Download or read book Oedipus in Brooklyn and Other Stories written by Blume Lempel and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume gives English readers the opportunity to enjoy the stories of Blume Lempel, Yiddish literature's most remarkable woman writer

Download or read book On the Landing written by Yenta Mash and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-09-28 with total page 143 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In these sixteen stories, available in English for the first time, prize-winning author Yenta Mash traces an arc across continents, across upheavals and regime changes, and across the phases of a woman's life. Mash's protagonists are often in transit, poised "on the landing" on their way to or from somewhere else. In imaginative, poignant, and relentlessly honest prose, translated from the Yiddish by Ellen Cassedy, Mash documents the lost world of Jewish Bessarabia, the texture of daily life behind the Iron Curtain in Soviet Moldova, and the challenges of assimilation in Israel. On the Landing opens by inviting us to join a woman making her way through her ruined hometown, recalling the colorful customs of yesteryear—and the night when everything changed. We then travel into the Soviet gulag, accompanying women prisoners into the fearsome forests of Siberia. In postwar Soviet Moldova, we see how the Jewish community rebuilds itself. On the move once more, we join refugees struggling to find their place in Israel. Finally, a late-life romance brings a blossoming of joy. Drawing on a lifetime of repeated uprooting, Mash offers an intimate perch from which to explore little-known corners of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. A master chronicler of exile, she makes a major contribution to the literature of immigration and resilience, adding her voice to those of Jhumpa Lahiri, W. G. Sebald, André Aciman, and Viet Thanh Nguyen. Mash's literary oeuvre is a brave achievement, and her work is urgently relevant today as displaced people seek refuge across the globe.

Download or read book We Are Here written by Ellen Cassedy and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2012-03-01 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ellen Cassedy’s longing to recover the Yiddish she’d lost with her mother’s death eventually led her to Lithuania, once the “Jerusalem of the North.” As she prepared for her journey, her uncle, sixty years after he’d left Lithuania in a boxcar, made a shocking disclosure about his wartime experience, and an elderly man from her ancestral town made an unsettling request. Gradually, what had begun as a personal journey broadened into a larger exploration of how the people of this country, Jews and non-Jews alike, are confronting their past in order to move forward into the future. How does a nation—how do successor generations, moral beings—overcome a bloody past? How do we judge the bystanders, collaborators, perpetrators, rescuers, and ourselves? These are the questions Cassedy confronts in We Are Here, one woman’s exploration of Lithuania’s Jewish history combined with a personal exploration of her own family’s place in it. Digging through archives with the help of a local whose motives are puzzling to her; interviewing natives, including an old man who wants to “speak to a Jew” before he dies; discovering the complications encountered by a country that endured both Nazi and Soviet occupation—Cassedy finds that it’s not just the facts of history that matter, but what we choose to do with them.

Download or read book Diary of a Lonely Girl or The Battle against Free Love written by Miriam Karpilove and published by Syracuse University Press. This book was released on 2020-01-23 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published serially in the Yiddish daily newspaper di Varhayt in 1916–18, Diary of a Lonely Girl, or The Battle against Free Love is a novel of intimate feelings and scandalous behaviors, shot through with a dark humor. From the perch of a diarist writing in first person about her own love life, Miriam Karpilove’s novel offers a snarky, melodramatic criticism of radical leftist immigrant youth culture in early twentieth-century New York City. Squeezed between men who use their freethinking ideals to pressure her to be sexually available and nosy landladies who require her to maintain her respectability, the narrator expresses frustration at her vulnerable circumstances with wry irreverence. The novel boldly explores issues of consent, body autonomy, women’s empowerment and disempowerment around sexuality, courtship, and politics. Karpilove immigrated to the United States from a small town near Minsk in 1905 and went on to become one of the most prolific and widely published women writers of prose in Yiddish. Kirzane’s skillful translation gives English readers long-overdue access to Karpilove’s original and provocative voice.

Download or read book The Children of Jocasta written by Natalie Haynes and published by Europa Editions. This book was released on 2018-11-13 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “[A] dark, elegant novel” of two women in ancient Greece, based on the great tragedies of Sophocles (Publishers Weekly). Thebes is a city in mourning, still reeling from a devastating plague that invaded every home and left the survivors devastated and fearful. This is the Thebes that Jocasta has known her entire life, a city ruled by a king—her husband-to-be. Jocasta struggles through this miserable marriage until she is unexpectedly widowed. Now free to choose her next husband, she selects the handsome, youthful Oedipus. When whispers emerge of an unbearable scandal, the very society that once lent Jocasta its support seems determined to destroy her. Ismene is a girl in mourning, longing for the golden days of her youth, days spent lolling in the courtyard garden, reading and reveling in her parents’ happiness and love. Now she is an orphan and the target of a murder plot, attacked within the very walls of the palace. As the deadly political competition swirls around her, she must uncover the root of the plot—and reveal the truth of the curse that has consumed her family. The novel is based on Oedipus Tyrannus and Antigone, two of Classical Greece’s most compelling tragedies. Told in intersecting narratives, this reimagining of Sophocles’s classic plays brings life and voice to the women who were too often forced to the background of their own stories. “After two and a half millennia of near silence, Jocasta and Ismene are finally given a chance to speak . . . Haynes’s Thebes is vividly captured. In her excellent new novel, she harnesses the mutability of myth.” —The Guardian

Download or read book Beloved Comrades written by Yermiyahu Taub and published by . This book was released on 2020-05-19 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tells of three generations in the life of a small (highly unorthodox) Orthodox American synagogue, revealing the alliances, grievances, and secrets pulsating beneath the seemingly mundane facade of institutional life. Through a series of pointed, highly charged encounters, the interlocking fates of its congregants and the interior life of the synagogue itself are explored. By looking at the same events from multiple perspectives, Yermiyahu Ahron Taub dramatizes how even the most seemingly minor incidents create long-lasting effects. In a tableau simultaneously epic and intimate, sweeping and focused, Taub reimagines the synagogue as a means to investigate themes of faith, work, immigration, sexuality, community, art, social justice, and, as the novel's title suggests, friendship and love.

Download or read book Everything Under written by Daisy Johnson and published by Graywolf Press. This book was released on 2018-10-23 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2018 MAN BOOKER PRIZE An eerie, watery reimagining of the Oedipus myth set on the canals of Oxford, from the author of Fen The dictionary doesn’t contain every word. Gretel, a lexicographer by trade, knows this better than most. She grew up on a houseboat with her mother, wandering the canals of Oxford and speaking a private language of their own invention. Her mother disappeared when Gretel was a teen, abandoning her to foster care, and Gretel has tried to move on, spending her days updating dictionary entries. One phone call from her mother is all it takes for the past to come rushing back. To find her, Gretel will have to recover buried memories of her final, fateful winter on the canals. A runaway boy had found community and shelter with them, and all three were haunted by their past and stalked by an ominous creature lurking in the canal: the bonak. Everything and nothing at once, the bonak was Gretel’s name for the thing she feared most. And now that she’s searching for her mother, she’ll have to face it. In this electrifying reinterpretation of a classical myth, Daisy Johnson explores questions of fate and free will, gender fluidity, and fractured family relationships. Everything Under—a debut novel whose surreal, watery landscape will resonate with fans of Fen—is a daring, moving story that will leave you unsettled and unstrung.

Download or read book The Gospel at Colonus written by Lee Breuer and published by Theatre Communications Group. This book was released on 1993-01-01 with total page 79 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A founding member of the acclaimed New York-based company Mabou Mines, Breuer's gifts as a writer and director have have made him a mainstay of the theatrical avant-garde.

Download or read book Personal History written by Katharine Graham and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-02-09 with total page 951 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: #1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER • PULTIZER PRIZE WINNER • The captivating inside story of the woman who helmed the Washington Post during one of the most turbulent periods in the history of American media: the scandals of the Pentagon Papers and Watergate In this widely acclaimed memoir ("Riveting, moving...a wonderful book" The New York Times Book Review), Katharine Graham tells her story—one that is extraordinary both for the events it encompasses and for the courage, candor, and dignity of its telling. Here is the awkward child who grew up amid material wealth and emotional isolation; the young bride who watched her brilliant, charismatic husband—a confidant to John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson—plunge into the mental illness that would culminate in his suicide. And here is the widow who shook off her grief and insecurity to take on a president and a pressman’s union as she entered the profane boys’ club of the newspaper business. As timely now as ever, Personal History is an exemplary record of our history and of the woman who played such a shaping role within them, discovering her own strength and sense of self as she confronted—and mastered—the personal and professional crises of her fascinating life.

Download or read book The Sexual Life of Savages and Other Stories written by Stokes Howell and published by St Martins Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of erotic stories includes "In the bathroom at Joey's," "Dear Veronica," "Unction," and "Dinner"

Download or read book A Jewish Refugee in New York written by Kadya Molodovsky and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2019-04-01 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “This novel invites the reader inside the mind of a Polish Jewish woman who has recently arrived in New York just after WWII began in Europe.” —Jeffrey Shandler, author of Anne Frank Unbound Rivke Zilberg, a twenty-year-old Jewish woman, arrives in New York shortly after the Nazi invasion of Poland, her home country. Struggling to learn a new language and cope with a different way of life in the United States, Rivke finds herself keeping a journal about the challenges and opportunities of this new land. In her attempt to find a new life as a Jewish immigrant in the United States, Rivke shares the stories of losing her mother to a bombing in Lublin, jilting a fiancé who has made his way to Palestine, and a flirtatious relationship with an American “allrightnik.” In this fictionalized journal originally published in Yiddish, author Kadya Molodovsky provides keen insight into the day-to-day activities of the large immigrant Jewish community of New York. By depicting one woman’s struggles as a Jewish refugee in the United States during WWII, Molodovsky points readers to the social, political, and cultural tensions of that time and place.

Download or read book A Mother s Kisses written by Bruce Jay Friedman and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2015-09-29 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An indefatigable, irresistible, and wildly inappropriate Jewish mother takes her 17-year-old son to school in this uproarious coming-of-age comedy Tall and scattered-looking, Joseph has just graduated from high school and is ready for college. But is college ready for him? Apparently not, judging by the rejection letter he receives from Bates and the deafening silence that greets his application to Columbia. While his friends pack their bags for schools across the country, Joseph mopes around the apartment in his bathrobe and checks the mailbox obsessively. It’s enough to make his mother fear for the boy’s sanity—so she resolves to take matters into her own hands. What follows is a sidesplitting series of misadventures as Meg, whom the New York Times Book Review called “the most unforgettable mother since Medea,” pulls out all the stops to get her boy what he wants. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Bruce Jay Friedman including rare photos from the author’s personal collection.

Download or read book Koba the Dread written by Martin Amis and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2014-09-17 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A brilliant weave of personal involvement, vivid biography and political insight, Koba the Dread is the successor to Martin Amis’s award-winning memoir, Experience. Koba the Dread captures the appeal of one of the most powerful belief systems of the 20th century — one that spread through the world, both captivating it and staining it red. It addresses itself to the central lacuna of 20th-century thought: the indulgence of Communism by the intellectuals of the West. In between the personal beginnings and the personal ending, Amis gives us perhaps the best one-hundred pages ever written about Stalin: Koba the Dread, Iosif the Terrible. The author’s father, Kingsley Amis, though later reactionary in tendency, was a “Comintern dogsbody” (as he would come to put it) from 1941 to 1956. His second-closest, and then his closest friend (after the death of the poet Philip Larkin), was Robert Conquest, our leading Sovietologist whose book of 1968, The Great Terror, was second only to Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago in undermining the USSR. The present memoir explores these connections. Stalin said that the death of one person was tragic, the death of a million a mere “statistic.” Koba the Dread, during whose course the author absorbs a particular, a familial death, is a rebuttal of Stalin’s aphorism.

Download or read book Middlesex written by Jeffrey Eugenides and published by Vintage Canada. This book was released on 2011-07-18 with total page 546 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Spanning eight decades and chronicling the wild ride of a Greek-American family through the vicissitudes of the twentieth century, Jeffrey Eugenides’ witty, exuberant novel on one level tells a traditional story about three generations of a fantastic, absurd, lovable immigrant family -- blessed and cursed with generous doses of tragedy and high comedy. But there’s a provocative twist. Cal, the narrator -- also Callie -- is a hermaphrodite. And the explanation for this takes us spooling back in time, through a breathtaking review of the twentieth century, to 1922, when the Turks sacked Smyrna and Callie’s grandparents fled for their lives. Back to a tiny village in Asia Minor where two lovers, and one rare genetic mutation, set our narrator’s life in motion. Middlesex is a grand, utterly original fable of crossed bloodlines, the intricacies of gender, and the deep, untidy promptings of desire. It’s a brilliant exploration of divided people, divided families, divided cities and nations -- the connected halves that make up ourselves and our world.

Download or read book Straight Man written by Richard Russo and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-11-09 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hilarious and true-to-life, witty, compassionate, and impossible to put down, Straight Man follows Hank Devereaux through one very bad week in this novel from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Empire Falls. • Now the AMC Original Series Lucky Hank. William Henry Devereaux, Jr., is the reluctant chairman of the English department of a badly underfunded college in the Pennsylvania rust belt. Devereaux's reluctance is partly rooted in his character—he is a born anarchist—and partly in the fact that his department is more savagely divided than the Balkans. In the course of a single week, Devereaux will have his nose mangled by an angry colleague, imagine his wife is having an affair with his dean, wonder if a curvaceous adjunct is trying to seduce him with peach pits, and threaten to execute a goose on local television. All this while coming to terms with his philandering father, the dereliction of his youthful promise, and the ominous failure of certain vital body functions. In short, Straight Man is classic Russo—side-splitting, poignant, compassionate, and unforgettable. Look for Richard Russo's new book, Somebody's Fool, coming soon.

Download or read book Wilful Disregard written by Lena Andersson and published by Pan Macmillan. This book was released on 2015-06-04 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Gripped me like an airport read . . . perfect.' Lena Dunham 'Lena Andersson's Wilful Disregard is a story of the heart written with bracing intellectual rigor. It is a stunner, pure and simple.' Alice Sebold, author of The Lovely Bones Winner of the August Prize 2013 On the day that Ester Nilsson, a poet and a sensible person in a sensible relationship, meets renowned artist Hugo Rask, her rational world begins to unravel. Leaving her boyfriend and her past behind, Ester embarks on what is sure to be the greatest love story of her life. It's a shame no one else agrees.

Download or read book Contested Will written by James Shapiro and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2011-04-19 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro explains when and why so many people began to question whether Shakespeare wrote his plays.