Mila Kunis. (Getty Images)

Sometimes there are so much information about the world, it's hard to keep it all in your head. How many municipalities does Greenland have? Who owns the Canary Islands? Do we know anything about Madagascar except for cars and that animated movie with comedian Chris Rock?

So we can forgive you for forgetting that Ukraine has been beseiged in its parliament by the All-Ukrainian Union "Svoboda" movement, a nationalist uber-right-wing Slytherin-esque party that is really interested in bloodlines and keeping up the traditions of the neo-Nazis. For the past several years, Svoboda has been gaining momentum with its anti-Russian sentiment, gaining 12 percent of the national vote in the last election cycle.

Which is all terrible, but you know, the anti-Semitic Svoboda party has been rising to power for some time. Why do we suddenly care?

We care because they started attacking on our own territory. We care, in short, because one of their leaders started going after Mila Kunis.

From the news website Algemeiner:

A Member of the Ukrainian Parliament from the far-right Svoboda Party ... sneeringly proclaimed that [Kunis] was not Ukrainian but a zhydovka. This deeply hurtful slur for a Jew was an alarming gutter effort to inject Jew-hatred into the acceptable bounds of mainstream Ukrainian discourse.

But this story gets weirder. Because it turns out that the Ukrainian lawmaker who made these comments, Igor Miroshnichenko, did so not in Parliament but on his Facebook wall. Which is shitty, but still kind of like ... come on guys. Are you just looking to fight with Ashton Kutcher?

The most disturbing aspect of the story was the reaction from the Ukrainian ministry, which claimed that there is nothing wrong with calling Kunis the female version of a "dirty Jew," because the word is in their dictionary. Which you know, maybe change your dictionary? Or not! We have tons of terrible words in our dictionary, but we don't allow politicians to bandy them about on social networking sites without consequences.

See: the question here is whether the words in question express hate and bigotry and were used in that context, not whether they are in a book of words that exist.

And the fact that the ministry is allowing this sort of rhetoric from its parliament members and justifying the hate speech is the most telling piece of information in this whole story.

Well, that and the fact that Mila Kunis is apparently Jewish. Who knew? Also, from Googling, we just found out she and Ashton might be moving to London, which we believe is nearer to the Ukraine than America is, so be careful out there, Ms. Kunis!

And in the future, the market may get even tighter for buying-crazed billionaires, with a new crop of Russians and Ukrainians eager to snap up trophy properties, a new CNBC video warns.

The number of billionaires in Russia and the Ukraine has more than tripled in recent years, according to the the video (which the Real Deal first spotted), and these novyi riche hate putting their money in banks. Just look at Dmitri Robolovlev, who sank $88 million into a pad at 15 CPW.

"We starting not just to see an increase in transactions, but an increase in the size of the transactions," real estate attorney Edward Mermelstein told CNBC.

Russian Billionaire Alexander Rovt, who recently purchased an office building at 14 Wall Street for $303 million in cash explains his philosophy.

"I'm always winning on the stock market. I'm always winning. Know why? Because I never played," Mr. Rovt told CNBC smugly. Don't keep it in the bank, he advised, invest in real estate.

Great advice if you're a billionaire buying in Manhattan. Less good for the average American, at least if the housing market crash was any indication.

kvelsey@observer.com

David Elliot, director of the first International Biennale of Contemporary Art in the Ukraine.

The proliferation of international art biennials continues. Culture officials in Ukraine announced that the nation will debut a biennial in Kiev, Ukraine, in May of next year. Leaders have selected a seasoned curator, David Elliot, who organized last year's Sydney Biennale, as artistic director of the event, which will be held in the capital city's National Culture and Art Museum Complex.

"Due to the first Kyiv Biennale," Ukrainian minister of culture Mykhailo Kulyniak said in a statement, "Ukraine will present its new image to the international art community—an image of the country for the 21st century."

Like leaders in New Orleans, Singapore, Athens and Bucharest, which have all launched biennials over the past decade, Ukrainian leaders are trying to reshape their international profile at the same time that they work to bolster tourism.

Mr. Elliot previously directed the first Istanbul Biennale and served as founding director of the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo and director of the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Sweden. He has picked an epic and foreboding title for his Kiev debut: "The Best of Times, The Worst of Times, Rebirth and Apocalypse in Contemporary Art."

In a statement, Mr. Elliot said that he would "offer a new vision of the country and its art, which can be quite valuable for the development of the global artistic context."

"Coming from Germany where there's so much modern stuff happening," she said in gently accented English, her dark, wavy hair framing her face and falling over a T-shirt emblazoned with a big pink flamingo, "and seeing something so realistic, it takes me back to when I was a little girl going to the opera and just totally mesmerized by it. I remember coming to Lincoln Center when I was in high school, and this was like a different planet for me. Like, 'People sing here? They're so lucky.' And here I am."

The 31-year-old soprano is at City Opera rehearsing the role of Adina in Donizetti's classic comedy The Elixir of Love, which opens March 22. It's her return to the company after her triumph in Christopher Alden's production of Don Giovanni in 2009.

In that stylized production, the polar opposite of the lush Zeffirelli Bohème, Ms. Dovhan burned her way through the role of Donna Anna, singing and acting with passionate commitment. It didn't hurt that she looked gorgeous, with sensuous features and curves. She's part of a generation of singers well aware that their acting abilities and photogenic faces are almost as crucial as their voices. "Some people listen with their eyes," as she put it. "It's a fact of life."

This is Ms. Dovhan's breakout moment. For six years she's been a member of the small opera company in out-of-the-way Hagen, Germany, where she's gotten to do the big, varied parts she would have had to wait years for at larger houses or in a young-artists program. It's the old-fashioned, increasingly rare way of starting a career: getting her sea legs and honing her performances in a stable, supportive environment.

Hagen was the first job she ever auditioned for, and she's now leaving it behind for regular work at a bigger German company in Karlsruhe and the chance to try out the truly unmoored existence of a modern opera singer.

"I'm right now very eager to travel and see other countries and work with other people," she said. "I don't need to have a home right now. I'm ready to be freelance. The contract in Karlsruhe is very flexible, and they really want me to go out into the world and sing."

Ms. Dovhan was born in 1979, in Kyiv, Ukraine, into a creative family, but one devoted more to the visual arts than to music: Her mother is an art conservator, her grandfather a sculptor and her father a ceramicist. Her parents divorced when she was young, and when her mother married an American, they moved to the United States. Stefania attended the Baltimore School for the Arts and the University of Maryland, graduating in 2002, and in 2005 got the job in Hagen, where she's since spent almost all her time.

It won't be easy for Ms. Dovhan to leave that familial environment, where everyone knows everyone and she can host post-premiere parties in her kitchen. She's still learning to balance having stable relationships with the independence her schedule will soon demand. Things have been on-again, off-again with her boyfriend, a German engineering student she met at a dance party, but it's going well at the moment, and he'll be flying to New York for the Elixir premiere.

In Adina, she couldn't have chosen a more different character than the despondent Donna Anna. "Adina is supposed to be bossy," Ms. Dovhan said, "but inside of her, there is a true romantic and a woman who can love with a lot of passion. I'm enjoying doing the comedy because I've done a lot of tragedy. I get to be goofy and jump around a bit and laugh and move my body, so that's a lot of fun. And at the end, she opens up and you see what she really is, this warm, beautiful person."

Ms. Dovhan plays, in other words, the contemporary opera diva: a little imperious--she's got to keep up appearances, after all--but ultimately friendly, a sweetheart.

"To be a diva has this negative aura around it right now," she said. "I think when I'm onstage, I do need to be a diva, because that's what people want to see. You stand in a certain way, there's a certain confidence. It's freedom also: For me, a diva is a person who is not afraid to be funny or tragic. And why do people go to the opera? To experience emotions, to be moved."

She most admires fearlessly dramatic singers like Aprile Millo. "She's so honest," she said, "so true. There's selflessness. I mean, Callas, she was a diva, but she was selfless in her singing. She was giving it, giving truth. With someone like Renée Fleming, it's very beautiful but"--tapping her chest--"it sometimes doesn't go inside."

Ms. Dovhan is taking it slow, but with her rich voice and smoldering presence, she could follow in the footsteps of singers like Renata Scotto and gradually transition from lyric roles like Adina to the great roles of Puccini and Verdi. No matter what course it takes, hers is a career it will be a pleasure to watch grow.

"I love roles that have a lot of temperament in them," she said. "I love dramatic things. I would love to go in that direction. I'm not in a rush, and I'm enjoying very much singing Mozart and Donizetti. I'm lucky because I've never been offered anything outside of my capability. You hear a lot of singers say, 'Someone wants me to do Tosca.' I've always had a very gradual, step-by-step program. I did Giulio Cesare, then I did Adina, then I did Rigoletto, then I did Traviata. Every year is a building block to something bigger, bigger, bigger."

editorial@observer.com

Jonathan Safran Foer wants to charm you right away. He's in a hurry because he knows that if he doesn't make you laugh quickly, he may well lose you. Which would be a shame, because Everything Is Illuminated , his extraordinary first novel, though painful and convoluted, is also funny and enchanting.

Mr. Foer launches a two-pronged charm offensive: On the first page you're addressed by a Ukrainian youth, born in 1977, who tortures the English language with thesaurus-mad locutions; he's very funny. A half-dozen pages later, you're reading a story, in conventional English, about a shtetl in 1791. The shtetl is maniacally odd; the story is quirky and engaging. If you're up to the challenge of making these disparate elements fit together, Mr. Foer has won the battle.

Or perhaps not. He may have lost you on the first page, where you discover that this is one of those novels in which there's a character with the same name as the author. Be warned: In Mr. Foer's postmodern pretzel of a book, a character named Jonathan Safran Foer is busy writing a book that looks a lot like the one you're reading.

A further warning is required: It's pretty soon obvious that Mr. Foer means to come to grips with the Holocaust (that maniacally odd shtetl is obliterated in 1942). You'd think that charm, laughs and postmodern playfulness would be for this darker purpose irrelevant or worse, and yet this is where Everything Is Illuminated distinguishes itself: What's easy and pleasing turns out to be as important as what's difficult and profound.

Untangling Mr. Foer's plot feels a bit like defusing a bomb-one wrong move and there's nothing left but fluttering shreds of paper.

But here goes: The Ukrainian youth, Alex, identifies himself as having been the translator for one Jonathan Safran Foer ("the hero of this story") when Jonathan made a pilgrimage to the Ukraine to try to locate the shtetl where his mother's family came from. Everything Is Illuminated is woven from three strands: Alex's letters to Jonathan, written in his comical English (they're signed "Guilelessly, Alexander"); drafts of Alex's account of Jonathan's trip to the Ukraine, also in Alex-speak; and chapters from Jonathan's novel in progress, a fantastical tale of 200 years in the life of a shtetl on the Polish-Ukrainian border.

"Like you know, I am not first rate with English," Alex writes. "In Russian my ideas are asserted abnormally well, but my second tongue is not so premium." "Enough of my miniature talking," he writes. "I am making you a very boring person." Actually, he's never boring, in part because his language evolves as our understanding of his character deepens.

Alex begins full of bravado, boasting about girls and money and nightclubs in Odessa. Gradually, sad truths begin to emerge: His father is a drunken brute who beats him and beats his little brother; his mother is "humble," as he puts it; his grandfather is burdened with unbearable guilt. Eventually we learn that there are no girls, no nightclubs, no money, and that Alex's life in Odessa is lonely and pathetic. His botched idioms are funny and sad and they also show us the world in a new light (everything is illuminated). Witness his argument with Jonathan about truth and fiction in the stories they're writing and exchanging: "We are being very nomadic with the truth, yes? … [I]f we are to be such nomads with the truth, why do we not make the story more premium than life?"

Trachimbrod, the shtetl in Jonathan's novel-in-progress, is at the outset more premium than life, a Chagall canvas crowded with irrepressible Jewish vitality and magic-realist kookiness. Here's the kind of story he tells: His great-great-great-great-great-grandmother was miraculously rescued from a river as an infant and raised by an old man who cherished her with fairy-tale intensity. Impossibly beautiful and brainy, she became the object of the entire shtetl 's lust-and ended up a battered wife. Or this: Jonathan's grandfather had a "dead" arm (he was born with a full set of teeth, which made breast-feeding painful for his mother, "and it was because he got no milk that his right arm died"); the dead arm is wildly attractive to women-but though he's comically promiscuous from the age of 10, the grandfather only learns to love when he has lost love. And so on. Jonathan can't bring himself to dispense happy endings-Alex complains to him that "again and again you insist on evil." This, of course, is because the ending for this shtetl , as for so many others on the Polish-Ukrainian border, is tragic: The tanks will roll in, the Germans will bark orders, the synagogue will burn, the flames will "illuminate" the Jews locked inside. (That "illuminate"-a bit of Alex-speak-is a bitter pun; Mr. Foer will play with words at any moment, even in the teeth of tragedy, which is one way to muffle pain.)

Jonathan and Alex eventually find Trachimbrod-but there's nothing left except a memorial to the dead. As they get closer to the object of their quest, a friendship blossoms between the young Jew in search of his roots and the young Ukrainian (who had never even met a Jew before Jonathan appeared). But that friendship is strained by the fact that Trachimbrod's Jews were slaughtered and the shtetl razed, a total annihilation that could not have been accomplished without the complicity-or at least the acquiescence-of the Ukrainians. In a harrowing episode, Jonathan and Alex hear the confession of a Ukrainian who denounced his best friend, a Jew, by pointing him out with his finger to save himself. Like everything else in Mr. Foer's novel, this event is remembered, recounted, discussed, translated, written up as fiction, revised (and then published and read by us)-in other words, the postmodern distancing is very thorough.

One of the very few Jews to survive the destruction of Trachimbrod says: "It is not a thing that you can imagine. It only is. After that, there can be no imagining." ("No poetry after Auschwitz," said Theodor Adorno.) It's impossible to capture, unmediated, the horror of the Holocaust-writing, after all, is a form of mediation. You can't get to the thing itself, but you can try-and people do, again and again. This is what Mr. Foer is writing about: how to write about the horror that can't be written about. Which is justification enough for the novel's many convolutions.

Mr. Foer's shtetl is a place where people wrote. Someone was always scribbling, whether on a scrap of paper or on a ceiling or on a tree trunk. Collectively, the inhabitants compiled an endless, encyclopedic tome called The Book of Antecedents (which allows Mr. Foer to toss more postmodern digressions into his already crowded novel). Here's a riff on "Art": "Art is that thing having only to do with itself-the product of a successful attempt to make a work of art." But Art, as the Trachimbrodians knew, is always the product of mixed motives, "i.e., I want to sell this , or I want this to make me famous and loved , or I want this to make me whole ."

Everything Is Illuminated is no more perfect than it is pure (it sold to Houghton Mifflin for $500,000 and may well make its author famous and loved, if not whole). Mr. Foer is too excitable, especially in the shtetl sections: Trachimbrod at times resembles a pomo fun fair. But the heart of the book-not the Nazi shoah but the astonishing, improbable, utterly convincing friendship of Alex and Jonathan-is golden. The friendship can't last, of course (Mr. Foer is as grudging as Jonathan when it comes to happy endings). We're left with what passes for consolation: "Every love is carved from loss."

It's wonderful to think that the very young Jonathan Safran Foer-he was born in 1977-can be writing so well and with such lofty aspiration. It will be wonderful if he writes many more books and inches ever closer to Art. But for now, let's give Alex, Mr. Foer's delightful creation, the last word, a tribute to a book packed tight with intelligence and compassion: "Volumes had happened, just as volumes now happen, just as volumes will happen."

Adam Begley is the books editor of The Observer.

Five years later, though, Mr. Wolfensohn hasn't gotten too far.

For evidence, check out the World Bank's sexy new product line: "corruption loss insurance." If your regime is so demonstrably untrustworthy that foreign investors have decamped en masse, the World Bank can help. It will lend you tens of millions of dollars, furnished by foreign taxpayers, so that you can offer investors insurance against your own perfidiousness.

The business of insuring foreign investors against sovereign acts like expropriation, change in law, currency inconvertibility and war-so-called "political risk insurance"-is not new. Private insurance companies and quasi-governmental organizations have long offered insurance against such risks, but, generally speaking, no one writes political risk coverage against sovereigns that are totally unreliable.

Enter the World Bank, with its "Leveraged Insurance Facility for Trade and Development." Uniquely, this loan program is closed to countries that behave themselves. To qualify for it, a regime must be unsavory to foreign investors. In this fractured bad-is-good universe, the government in question must first purposefully fail to provide the elemental infrastructure and protections that make foreign investors comfortable and that permit local businesses to thrive.

Does your country have clear laws defining property rights? If it does, this program is not for you. An impartial judiciary? Sorry. Honest officials? Next window, please. But, if your government and judiciary are corrupt, your country lacks a consistent body of law, the few laws you do have are applied arbitrarily, and both local and foreign businessmen quail at the thought of investing, the World Bank wants to help. It will lend good money to bad governments so those selfsame regimes can sell investors insurance against misdeeds that are totally within their own control.

Given such stringent preconditions, not just any old untrustworthy regime is good enough. To date, only Ukraine and Albania have been sufficiently unattractive to investors to qualify for programs like this. Albania is the stolen-car capital of Europe; Germans joke that, if your car is missing, you look for it not at the local pound but on the docks outside Tirana. Ukraine, of course, has similar qualifications: The International Monetary Fund is investigating Ukraine's Central Bank for misrepresenting the level of its reserves, I.M.F. money may have gone astray, and the Ukraine is restructuring its external bonds.

Consistent with those standards, the World Bank invited Kazakhstan to join the Leveraged Insurance club. It plans to lend Kazakhstan $50 million so that, if Kazakhstan continues lying to foreign investors, it has the dough to compensate them for the costs of its own corruption, arbitrary legal changes and capricious enforcement. (The loan is slated for approval by the World Bank's board in June.)

Kazakhstan seems to meet the World Bank's criteria perfectly. Transparency International, a global watchdog group, gives Kazakhstan a dismal 2.3-out of a possible 10-on its Corruption Perceptions Index. That ranks Kazakhstan as one of the most corrupt countries anywhere.

Then there's its dismal human rights record. Freedom House reports that President Nursultan Nazarbaev runs one of the most repressive regimes on earth. Mr. Nazarbaev controls the police and the judiciary and, said Freedom House, "corruption is evident at every level of the judicial system." The authorities routinely use libel laws to discourage free speech.

Some say that the World Bank would be out of business if it did not lend money to creepy regimes. Nonetheless, the ironies inherent in the World Bank's relationship with Kazakhstan abound. The bank's mission statement requires it to "encourage governments to create the legal and institutional framework for transparency, predictability and competence in the conduct of public affairs."

Instead of encouraging Kazakhstan to achieve any of those objectives, however, the World Bank has instead set about enabling Kazakhstan to avoid them. The World Bank plays no useful role when it implicitly encourages bad government and bad actors. Lots of Third World countries are struggling to implement economic and political reforms-and many are succeeding. Loans to regimes like Mr. Nazarbaev's mock those efforts and encourage other miscreants, who really need no encouragement.

Jay Newman is a money manager who specializes in foreign debt.