In the late 1930s, the world was on the brink of war. In 2024, Alexis Pogorelskin is well aware that the threat has returned.

Her book Hollywood and the Nazis on the Eve of War: The Case of The Mortal Storm details the events preceding World War II. It was released in August by Bloomsbury Press.

Pogorelskin is a decades-long resident of Duluth and professor emerita in the department of history at the University of Minnesota Duluth. She taught the history of Hollywood at the Russian State University for the Humanities while on a Fulbright in Moscow and was a Rhodes Visiting Fellow at St. Hilda’s College in Oxford, UK.

In 2015, she was the first Vera Brittain Scholar on Women and War at the University of Southampton, UK. That year she traveled to Ukraine and Poland and saw where the events of the Holocaust took place.

“To see what was left of Jewish life was painful,” Pogorelskin said. “However, it was also striking. The buildings and the monuments were very much alive.”

Pogorelskin is a devotee of Hollywood films and especially interested in historical films from the World War II era. She has traveled and worked extensively throughout Russia and Europe. Her background led her to The Mortal Storm, a 1940 film that was the only movie at the time to tackle the treatment of the Jews in Nazi Germany. It caused a commotion in the film world. Sidney Buchman, the great scriptwriter of Hollywood’s golden age, grew up in Minnesota and figures prominently in the book.

Two free screenings of the film are coming up in Duluth. The first is on Thursday, Oct. 24, at Zeitgeist Zinema, 222 E. Superior St. The second is on Tuesday, Dec. 3, in the Duluth Public Library Green Room, 520 W. Superior St.

Both events begin with the film at 5 p.m. and a reception and short discussion following at 7 p.m.