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George Grosz was a "German American expressionist painter and illustrator. Born in Berlin, he studied art at the Royal Academy, Dresden, the Kunstgewerbemuseum, Berlin, and the Academie Colarossi, Paris, and served in the army in World War I (1914-1918)."

Reading Sholem Aleichem’s writing serves a dual purpose. First, it exposes us to the life and culture of Jews in a particular time and place—eastern Europe at the turn of the twentieth century. Second, it allows us to connect history to our own lives, as any encounter with great literature does. Of course, recognizing connections between oneself and the life of someone who lived a century ago is a difficult task, especially considering that the particular world Sholem Aleichem wrote about is gone—transformed by modernization, and then eventually destroyed by the Holocaust. However, literature—because of its suggestive power—can serve as a bridge to the past.

Introduce your students to the life and work of German satirist Kurt Tucholsky, which was active during the Weimar era.

These three lessons are centered on excerpts from the documentary film Sholem Aleichem: Laughing in the Darkness by Joseph Dorman. The film looks at Sholem Aleichem’s life and the culture of the shtetl through several of his short stories, among them "On Account of a