the word "ghetto" in a conversation with a court employee to describe Detroit's 36th District Court...

WARSAW — Polish officials unveiled a new monument yesterday honoring the last group of Jewish insurgents to escape from Warsaw’s burning ghetto in 1943 as the Nazis crushed the revolt against their brutal rule. The bronze memorial shows a sewage canal rising vertically from the ground with disembodied hands symbolically climbing their way to freedom. It honors insurgents who escaped the ghetto to the city’s Aryan side through a stinking, dark, and claustrophobic sewage canal.

Charmingly Ghetto doesn't go to Boston University, which makes his decision to meet at the school's campus in Kenmore Square - at 1 p.m. on a Sunday no less, the time most students are still in bed recovering from the previous night - an unusual one. The usually packed sidewalks on Commonwealth Avenue are barren and the cold late-winter air quickly chills any exposed skin; CG, as his friends call him, pulls a long scarf tight around his neck...

In the Lodz ghetto in Poland, home to as many as 204,000 Jews during World War II, there were 170 doctors, as well as a few nurses and midwives, according to diaries and memoirs. Like all the others, the Jewish healers lived with the daily terror of being shipped off to a death camp. Still, they tended to their fellow inmates. There was almost no food, no medication, and certainly no X-ray machines, laboratories, or any of the other accoutrements that we think of as essential to medicine today.

A former top lawyer for the city of Detroit who lost her job for describing a local court as "ghetto" has lost an appeal over her dismissal. A federal appeals court says Friday that Kathleen Leavey's comments in 2009 were not protected under the First Amendment because they were made as part of her job. Leavey, who is white, has said she used the word "ghetto" in a conversation with a court employee to describe Detroit's 36th District Court...

MALIBU'S MOST WANTED *** (MAX on Comcast) When his son's outrageous hip-hop lifestyle threatens his campaign, a California gubernatorial hopeful agrees to have the boy kidnapped, shipped to the ghetto, and scared white. A surprisingly smart, inoffensive satire headed by comedian Jamie Kennedy as a brazen caricature of rich, non-black hip-hop fans. Anthony Anderson and Taye Diggs are excellent as actors-turned-kidnappers who have to teach themselves how to be ghetto. (PG-13; runs through Oct. 6)

Usually summer anthems are about open skies, easy living, and a sense of freedom. Not this year. This Senegalese-born singer/songwriter/producer has the buzz song right now with "Locked Up," an irresistible joint about doing hard time where "they won't let me out. " Over an insinuating piano refrain and echoing, clanging jail doors, the ex-con, Akon, tells a taut tale of the life inside with a novelist's eye. "Locked Up" and its companion "Trouble Nobody"...

From the first page of his Holocaust memoir, "Nine Suitcases," Bla Zsolt conveys a prevailing sense of disbelief about what is enfolding before his rheumy eyes. A prominent Hungarian writer in the first half of the 20th century, Zsolt saw his homeland turn swiftly against him. His wife saw her town become her captor. Hungarian Jews saw former friends and neighbors condoning their death sentences. This numbing disbelief extends to the reader: Despite the glut of Holocaust work, one cannot help but be taken aback at the scale of betrayal and inhumanity that...

HIBAT ZION, Israel -- It was a crime that unfolded on the sidelines of the Holocaust: Farmers in Nazi-occupied Poland killed six members of a well-to-do Jewish family for their possessions. And there the story might have stayed, swallowed up in the enormity of Hitler's genocide, had the owner of a biotechnology company in Israel not decided at age 57 to find out what happened to his grandmother Gitl and her five children. As Rony Lerner would discover, the wounds are still raw. In a Polish village, he confronted a 92-year-old man alleged to be the last...

THE EMPEROR OF LIES By Steve Sem-Sandberg Translated, from the Swedish, by Sarah Death Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 664 pp., $30 Most novelists would be happy to have Steve Sem-Sandberg's problem - too much great material - but it is a real problem. Three thousand pages of "The Ghetto Chronicle," compiled by Lodz ghetto archivists, and a vast amount of other material from the community were available for Sem-Sandberg to re-create the life of residents from 1942 to 1944.

MALIBU'S MOST WANTED *** (MAX on Comcast) When his son's outrageous hip-hop lifestyle threatens his campaign, a California gubernatorial hopeful agrees to have the boy kidnapped, shipped to the ghetto, and scared white. A surprisingly smart, inoffensive satire headed by comedian Jamie Kennedy as a brazen caricature of rich, non-black hip-hop fans. Anthony Anderson and Taye Diggs are excellent as actors-turned-kidnappers who have to teach themselves how to be ghetto. (PG-13; runs through Oct. 6)

After surviving a Nazi concentration camp as a boy and fleeing communist rule in his native Czechoslovakia, Michael Gruenbaum remembers well the first job he got upon immigrating to the United States and becoming a student at MIT. Gruenbaum was studying engineering at the Cambridge school in the early 1950s when he heard of an opening at MIT's Lewis Music Library, where he rushed to get an interview and landed the job. As an immigrant, Gruenbaum...

THE WARSAW ANAGRAMS By Richard Zimler Overlook, 323 pp., $25.95 Part murder mystery and part historical fiction, Richard Zimler’s latest novel, “The Warsaw Anagrams,’’ renews the impact of the large-scale atrocities committed by the Nazis on millions of Jews by comparing them to the specific and gruesome murder of a child. Jewish folklore, anagrams, deceit, and treachery all play a part in a novel that successfully makes personal a massacre whose scope is all too easy to diminish by quoting a mostly abstract number: 6 million.

WARSAW — Polish officials unveiled a new monument yesterday honoring the last group of Jewish insurgents to escape from Warsaw’s burning ghetto in 1943 as the Nazis crushed the revolt against their brutal rule. The bronze memorial shows a sewage canal rising vertically from the ground with disembodied hands symbolically climbing their way to freedom. It honors insurgents who escaped the ghetto to the city’s Aryan side through a stinking, dark, and claustrophobic sewage canal.

WARSAW - Marek Edelman, the last surviving leader of the ill-fated 1943 Warsaw ghetto revolt against the Nazis, died yesterday at the age of 90. Dr. Edelman died of old age at the family home of his friend Paula Sawicka, where he had lived for the past two years. Most of Dr. Edelman’s adult life was dedicated to the defense of human life, dignity, and freedom. He fought the Nazis in the doomed Warsaw ghetto revolt and later in the Warsaw city Uprising. And then for decades he fought communism in Poland.

Blows to the head are delivered with more subtlety than the message of "Diary of a Mad Black Woman. " But the movie seems intended as a blunt instrument, so its lack of finesse is very much the point: Certain women (and you know who you are) need a wake-up call to free them from the grip of a dead relationship. "Diary" is part broad comedy, part domestic drama, part extended R&B slowjam, and total audience-tickler, with a lot of church and even more soap opera thrown in. It leaves no mood unswung as it shares with us the feel-bad-then-feel-really-good story of Helen McCarter, whom Kimberly Elise...

JERUSALEM -- The diary of a 14-year-old Jewish girl, dubbed the "Polish Anne Frank," was unveiled yesterday by Israel's Holocaust museum more than 60 years after the teenager vividly described the world crumbling around her as she came of age in a Jewish ghetto. "The rope around us is getting tighter and tighter," Rutka Laskier wrote in 1943, shortly before she was deported to Auschwitz. "I'm turning into an animal waiting to die. " Within a few months Rutka was dead and, it seemed, her diary lost.

In the Lodz ghetto in Poland, home to as many as 204,000 Jews during World War II, there were 170 doctors, as well as a few nurses and midwives, according to diaries and memoirs. Like all the others, the Jewish healers lived with the daily terror of being shipped off to a death camp. Still, they tended to their fellow inmates. There was almost no food, no medication, and certainly no X-ray machines, laboratories, or any of the other accoutrements that we think of as essential to medicine today.

NEW YORK - Patti LaBelle may be sitting on the top floor of Sony's midtown headquarters, meticulously dressed in a Michael Boris suit with Christian Louboutin pumps, looking out on the magnificent view, but she says there is always something to remind her of her roots. "I thought I was going to die," she says, with a laugh, recalling the 98-degree heat last month. "We came from Philadelphia in a limo where the air turned into a heater. It was a ghetto limo that was broke-down.