FAMILY LETTERS

Author Edith Kurzweil, a former editor of the Partisan Review, spoke at the Center for Jewish History on Tuesday about her book “Nazi Laws and Jewish Lives: Letters from Vienna” (Transaction Publishers). The program was introduced by the executive director of YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, Carl J. Rheins. YIVO and the Leo Baeck Institute co-hosted the event.

Ms. Kurzweil read from her mother and grandmother’s heart-rending correspondence between April 1940 and November 1941, when her grandmother, Malvina Fischer, was deported by the Nazis. Ms. Kurzweil later found out that her grandmother was shot after having been forced to dig her own grave.

The letters had to pass censors. “My mother and her mother had a code language,” Ms. Kurzweil said. “Sickness” indicated the Nazis, and “vacation” referred to internment.

Details of everyday life during the war were mentioned during the talk: Shipping agents gave her family the runaround, and 11 people lived together in a single apartment, including an elderly man with two daughters who argued with each other.

The discussion expanded to connect Nazi laws to their implications for Jews’ daily schedules. Ms. Kurzweil said that the Nazis “regulated even the most intimate details” and systematically drove ghettoization forward. For example, she said, Jews could only shop between 4 and 5 p.m. when store shelves were often empty. One can begin to understand, she said, how the Nazis penetrated and intervened in the private lives of individuals.

Ms. Kurzweil herself escaped on a children’s transport.

Following the author, a professor of modern Jewish history at New York University, Marion Kaplan, discussed what Ms. Kurzweil’s book added to the historical record. Among Holocaust publications, “Nazi Laws and Jewish Lives” is rare because there are few published letters from Vienna in English. Also uncommon is the skillful way that Ms. Kurzweil linked the correspondence to Nazi law.

The professor went on to note that the letters show that even after Kristallnacht, the writing was not on the wall regarding the impending destruction of the Jews. “It’s always with hindsight that we can see so clearly.” Ms. Kaplan said that many older Jews believed that they would “live in a reduced state and the children will get out.”

Ms. Kaplan said the book showed how those under Nazi rule suffered ever-increasing social isolation. With a lack of transportation and strict curfews, she said, “The circle becomes smaller.”

***

MACABRE MINIATURES

At the Accompanied Library on Gramercy Park this week, photographer Corinne May Botz spoke about her book “The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death” (Monacelli).

The book tells the tale of a wealthy grandmother named Frances Glessner Lee, who founded the Department of Legal Medicine at Harvard in 1936.

Lee constructed 18 intricate dollhouse crime scenes based on true cases, then used them to teach law enforcement officials how to observe physical clues while investigating crimes. The dollhouses are now located at the Baltimore Medical Examiner’s Office.

The miniatures are meticulous: Grains of sugar lay on the floor, window shades move, and a coffeepot sits with a strainer, complete with coffee grounds. Each doll wears undergarments. In one room, a Cracker Jack prize became a girl’s rocking horse. Faces were painted according to how long the person on whom the dolls were modeled had been dead.

Ms. Botz said the carpenter who assisted Lee “equated the length of time he spent building a single model as equivalent to that required to build a house.” Lee believed that if policemen could spot imperfections, they would question the credibility of the re-enactment. Drawing on philosopher Gaston Bachelard, Ms. Botz said Lee knew the viewers must “experience what is large in what is small.”

Ms. Botz described how burly policemen gathered as Lee played “mother hen.”

Lee’s childhood home in Chicago was made of granite and designed by Henry Hobson Richardson. Some critics called it a fort or a jail, Ms. Botz said, who described neighbor George Pullman’s angry reaction: “I don’t know what I have ever done to have that thing staring me in the face every time I go out my door.”

***

THE UNCANNY

The mass murder of 6 million people is of a wholly different order than the reproduction of 18 deadly crime scenes. But both books gave the Knickerbocker a chilling feeling of what Nicholas Royle, in the introduction to his book “The Uncanny” (Routledge), describes as a frightening revelation of something “unhomely at the heart of hearth and home.” Mr. Royle says the uncanny entails a “critical disturbance in what is proper” and a particular commingling of the familiar and unfamiliar. He says it involves feelings of “uncertainty regarding who one is and what is being experienced.”