Close to 10,000 Jews settled in
Texas. Stalin created a "Jewish Homeland" in Birobidjan. Even the
Nazis tried to revive some of these "solutions to the Jewish
question" - notably in Lublin, Poland and in the island of Madagascar.
http://www.us-israel.org/jsource/Zionism/Uganda.html
http://www.jewishamerica.com/ja/timeline/zionism.cfm
Verdi, Giuseppe
Like Puccini, the career of Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1901) did not start
auspiciously.
Coming from a tiny hamlet and the son of an innkeeper and farmer, he
was snootily rejected by the Milan Conservatory due to his "advanced
age" and "poor playing of the piano". He, thus, had to take private
lessons from the Milanese composer, Vincenzo Lavigna. His second
opera, King for a Day, was a flop. When his wife and two children
died, he gave up composing altogether.
Luckily, the director of La Scala, the Milanese opera house, succeeded
to convince him to rescind his vow. The result was Nabucco (1842). The
opera was so adored that it was still playing in Buenos Aires and St.
Petersburg a decade later.
As opposed to nostalgic re-writing of history, not least by Verdi
himself, the fact is that the opera's subject matter - the Babylonian
captivity of the Jews - was not meant to allude to the subjugation of
the Italian people to Austrian rule.
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