Ghetto

Washington. -- The remarkable Chambers brothers rose from grinding poverty in the Arkansas delta to running a retail trade earning $1 million a week in Detroit.This was in the mid-1980s, when the automobile industry was shrinking and the city was losing a quarter of a million jobs and a fifth of its population. The four brothers' enterprise had revenues larger than any other privately held business in the city.This story of ghetto capitalism is told in a virtuoso exercise in reporting, William M. Adler's new book ''Land of Opportunity.

Renee Washington says she's not asking for special treatment from City Hall. The 58-year-old paraplegic just wants to make sure she and her neighbors are reimbursed for the stoves and water heaters damaged during a Valentine's Day gas main break that caused water to rush into their appliances. "We want to make hot meals for our families," says Washington, a resident of the Southwest Baltimore neighborhood of Mill Hill, who is attempting to organize her neighbors to action. "We want to take hot showers and baths.

Being poor, the author George Orwell observed, is "extraordinarily complicated." And if you're poor in Baltimore, it's also extraordinarily expensive. Families in lower-income neighborhoods pay more for the same car and home insurance, the same appliances, furniture, food and loans than do their wealthier counterparts living in other parts of the city. In the absence of large retail stores, banks and credit unions and, in many cases, the capability of online comparison shopping, consumers in poor communities pay top dollar.

Agnieszka Holland's Holocaust movies, like "Angry Harvest" and "Europa Europa," are a world away from concentration camp tear-jerkers like Robert Benigni's Oscar-winning smash "Life Is Beautiful. " Holland's films are uninhibited and sexual, gutsy and tough-minded. With "In Darkness" (opening at the Charles on Friday) she tells the fact-based story of Jews who survived the Nazi onslaught by hiding underground in sewers. Set in large part beneath the Polish city of Lvov, this movie is an unremitting heart-stopper.

Greek Orthodox priests and lay leaders meeting in Baltimore were urged yesterday to reject the idea that theirs is an exclusively Greek-American "ghetto church" and to set their sights instead on a lofty goal worthy of Christianity -- "the world transformed."The Rev. Constantine Sitaras cautioned the delegates from 51 parishes in New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland and Virginia that, as God's chosen people, they may not shrink from this mission, daunting as it is."We are not a ghetto church! Why do we act like one?"

WARSAW, Poland -- Even with the thousands gathered for the 50th anniversary of the Ghetto Uprising, there were still more Jews among the dead in Warsaw than among the living.And the living stood among the dead yesterday as a new monument to the children killed in the Holocaust was unveiled in the city's old, battered and disheveled Jewish cemetery.Clustered just inside the gate of the cemetery were perhaps 2,000 of the 6,000 or so people who have come here to celebrate the civilian heroes who offered the strongest Jewish resistance to Nazi forces.

IN HER FIRST film, "Love Your Mama," Chicago filmmaker Ruby Oliver tracked a family's struggles against the riptides of poverty -- a project that relied more upon the drama of her own life than her film school courses.The Baltimore Film Forum and Women in Film and Video of Maryland and D.C. will host the film's Baltimore premiere at 7:30 p.m. tomorrow at the Baltimore Museum of Art. General admission is $6 and $5 for seniors, students and members of the film forum, the museum or WIFV. Oliver will speak before and after the screening.

Roland Gilbert, a one-time malcontent and gang member turned top student, mentor and author, says he has "the ghetto solution."It relies on people returning to the basics, to what he calls Afro-centric values: spirituality, faith and self-knowledge. It also relies on mentors working continuously with the same youngsters for the 12 years they are in school.The commitment is long but necessary, said Mr. Gilbert, who made his pitch yesterday to more than 150 people at West Baltimore's Bethel A.M.E.

Killer of Sheep is a miracle movie because it's receiving its first theatrical release 30 years after it was made and because, as a movie, it's miraculous. What makes Charles Burnett's vibrant depiction of life in L.A.'s Watts ghetto so universal is that it carries the emotional translucence of childhood into a raw adulthood. Killer of Sheep (Milestone) Starring Henry Gayle Sanders, Kaycee Moore, Charles Bracy, Angela Burnett. Directed by Charles Burnett. Unrated. Time 80 minutes.

WASHINGTON -- As the Germans began the final destruction of the Jewish ghetto in Kovno, Lithuania, during 1944, 11-year-old Helen Yermus helplessly watched SS soldiers lead her 7-year-old brother away. With one last, fearful glance at his sister, the little boy walked off with his executioners and disappeared forever.Toward the end of a new exhibit on the Kovno ghetto at the U.S. Holocaust Museum, Yermus' quavering, adult voice can be heard lamenting her lost brother, whom she fears will soon vanish even from memory.

A Glen Burnie Democrat said Wednesday he plans to run for the District 2 seat on the Anne Arundel County Council in order to bring some civility back to the body which has been dogged in recent weeks by a series of contentious meetings to choose a replacement for a vacancy on the council. Ian Patrick “Pat” Hines, a state employee, said he has filed a “statement of organization” that allowed him to form a fundraising committee to run in 2014 for the seat currently held by Councilman John J. Grasso, a Glen Burnie Republican.

Rothschilds' story Actor Bernie Dean will perform a one-person rendition of the Broadway musical "The Rothschilds" Sun., June 12, 6 p.m., at the Beth Shalom Congregation at 8070 Harriet Tubman Lane, in Columbia. The Tony Award-winning show tells the story of the Rothschild family, which went from Jewish ghetto poverty to wealth and power. A dessert reception will follow the performance. Admission is $20, $36 per couple and $10 for teens. Babysitting will be available.

Liliana C. "Lilly" Shepard, a Holocaust survivor who chronicled her experiences being trapped in the Warsaw Ghetto with other Jews in a 1980 book, died April 7 of cancer at Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center. The longtime Ellicott City resident was 85. The daughter of an engineer and a homemaker, Liliana Cukier was born and raised in Kalisz, Poland. Her formal education ended when the Nazis invaded her homeland in 1939. "Then came September 1, 1939, the date Poland and the world will never forget.

A couple years ago, African-American artist Loring Cornish was focusing his creativity on works that addressed the civil rights movement. When a Jewish couple, Ellen and Paul Saval, bought some other pieces of his, Cornish went to their home to hang the art. By the time he was finished, "something came over me," he said. "I don't what it was. But I realized then that I had to include the struggles of the Jewish people in my work about the African-American experience. I went home, flipped over the 8-by-8(-foot)

You've heard of resume' inflation? You've heard of people who lie about having Ph.D.s or Ivy League pedigrees in order to get ahead? The world of thug culture has its own perverse equivalent, in which middle-class men with minor legal transgressions exaggerate their bad behavior, claiming to be hard-core degenerates in order to impress youngsters looking for outlaw role models. In this destructive environment, the more violent and predatory you are, the more heroic you seem. That helps to explain why a hip-hop star known as Akon wove a tall tale of malevolence and criminal activity, claiming to have spent three years in prison for running a "notorious car theft operation," a story he's been telling for years.

It's difficult to know how to properly hyphenate the prolific Al Letson Jr. Is he a playwright-actor? A film director-radio writer? A poet-social activist? No matter. Letson enjoys creating unusual juxtapositions. For instance, his play, Julius X, which previously was performed at Baltimore's Theatre Project, melds the stories of Roman emperor Julius Caesar with slain civil rights leader Malcolm X. Another work, Griot: He Who Speaks the Sweet Word, has been described as "a hip-hop choreopoematic play."

On Vyse Avenue in the South Bronx, a woman enters an abandoned building to go to a crack house in the basement. The entrance is surmounted by stone decoration -- attached columns, a shield, scrolls -- that will never be equaled on buildings constructed today.In Newark, a boy climbs an apartment building stairway that looks like a dungeon -- no windows, no visible source of outside light. In Chicago, another boy looks through an iron grate outside a 16th-floor apartment of a housing project.

"Use words," a concerned librarian repeatedly advises Alexis, the young protagonist in Dael Orlandersmith's multi-character one-woman show, "The Gimmick." "Don't waste them." Alexis doesn't -- and neither does Orlandersmith. In interviews, the playwright/performer has emphasized that "The Gimmick" is not autobiographical. Yet there are unmistakable biographical similarities: Like Alexis, Orlandersmith was raised in Harlem and grew up to be a writer. This forceful, affecting and ultimately affirmative show -- currently on view in Center Stage's Head Theater -- proves how powerfully she learned to "use words."

NAIROBI, Kenya -- At the edge of a Nairobi neighborhood called the Ghetto, there is a bridge across a gray, stinking creek, on a street called Mother Teresa Road. The creek has become a frontier between two worlds, and the bridge the border crossing. Yesterday, under the protection of paramilitary police, people shuttled from one side to another, carrying furniture, bedding, bags and pots as they steadily divided themselves by tribe. On one side of the bridge, in the Ghetto, no Luos can live.