Category: Jewish Literature

Translated into English finally, Fiasco joins its better half volumes Fatelessness and Kaddish for an Unborn baby in telling an epic tale of the author's go back from the Nazi dying camps, basically to discover his nation taken over by means of one other totalitarian executive.

Fiasco as Imre Kertesz himself has acknowledged, "is fiction based on reality"—a Kafka-like account that's strangely humorous in its unrelentingly pessimistic readability, of the Communist takeover of his place of origin. compelled into the military and assigned to escort army prisoners, the protagonist comes to a decision to feign madness to be published from accountability. yet in the meantime, existence lower than the recent regime is portrayed virtually as an uninterrupted continuation of existence within the Nazi focus camps-which, in flip, is depicted as a continuation of the patriarchal dictatorship of joyless adolescence. it truly is, briefly, a searing extension of Kertesz' primary topic: the totalitarian event visible as trauma not just for anyone yet for the total civilization—ours—that made Auschwitz possible.

From the alternate Paperback edition.

Chaim Potok was once a world-class author and student, a Conservative Jew who wrote from and approximately his culture and the conflicts among observance and acculturation. With a undeniable, trouble-free kind, his novels have been set opposed to the ethical, non secular, and highbrow currents of the 20th century. This assortment goals to widen the lens during which we learn Chaim Potok and to set up him as an genuine American author who created unforgettable characters forging American identities for themselves whereas maintaining their Jewish nature. The essays remove darkness from the primary fight in Potok’s novels, which ends from a profound wish to reconcile the allure of modernity with the pull of conventional Judaism. the amount encompasses a memoir by way of Adena Potok and ends with Chaim Potok’s “My lifestyles as a Writer,” a speech he gave at Penn nation in 1982.

Aside from the editor, the individuals are Victoria Aarons, Nathan P. Devir, Jane Eisner, Susanne Klingenstein, S. Lillian Kremer, Jessica Lang, Sanford E. Marovitz, Kathryn McClymond, Hugh Nissenson, Adena Potok, and Jonathan Rosen.

an important contribution to Holocaust reviews, the booklet examines the ability of supernatural parts to dramatize the moral and representational problems of Holocaust fiction. Exploring texts by way of such writers as D.M. Thomas and Markus Zusak it's going to entice students and scholars of Holocaust literature, magic realism, and modern fiction.

released in Tunis in 1938, Ninette of Sin Street is likely one of the first works of Tunisian fiction in French. Ninette's writer, Vitalis Danon, arrived in Tunisia lower than the aegis of the Franco-Jewish association the Alliance Israélite Universelle and speedy adopted—and was once followed by—the neighborhood community.
Ninette is an not likely protagonist: pressured through poverty to paintings as a prostitute, she goals of a higher existence and an schooling for her son. Plucky and street-wise, she enrolls her son within the neighborhood institution and the tale unfolds as she narrates her lifestyles to the school's headmaster. Ninette's account is either a vintage rags-to-riches story and a refined, incisive critique of French colonialism. That Ninette's tale should end up incredible this present day indicates how a lot we stand to benefit from historical past, and from the secrets and techniques of Sin Street.
This quantity deals the 1st English translation of Danon's best-known paintings. a variety of his letters and an editors' creation and notes supply context for this cornerstone of Judeo-Tunisian letters.

This selection of essays is a stick to as much as the severely acclaimed, the massive Lie: On Terror, Antisemitism and id. the writer brings his insights from a protracted profession as a author and cultural critic to navigate in the course of the tradition wars and geo-political minefields in regards to the nation of Israel. Drawing on historic, cultural and ideological research, he clarifies the position of antiSemitism within the Left's betrayal of the one liberal democracy within the center East. He examines the hostility to Israel from different sectors equivalent to countries, non-governmental agencies, unions, and academia - whereas he unveils the shoddy and occasionally antisemitic assumptions mendacity less than the skin of such critics. Solway is likely one of the such a lot literate defenders of Israel and a courageous voice between an highbrow classification complicit in half-truths and outright distortions bearing on Israel's state of affairs one of the terrorists and Iranian proxies surrounding it. this is often an awfully well-written book.

Set in Miami seashore, Florida in 1972, the unconventional follows the Posner family--two Holocaust survivors, Sophie and Jacob, and their son, Adam--doing every thing they could to prevent each other in a urban with an unlimited offer of colourful diversions. during this 12 months, Miami seashore was once the location of either the Republican and Democratic political conventions, and observed the increase of the counterculture, the chilly struggle, and the desegregation of the outdated South. the radical is enriched by means of the presence of old characters equivalent to Jackie Gleason, Frank Sinatra, Muhammad Ali, I. B. Singer, Meyer Lansky and a comical team of fading gangsters. there's even a sighting of Fidel Castro. For those Holocaust survivors and their son, Miami seashore was once to be their salvation. the place higher to mix in, regain one's sanity, and reside their lives? as an alternative what they realize is that Miami seashore isn't really a spot of camouflage--all that sunshine highlighted the very issues they needed to disregard, and the considerable solar became their lives right into a Disney global of funhouse mirrors and chaotic rides, giving them a entrance row seat via a transformational yr in American tradition, politics and international history.

What function has Jewish highbrow tradition performed within the improvement of recent Romance literature? Susanne Zepp seeks to respond to this query via an exam of 5 influential early glossy texts written among 1499 and 1627: Fernando de Rojas's La Celestina, Leone Ebreo's Dialoghi d'amore, the nameless story Lazarillo de Tormes (the first picaresque novel), Montaigne's Essais, and the poetical renditions of the Bible by means of João Pinto Delgado. pressured to straddle cultures and religions, those Iberian conversos (Jews who switched over to Catholicism) prefigured the subjectivity which might come to represent modernity.
As "New Christians" in an illiberal global, those thinkers labored in the tensions in their old context to question norms and dogmas. long ago, students have concerned about the Jewish origins of such significant figures in literature and philosophy. via shut readings of those texts, Zepp strikes the talk clear of the slender query of the authors' origins to target the cutting edge methods those authors subverted and transcended conventional genres. She translates the alterations that happened in quite a few literary genres and works of the interval in the broader old context of the 16th and 17th centuries, demonstrating the level to which the advance of early smooth subjective realization and its expression in literary works should be defined partially as a universalization of initially Jewish experiences.

visible in the course of the eyes of an illiterate twelve-year-old boy, Nava Semel's relocating, now and then lyrical fiction explores existence within the Palestine of the Nineteen Thirties - an international the place a tender Jew is ready to adopt a number of marriages to threatened East ecu girls for patriotic purposes on my own; the place a boy's closest acquaintances are a puppy named after his hero Johnny Weissmuller (the monitor Tarzan of blessed memory), his brother's first spouse, and the woman round the corner. Semel weaves a wealthy evocation of affection and ache and grants, written with eloquent humanity and verve.

Die Studie widmet sich der Erforschung der deutschsprachigen jüdischen Autobiographie im 20. Jahrhundert. Nach einem Überblick, der die Autobiographietradition im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert beleuchtet, werden die spezifischen Bedingungen der jüdischen Autobiographie, die seit dem Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts entsteht, herausgearbeitet. Im Hauptteil widmet sich die Arbeit der Einzeluntersuchung von autobiographischen Texten von Jakob Wassermann, Werner Kraft, Gershom Scholem, Max Fürst, Ernst Toller, Ludwig Greve, Ruth Klüger und Georges-Arthur Goldschmidt.