Download or read book Anna s Shtetl written by Lawrence A. Coben and published by University of Alabama Press. This book was released on 2011-01-25 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A rare view of a childhood in a European ghetto. Anna Spector was born in 1905 in Korsun, a Ukrainian town on the Ros River, eighty miles south of Kiev. Held by Poland until 1768 and annexed by the Tsar in 1793 Korsun and its fluid ethnic population were characteristic of the Pale of Settlement in Eastern Europe: comprised of Ukrainians, Cossacks, Jews and other groups living uneasily together in relationships punctuated by violence. Anna’s father left Korsun in 1912 to immigrate to America, and Anna left in 1919, having lived through the Great War, the Bolshevik Revolution, and part of the ensuing civil war, as well as several episodes of more or less organized pogroms—deadly anti-Jewish riots begun by various invading military detachments during the Russian Civil War and joined by some of Korsun’s peasants. In the early 1990s Anna met Lawrence A. Coben, a medical doctor seeking information about the shtetls to recapture a sense of his own heritage. Anna had near-perfect recall of her daily life as a girl and young woman in the last days in one of those historic but doomed communities. Her rare account, the product of some 300 interviews, is valuable because most personal memoirs of ghetto life are written by men. Also, very often, Christian neighbors appear in ghetto accounts as a stolid peasant mass assembled on market days, as destructive mobs, or as an arrogant and distant collection of government officials and nobility. Anna’s story is exceptionally rich in a sense of the Korsun Christians as friends, neighbors, and individuals. Although the Jewish communities in Eastern Europe are now virtually gone, less than 100 years ago they counted a population of millions. The firsthand records we have from that lost world are therefore important, and this view from the underrecorded lives of women and the young is particularly welcome.

Download or read book Anna written by Shirley Riell Brown and published by iUniverse. This book was released on 2000-09-30 with total page 614 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: BOOK DESCRIPTION The relative tranquility of a small Shtetl (village or area of a village where Jews were allowed to live in Russia) was shattered by a devastating pogrom led by the Czar's elite soldiers, the Cossacks. Two young girls' lives are dramatically and definitively changed forever; Anna, the youngest daughter of an educated Jewish family and Petrovena, a village peasant girl; and both by an unusual Cossack Officer, Nicholai Kollenoff. While ANNA is completely a work of fiction, actual events and people are part of the book, and of course, pogroms were a very real part of Russian Jewish life. This epic novel takes the reader on a journey with Anna, Petrovena, and Nicholai through some of the most important events of the first half of the Twentieth Century including two world wars and the Russian Revolution. It is populated with unusual characters, some of which the reader will love while others will be hated. Action moves from Russia to France and the United States with interesting twists and turns that will keep the readers' interest alive until the last word.

Download or read book A Shtetl and Other Yiddish Novellas written by Ruth R. Wisse and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 1986 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The five short novellas which comprise this anthology were written between 1890 and World War I. All share a common setting--the Eastern European Jewish town or shtetl, and all deal in different ways with a single topic--the Jewish confrontation with modernity. The authors of these novellas are among the greatest masters of Yiddish prose. In their work, today's reader will discover a literary tradition of considerable scope, energy, and variety and will come face to face with an exceptionally memorable cast of characters and with a human community now irrevocably lost. In her general introduction, Professor Wisse traces the development of modern Yiddish literature in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and describes the many shifts that took place between the Yiddish writers and the world about which they wrote. She also furnishes a brief introduction for each novella, giving the historical and biographical background and offering a critical interpretation of the work.

Download or read book The Soup Has Many Eyes written by Joann Rose Leonard and published by Bantam. This book was released on 2000 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Our lives are made rich by those who came before us. Like ingredients in a long-simmering soup, they flavor who we are and what we do. In this beautiful, haunting, and larger-than-life memoir, one woman shares with us the humor, heartbreak, and triumph of her Jewish ancestry, to comfort and strengthen us all, whatever our faith. At home in her Pennsylvania kitchen, Joann Leonard makes soup. In her grandfather's pot, she improvises, using her great-grandmother's unwritten recipe. As she does, amid the fragrant steam rising from the pot comes a stream of memories, half-told tales, and departed ancestors asking that their stories be told. And what stories they are: of the six strong Axelrood brothers and their families terrorized by Cossacks in their Eastern European village; of a man hiding twenty-eight days under a barn floor to avoid being murdered; of a tiny girl left with others for safety in the flight from savagery and lost for twelve long years; and of new lives made from old in America, "the Golden Land." As Joann Leonard adds each story to her pot, she creates a rich and universal soup to nourish us all: the story of a woman putting together the fragmented pieces of her own life and recognizing the power of her own Jewish heritage. What she discovers within her cookpot are the extraordinary endurance, remarkable bravery, and lusty humor of her forebears and the joy of an undying legacy of faith that is the greatest gift she has been given--a gift she has been entrusted to pass along to her two adult sons. These pages invite us all to share in this life-giving food. In a nation where most people's roots lie in faraway lands, The Soup Has Many Eyes is a rich, poetic, deeply satisfying testament to the importance of family bonds, spiritual insight, and--most of all--the miracle that happens when we invite the past into our lives.

Download or read book Anna in the Afterlife written by Merrill Joan Gerber and published by Syracuse University Press. This book was released on 2002-01-01 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Once her dying got underway, Anna could not really complain about the way the process moved along." So begins this deftly amusing, wryly perceptive look at the passing of a feisty, funny woman. During the four-day limbo that bridges her death and burial, Anna, who is "infinitely present, never dead, never stupid, and never done with it all," gets to investigate the preparations for her own funeral, the true nature of her sister's suicide attempt, and the revelations of her own sexual abuse by her half-brother. She contemplates her parents-her impoverished Polish Jewish mother, her father who was obsessed with his digestive system-and she longs to remember her beloved husband, who is all but buried by time. She considers the origins of her bigotry and her reluctant capitulation to romantic and physical love. In her final moments of consciousness, Anna has the last word on her own secrets and crimes before stepping into eternity.

Download or read book Americans in a World at War written by Brooke L. Blower and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023-08-01 with total page 561 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A vivid narrative of an ill-fated Pan American flight during World War II that captures the dramatic backstories of its passengers and, through them, the impact of Americans' global connections. On February 21, 1943, Pan American Airways' celebrated seaplane, the Yankee Clipper, took off from New York's Marine Air Terminal and island-hopped its way across the Atlantic Ocean. Arriving at Lisbon the following evening, it crashed in the Tagus River, killing twenty-four of its thirty-nine passengers and crew. Americans in a World at War traces the backstories of seven worldly Americans aboard that plane, their personal histories, their politics, and the paths that led them toward war. Combat soldiers made up only a small fraction of the millions of Americans, both in and out of uniform, who scattered across six continents during the Second World War. This book uncovers a surprising history of American noncombatants abroad in the years leading into the twentieth century's most consequential conflict. Long before GIs began storming beaches and liberating towns, Americans had forged extensive political, economic, and personal ties to other parts of the world. These deep and sometimes contradictory engagements, which preceded the bombing of Pearl Harbor, would shape and in turn be transformed by the US war effort. The intriguing biographies of the Yankee Clipper's passengers--among them an Olympic-athlete-turned-export salesman, a Broadway star, a swashbuckling pilot, and two entrepreneurs accused of trading with the enemy--upend conventional American narratives about World War II. As their travels take them from Ukraine, France, Spain, Panama, Cuba, and the Philippines to Java, India, Australia, Britain, Egypt, the Soviet Union, and the Belgian Congo, among other hot spots, their movements defy simple boundaries between home front and war front. Americans in a World at War offers fresh perspectives on a transformative period of US history and global connections during the "American Century."

Download or read book Shtetl written by Eva Hoffman and published by PublicAffairs. This book was released on 2007-10-09 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Shtetl (Yiddish for "small town"), critically-acclaimed author Eva Hoffman brings the lost world of Eastern European Jews back to vivid life, depicting its complex institutions and vibrant culture, its beliefs, social distinctions, and customs. Through the small town of Brafsk, she looks at the fascinating experiments in multicultural coexistence -- still relevant to us today -- attempted in the eight centuries of Polish-Jewish history, and describes the forces which influenced Christian villagers' decisions to conceal or betray their Jewish neighbors in the dark period of the Holocaust.

Download or read book Confessions of the Shtetl written by Ellie R. Schainker and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2016-11-16 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the course of the nineteenth century, some 84,500 Jews in imperial Russia converted to Christianity. Confessions of the Shtetl explores the day-to-day world of these people, including the social, geographic, religious, and economic links among converts, Christians, and Jews. The book narrates converts' tales of love, desperation, and fear, tracing the uneasy contest between religious choice and collective Jewish identity in tsarist Russia. Rather than viewing the shtetl as the foundation myth for modern Jewish nationhood, this work reveals the shtetl's history of conversions and communal engagement with converts, which ultimately yielded a cultural hybridity that both challenged and fueled visions of Jewish separatism. Drawing on extensive research with conversion files in imperial Russian archives, in addition to the mass press, novels, and memoirs, Ellie R. Schainker offers a sociocultural history of religious toleration and Jewish life that sees baptism not as the fundamental departure from Jewishness or the Jewish community, but as a conversion that marked the start of a complicated experiment with new forms of identity and belonging. Ultimately, she argues that the Jewish encounter with imperial Russia did not revolve around coercion and ghettoization but was a genuinely religious drama with a diverse, attractive, and aggressive Christianity.

Download or read book Shtetl written by Jeffrey Shandler and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2014-01-15 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Yiddish, shtetl simply means “town.” How does such an unassuming word come to loom so large in modern Jewish culture, with a proliferation of uses and connotations? By examining the meaning of shtetl, Jeffrey Shandler asks how Jewish life in provincial towns in Eastern Europe has become the subject of extensive creativity, memory, and scholarship from the early modern era in European history to the present. In the post-Holocaust era, the shtetl looms large in public culture as the epitome of a bygone traditional Jewish communal life. People now encounter the Jewish history of these towns through an array of cultural practices, including fiction, documentary photography, film, memoirs, art, heritage tourism, and political activism. At the same time, the shtetl attracts growing scholarly interest, as historians, social scientists, literary critics, and others seek to understand both the complex reality of life in provincial towns and the nature of its wide-ranging remembrance. Shtetl: A Vernacular Intellectual History traces the trajectory of writing about these towns—by Jews and non-Jews, residents and visitors, researchers, novelists, memoirists, journalists and others—to demonstrate how the Yiddish word for “town” emerged as a key word in Jewish culture and studies. Shandler proposes that the intellectual history of the shtetl is best approached as an exemplar of engaging Jewish vernacularity, and that the variable nature of this engagement, far from being a drawback, is central to the subject’s enduring interest.

Download or read book The Golden Age Shtetl written by Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2015-08-25 with total page 444 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Neither a comprehensive history of Eastern European Jewish life or the shtetl, Petrovsky-Shtern, professor of Jewish Studies at Northwestern University, focuses on three provinces Volhynia, Podolia, and Kiev of the then Russian Empire during what he deems the golden age period, 1790 - 1840, when the shtetl was "the unique habitat of some 80 percent of East European Jews."

Download or read book Anna Teller written by Jo Sinclair and published by Feminist Press at CUNY. This book was released on 1992 with total page 628 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Highly praised at its first publication in 1960, Anna Teller is the story of 75 years in the life of a Jewish Hungarian family, from their roots in Europe through the separate migrations of the son and the mother into the U.S. and their eventual reconciliation. "A fascinating story".--Kirkus Reviews.

Download or read book The Lost Shtetl written by Max Gross and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2020-10-13 with total page 549 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: WINNER OF THE NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARD AND THE JEWISH FICTION AWARD FROM THE ASSOCIATION OF JEWISH LIBRARIES GOOD MORNING AMERICA MUST READ NEW BOOKS * NEW YORK POST BUZZ BOOKS * THE MILLIONS MOST ANTICIPATED A remarkable debut novel—written with the fearless imagination of Michael Chabon and the piercing humor of Gary Shteyngart—about a small Jewish village in the Polish forest that is so secluded no one knows it exists . . . until now. What if there was a town that history missed? For decades, the tiny Jewish shtetl of Kreskol existed in happy isolation, virtually untouched and unchanged. Spared by the Holocaust and the Cold War, its residents enjoyed remarkable peace. It missed out on cars, and electricity, and the internet, and indoor plumbing. But when a marriage dispute spins out of control, the whole town comes crashing into the twenty-first century. Pesha Lindauer, who has just suffered an ugly, acrimonious divorce, suddenly disappears. A day later, her husband goes after her, setting off a panic among the town elders. They send a woefully unprepared outcast named Yankel Lewinkopf out into the wider world to alert the Polish authorities. Venturing beyond the remote safety of Kreskol, Yankel is confronted by the beauty and the ravages of the modern-day outside world – and his reception is met with a confusing mix of disbelief, condescension, and unexpected kindness. When the truth eventually surfaces, his story and the existence of Kreskol make headlines nationwide. Returning Yankel to Kreskol, the Polish government plans to reintegrate the town that time forgot. Yet in doing so, the devious origins of its disappearance come to the light. And what has become of the mystery of Pesha and her former husband? Divided between those embracing change and those clinging to its old world ways, the people of Kreskol will have to find a way to come together . . . or risk their village disappearing for good.

Download or read book A Man Comes from Someplace written by Judith Pearl Summerfield and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2018-07-17 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A story in history of a multi-generational Jewish family from a lost world, a shtetl in Ukraine before WWI. Explores narrative as cultural study, cultural performance, meta-narrative, and auto-ethnography. Story as antidote to trauma, the insistence that we know the past, and remember those who came before.

Download or read book Commandment written by Norman L. Weinberg and published by Archway Publishing. This book was released on 2020-11-30 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: COMMANDMENT is an allegory on life, all life, in whatever form and wherever it exists on EARTH or in the vast UNIVERSE. Extrapolating from what we know about life on EARTH, all creatures large and small share similarities: the struggle to exist, propagate, find nourishment, and overcome its enemies, even enemies of its own kind. The biblical commandment, ‘Thou Shalt Not Kill’ is a warning to us all. If obeyed, peace and prosperity follow; if disobeyed, we risk war, hardship, and annihilation. The novel came out of Weinberg’s interest in the incredible properties of microorganisms. Numerous scientific publications describing these ‘aliens’ among us capture the imagination and read themselves like science fiction.

Download or read book 1929 written by Hasia R. Diner and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2013-08-12 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2013 National Jewish Book Award, Anthologies and Collections The year 1929 represents a major turning point in interwar Jewish society, proving to be a year when Jews, regardless of where they lived, saw themselves affected by developments that took place around the world, as the crises endured by other Jews became part of the transnational Jewish consciousness. In the United States, the stock market crash brought lasting economic, social, and ideological changes to the Jewish community and limited its ability to support humanitarian and nationalist projects in other countries. In Palestine, the anti-Jewish riots in Hebron and other towns underscored the vulnerability of the Zionist enterprise and ignited heated discussions among various Jewish political groups about the wisdom of establishing a Jewish state on its historical site. At the same time, in the Soviet Union, the consolidation of power in the hands of Stalin created a much more dogmatic climate in the international Communist movement, including its Jewish branches. Featuring a sparkling array of scholars of Jewish history, 1929 surveys the Jewish world in one year offering clear examples of the transnational connections which linked Jews to each other—from politics, diplomacy, and philanthropy to literature, culture, and the fate of Yiddish—regardless of where they lived. Taken together, the essays in 1929 argue that, whether American, Soviet, German, Polish, or Palestinian, Jews throughout the world lived in a global context.

Download or read book The Book of V written by Anna Solomon and published by Henry Holt and Company. This book was released on 2020-05-05 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A GOOD MORNING AMERICA BOOK CLUB PICK A BELLETRIST BOOK CLUB PICK For fans of The Hours and Fates and Furies, a bold, kaleidoscopic novel intertwining the lives of three women across three centuries as their stories of sex, power, and desire finally converge in the present day. Lily is a mother and a daughter. And a second wife. And a writer, maybe? Or she was going to be, before she had children. Now, in her rented Brooklyn apartment she’s grappling with her sexual and intellectual desires, while also trying to manage her roles as a mother and a wife in 2016. Vivian Barr seems to be the perfect political wife, dedicated to helping her charismatic and ambitious husband find success in Watergate-era Washington D.C. But one night he demands a humiliating favor, and her refusal to obey changes the course of her life—along with the lives of others. Esther is a fiercely independent young woman in ancient Persia, where she and her uncle’s tribe live a tenuous existence outside the palace walls. When an innocent mistake results in devastating consequences for her people, she is offered up as a sacrifice to please the King, in the hopes that she will save them all. In Anna Solomon's The Book of V., these three characters' riveting stories overlap and ultimately collide, illuminating how women’s lives have and have not changed over thousands of years.

Download or read book Shtetl Memoirs written by Joachim Schoenfeld and published by Hoboken, N.J. : Ktav Publishing House. This book was released on 1985 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contains personal memoirs interspersed with historical information. Schoenfeld was born in 1895 in Snyatyn, Eastern Galicia. Recollects Jewish life in Snyatyn under the rule of Franz Josef, and his service in the Austrian Army during World War I. With the end of the war, antisemitism increased throughout Central and Eastern Europe. The restoration of the Polish Republic, the civil war in Ukraine, and the wars to define the state borders of Poland brought about anti-Jewish pogroms with thousands of victims. Antisemitism marked the whole interwar period of Polish independence. ǂc (From the Bibliography of the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism).