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MARY CONWAY is disappointed by a three-hander that broaches big themes, but doesn’t transcend dry academia
The Good Soldier Sam by Sam Berkovitz, with Simon Blumenfeld
Fascinating social history of a poverty-stricken East End of London by Sam Berkovitz
DAN GLAZEBROOK eavesdrops on the bourgeois intelligentsia and the stories it tells itself at this moment of crisis
JAN WOOLF is bowled over by a major retrospective for the YBA artist
LEO BOIX, ANGUS REID and MARIA DUARTE review Night Stage, Two Women, Kim Novak’s Vertigo, and Fuze
KATHRYN JOHNSON recommends the work of Norman Kaplan that was a tool in the struggle against apartheid in South Africa
GAVIN O’TOOLE welcomes a bold feminist subversion of classic folktales that are ubiquitous in the Irish imagination
THE GOOD Solider Sam is the memoir of the late Sam Berkovitz, who with the help of author and journalist Simon Blumenfeld — also now sadly deceased — tells a life story which begins in 1905 in Stepney, where he was born to Jewish immigrant parents from Romania.
He spent the majority of his life either in the poorly paid lower end of the tailoring trade or signing on the dole when work dried up. Living with his wife in the same humble flat for 60 years, even in relatively prosperous times they rarely had more than a few pounds to rub together.
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