Download or read book Shtetl Dreams written by Raaya Admoni and published by Xlibris Corporation. This book was released on 2015-08-31 with total page 537 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sarka is only thirteen when her mother suddenly tells her one day, I dreamed that you got married . . . to the rabbi. These words inform the young girl that she will marry a sixty-five-year-old widower and her fate will be determined by her mothers dream. Sarkas parents remain adamant that she will marry the rabbi whereupon all her youthful dreams of eventually marrying for love are quashed. Little Shaime is only ten when both his parents die, leaving him and his four siblings not only orphaned but penniless. While homes are found for his younger brothers and sisters, there is no family ready to adopt an older boy, and his grandparents have no room for him. So he is sent away to earn his keep as a saddlers apprentice in Lublin. The Krakowski family treat the orphan heartlessly, feeding him leftover scraps and making him sleep alone in a mouldy basement. Yet Shaime clings to his dream of one day having a childhood like any normal boy. The Second World War arrives, and when the carnage is over at last, very few survive. But both Sheindel, Sarkas daughter, and Shaime are among them, and their paths cross. Will fate prove kinder to them than the nightmares of the tragic losses that haunt their sleepless nights? Even before their fate was sealed by the Nazi invasion, the Jews in the little Polish town of Belzitz faced great adversity. Yet there were always dreams, some bringing consolation and others shaping their destinies. In this sweeping historical novel, Admoni traces a riveting family saga through three generations. The personal stories of Sheindel and the orphaned Shaime are interwoven into a rich tapestry of a Jewish shtetlbreathing life into an entire world of language, culture, and customsa world of which hardly a trace has survived. It is often said that reality surpasses imagination; hard as it may be to believe, everything described in Dreams really did take place. None of the names of the main characters have been changed, and their descendants are among us today. Raaya Admonia veteran radio editor and presenter at Kol Israel, Israels Broadcasting Authorityhas written many radio plays and stories which have garnered considerable success. In Dreams, written after extensive research, Admonis vivid characters are lovingly infused with the breath of life. Raaya Admonis book for children, Mother Says Its Late was published in 2001.
Download or read book Songa s Story written by Natalie Green Giles and published by iUniverse. This book was released on 2003 with total page 174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Describe the fate of the Ozeryany Jews (among them Songa's parents), who were ghettoized and killed by the Nazis. After the war Songa settled in the USA.
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 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 Homes of the Past written by Jeffrey Shandler and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2024 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Homes of the Past tells the powerful story of how immigrant Jewish scholars in 1940s New York sought to build a museum to commemorate their lost worlds and people. Among the Jews who arrived in the United States in the early 1940s were a small number of Polish scholars who had devoted their professional lives to the study of Europe's Yiddish-speaking Jews at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. Faced with the devastating knowledge that returning to their former homes and resuming their scholarly work there was no longer viable, they sought to address their profound sense of loss by continuing their work, under radically different circumstances, to document the European Jewish lives, places, and ways of living that were being destroyed. In pursuing this daunting agenda, they made a remarkable decision: they would create a museum to memorialize East European Jewry and educate American Jews about this legacy. YIVO scholars determinedly pursued this undertaking for several years, publicizing the initiative and collecting materials to exhibit. However, the Museum of the Homes of the Past was abandoned shortly after the war ended. With insight and clarity, Jeffrey Shandler draws upon the surviving archival sources to tell the story of the purpose, development, and ultimate fate of the Museum of the Homes of the Past. Homes of the Past explores this largely unknown episode of modern Jewish history and museum history and demonstrates that the project, even though it was never realized, marked a critical inflection point in the dynamic interrelations between Jews in America and Eastern Europe.
Download or read book A Question of Tradition written by Kathryn Hellerstein and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2014-07-23 with total page 511 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In A Question of Tradition, Kathryn Hellerstein explores the roles that women poets played in forming a modern Yiddish literary tradition. Women who wrote in Yiddish go largely unrecognized outside a rapidly diminishing Yiddish readership. Even in the heyday of Yiddish literature, they were regarded as marginal. But for over four centuries, women wrote and published Yiddish poems that addressed the crises of Jewish history—from the plague to the Holocaust—as well as the challenges and pleasures of daily life: prayer, art, friendship, nature, family, and love. Through close readings and translations of poems of eighteen writers, Hellerstein argues for a new perspective on a tradition of women Yiddish poets. Framed by a consideration of Ezra Korman's 1928 anthology of women poets, Hellerstein develops a discussion of poetry that extends from the sixteenth century through the twentieth, from early modern Prague and Krakow to high modernist Warsaw, New York, and California. The poems range from early conventional devotions, such as a printer's preface and verse prayers, to experimental, transgressive lyrics that confront a modern ambivalence toward Judaism. In an integrated study of literary and cultural history, Hellerstein shows the immensely important contribution made by women poets to Jewish literary tradition.
Download or read book Shtetl In My Mind written by Martin A. David and published by Martin A. David. This book was released on 2006-04-22 with total page 136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A mischief maker with sticky fingers, a rabbi who has prophetic visions, a healer, peddlers, revolutionaries, and travelers all live in the stories of Shtetl In My Mind. They will make you laugh, make you dance, and sometimes make you cry.
Download or read book Remember Us written by Martin Small and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2017-07-25 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Remember Us is a look back at the lost world of the shtetl: a wise Zayde offering prophetic and profound words to his grandson, the rich experience of Shabbos, and the treasure of a loving family. All this is torn apart with the arrival of the Holocaust, beginning a crucible fraught with twists and turns so unpredictable and surprising that they defy any attempt to find reason within them. From work camps to the partisans of the Nowogródek forests, from the Mauthausen concentration camp to life as a displaced person in Italy, and from fighting the Egyptian army in a tiny Israeli kibbutz in 1948 to starting a new life in a new world in New York, this book encompasses the mythical “hero’s journey” in very real historical events. Through the eyes of ninety-one-year-old Holocaust survivor Martin Small, we learn that these priceless memories that are too painful to remember are also too painful to forget.
Download or read book The Children of the Dream written by Bruno Bettelheim and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 1969 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Childhood education and psychology.
Download or read book The Montreal Shtetl written by Zelda Abramson and published by Between the Lines. This book was released on 2019-01-29 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As the Holocaust is memorialized worldwide through education programs and commemoration days, the common perception is that after survivors arrived and settled in their new homes they continued on a successful journey from rags to riches. While this story is comforting, a closer look at the experience of Holocaust survivors in North America shows it to be untrue. The arrival of tens of thousands of Jewish refugees was palpable in the streets of Montreal and their impact on the existing Jewish community is well-recognized. But what do we really know about how survivors’ experienced their new community? Drawing on more than 60 interviews with survivors, hundreds of case files from Jewish Immigrant Aid Services, and other archival documents, The Montreal Shtetl presents a portrait of the daily struggles of Holocaust survivors who settled in Montreal, where they encountered difficulties with work, language, culture, health care, and a Jewish community that was not always welcoming to survivors. By reflecting on how institutional supports, gender, and community relationships shaped the survivors’ settlement experiences, Abramson and Lynch show the relevance of these stories to current state policies on refugee immigration.
Download or read book The Binding of Isaac Religious Murders Kabbalah written by Lippman Bodoff and published by Devora Publishing. This book was released on 2005 with total page 466 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a series of evocative, groundbreaking articles, the author analyzes the Biblical and Rabbinic basis for what surely are now some of the most hotly debated topics in Jewish religious thought today. These include how the traditional interpretation of the Binding of Isaac has been misapplied in both Christian theology and Jewish martyrology, and how the centuries-long, and newly resurgent belief in mysticism and messianism, in kabbalah and Hasidism, has distorted classical Judaism and thwarted its national and cultural development. The author counters the arguments of those who see Judaism's – and the world's – newfound obsession with mysticism and kabbalah as a natural outgrowth of a progressive trend within rabbinic Judaism, and warns of the impending danger of rejecting the very core of Jewish thought and opinion as it was expounded in the Torah and classical Jewish tradition (the Oral Law). Each section of this magnificent work will give the reader new insights into how different aspects of Judaism have evolved and why they have often been in contention with each other. Nor is he afraid to deal with some of the supercharged issues within Judaism, such as, what are the underlying premises of Jewry's claim to the Divinely Promised Land? And has this claim been affected by its failure to pursue an active program of nationalism? These highly acclaimed articles have been gleaned from today's leading Jewish journals and have stood the test of time. They contain valuable source material and are a ready reference to the many historical and religious topics that are the focus of discussion across all main Jewish denominations.
Download or read book The Belarusian Shtetl written by Irina Kopchenova and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2023 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "For centuries Jewish shtetls were an active part of Belarusian life; today, they are gone. The Belarusian Shtetl is a landmark volume which offers, for the first time in English, an illuminating look at the shtetls' histories, the lives lived and lost in them, and the memories, records, and physical traces of these communities that remain today. Since 2012, under the auspices of the Sefer Center for University Teaching of Jewish Civilization, teams of scholars and students from many different disciplines have returned to the sites of former Jewish shtetls in Belarus to reconstruct their past. These researchers have interviewed a wide range of both Jews and non-Jews to find and document traces of Shtetl history, to gain insights into community memories, and to discover surviving markers of identity and ethnic affiliation. In the process, they have also unearthed evidence from old cemeteries and prewar houses and the stories behind memorials erected for Holocaust victims. Drawing on the wealth of information these researchers have gathered, The Belarusian Shtetl creates compelling and richly textured portraits of the histories and everyday lives of each shtetl. Important for scholars and accessible to the public, these portraits set out to return the Jewish shtetls to their rightful places of prominence in the histories and legacies of Belarus"--
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 The Jews of Chicago written by Irving Cutler and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Vividly told and richly illustrated with more than 160 photos, this fascinating history of the cultural, religious, fraternal, economic, and everyday life of Chicago's Jews brings to life the people, events, neighborhoods, and institutions that helped shape today's Jewish communities. 15 maps. Graphs & tables.
Download or read book Marc Chagall on Art and Culture written by Marc Chagall and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Marc Chagall (1887-1985) traversed a long route from a boy in the Jewish Pale of Settlement, to a commissar of art in revolutionary Russia, to the position of a world-famous French artist. This book presents for the first time a comprehensive collection of Chagall's public statements on art and culture. The documents and interviews shed light on his rich, versatile, and enigmatic art from within his own mental world. The book raises the problems of a multi-cultural artist with several intersecting identities and the tensions between modernist form and cultural representation in twentieth-century art. It reveals the travails and achievements of his life as a Jew in the twentieth century and his perennial concerns with Jewish identity and destiny, Yiddish literature, and the state of Israel. This collection includes annotations and introductions of the Chagall texts by the renowned scholar Benjamin Harshav that elucidate the texts and convey the changing cultural contexts of Chagall's life. Also featured is the translation by Benjamin and Barbara Harshav of the first book about Chagall's work, the 1918 Russian The Art of Marc Chagall.
Download or read book The Dream of Social Justice and Bad Moral Luck written by Alice Nakhimovsky and published by Academic Studies PRess. This book was released on 2024-02-20 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Dream of Social Justice and Bad Moral Luck examines the intertwined lives of five women and three men, Russian Jews in the first half of the twentieth century, as their belief in social transformation unraveled. The book looks at why these eight people bought into the dream, and what they did when things went bad. Under what circumstances did they bow to political pressures antithetical to the ideas they professed, and under what circumstances did they resist, even heroically? Political cowardice is a constant theme, but so is moral resistance that had no point beyond an individual’s conscience.
Download or read book Diasporic Modernisms written by Allison Schachter and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011-11-04 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pairing the two concepts of diaspora and modernism, Allison Schachter formulates a novel approach to modernist studies and diasporic cultural production. Diasporic Modernisms illuminates how the relationships between migrant writers and dispersed readers were registered in the innovative practices of modernist prose fiction. The Jewish writers discussed-including S. Y. Abramovitsh, Yosef Chaim Brenner, Dovid Bergelson, Leah Goldberg, Gabreil Preil, and Kadia Molodowsky--embraced diaspora as a formal literary strategy to reflect on the historical conditions of Jewish language culture. Spanning from 1894 to 1974, the book traces the development of this diasporic aesthetic in the shifting centers of Hebrew and Yiddish literature, including Odessa, Jerusalem, Berlin, Tel Aviv, and New York. Through an analysis of Jewish writing, Schachter theorizes how modernist literary networks operate outside national borders in minor and non-national languages. Offering the first comparative literary history of Hebrew and Yiddish modernist prose, Diasporic Modernisms argues that these two literary histories can no longer be separated by nationalist and monolingual histories. Instead, the book illuminates how these literary languages continue to animate each other, even after the creation of a Jewish state, with Hebrew as its national language.
