Download or read book ZALMEN OR THE MADNESS OF GOD written by Elie Wiesel and published by Schocken. This book was released on 2013-04-10 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On Yom Kippur eve in 1965, Elie Wiesel found himself in Russia, “in a synagogue crowded with people. The air was stifling. The cantor was chanting . . . Suddenly a mad thought crossed my mind: Something is about to happen; any moment now the Rabbi will wake up, shake himself, pound the pulpit and cry out, shout his pain, his rage, his truth. I felt the tension building up inside me; the wait became unbearable. But nothing happened . . . It was too late. The Rabbi no longer had the strength to imagine himself free.” In Zalmen, or The Madness of God, Wiesel gives his Rabbi that strength, the courage to voice his oppression and isolation, and the result is a passionate cry. This play illuminates not only the plight of the Soviet Jew, but the anguish of individuals everywhere who must survive—and yet long for something more than mere survival. (Adapted for the stage by Marion Wiesel.)

Download or read book The People of Godlbozhits written by Leyb Rashkin and published by Syracuse University Press. This book was released on 2017-09-27 with total page 507 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 1936, The People of Godlbozhits depicts the ordinary yet deeply complex life of a Jewish community, following the fortunes of one family and its many descendants. Set in a shtetl in Poland between the world wars, Rashkin’s satiric novel offers a vivid cross-section not only of the residents’ triumphs and struggles but also of their dense and complicated web of humanity. With biting humor and acerbic wit, Rashkin portrays the stratified society—the petty bourgeoisie, artisans, and proletariat—observing the crookedness at every level. The novel’s brisk and oftentimes lively Yiddish prose and its colorful and irascible cast of characters give readers a Yiddish Yoknapatawpha in all its tragic absurdity.

Download or read book The Last Consolation Vanished written by Zalmen Gradowski and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2022-11-15 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A unique and haunting first-person Holocaust account by Zalmen Gradowski, a Sonderkommando prisoner killed in Auschwitz. On October 7, 1944, a group of Jewish prisoners in Auschwitz obtained explosives and rebelled against their Nazi murderers. It was a desperate uprising that was defeated by the end of the day. More than four hundred prisoners were killed. Filling a gap in history, The Last Consolation Vanished is the first complete English translation and critical edition of one prisoner’s powerful account of life and death in Auschwitz, written in Yiddish and buried in the ashes near Crematorium III. Zalmen Gradowski was in the Sonderkommando (special squad) at Auschwitz, a Jewish prisoner given the unthinkable task of ushering Jewish deportees into the gas chambers, removing their bodies, salvaging any valuables, transporting their corpses to the crematoria, and destroying all evidence of their murders. Sonderkommandos were forcibly recruited by SS soldiers; when they discovered the horror of their assignment, some of them committed suicide or tried to induce the SS to kill them. Despite their impossible situation, many Sonderkommandos chose to resist in two interlaced ways: planning an uprising and testifying. Gradowski did both, by helping to lead a rebellion and by documenting his experiences. Within 120 scrawled notebook pages, his accounts describe the process of the Holocaust, the relentless brutality of the Nazi regime, the assassination of Czech Jews, the relationships among the community of men forced to assist in this nightmare, and the unbearable separation and death of entire families, including his own. Amid daily unimaginable atrocities, he somehow wrote pages that were literary, sometimes even lyrical—hidden where and when one would least expect to find them. The October 7th rebellion was completely crushed and Gradowski was killed in the process, but his testimony lives on. His extraordinary and moving account, accompanied by a foreword and afterword by Philippe Mesnard and Arnold I. Davidson, is a voice speaking to us from the past on behalf of millions who were silenced. Their story must be shared.

Download or read book Profiles of a Lost World written by Hirsz Abramowicz and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 406 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in a Yiddish edition in 1958, Profiles of a Lost World is a source of information about Eastern Europe before World War II as well as an touchstone for understanding a rich and complex cultural environment. Hirsz Abramowicz (1881-1960), a prominent Jewish educator, writer and cultural activist, knew that world and wrote about it, and his writings provide an eyewitness account of Jewish life during the first half of the twentieth century. Abramowicz was a witness to war, revolution and major cultural transformations in the Jewish world. His essays, written and originally published in Yiddish between 1920 and 1955, document the local history of Lithuanian Jewry in rural and small-town settings, and in the city of Vilna-the "Jerusalem of Lithuania"-which was a major center of East European Jewish intellectual and cultural life. They shed light on the daily life of Jews and the flourishing of modern Yiddish culture in Eastern Europe during the early 20th century and offer a personal perspective on the rise of Jewish radical politics. The collection incorporates local history of Lithuanian Jewry, shtetl folklore, observations on rural occupations, Jewish education, and life under German occupation during World War I. It also includes a series of profiles of leading social and intellectual Jewish personalities of the author's day, from traditional scholars to revolutionaries. Together the selections provide a blend of social and personal history and a window on a lost world.

Download or read book Pioneers written by S. An-sky and published by Syracuse University Press. This book was released on 2017-05-11 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When young Zalmen Itzkowitz steps off the train on a dark, dreary day at the close of the nineteenth century, the residents of Miloslavka have no idea what’s in store for them. Zalmen is a freethinker who has come to the rural town to earn his living as a tutor. Yet, rather than teach Hebrew, he plans to teach his students the Russian language and other secular subjects. Residents of the town quickly become divided, with some regarding Itzkowitz as the devil’s messenger and others supportive of his progressive ideas. Set during the time of the Haskalah, the great Jewish Enlightenment that was sweeping through Europe, Pioneers is a charming tale of one ambivalent young man’s attempt to join the movement and a compassionate portrait of one shtetl on the brink of transformation.

Download or read book The Maccabaean written by and published by . This book was released on 1904 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Fear of Fiction written by David Neal Miller and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2012-02-01 with total page 187 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: David Neal Miller's Fear of Fiction is the first book-length study that begins with the understanding that Singer is truly a Yiddish writer in language and culture. With the exception of a handful of articles, American critical examination of Isaac Bashevis Singer's work has been devoted to Singer's work in English—to those pieces he himself has selected for translation. This American Nobel laureate is part of a long tradition of Yiddish literature, and he still writes in that language. Working exclusively with Singer's Yiddish texts—many of the pieces discussed here are not available in English—Miller examines Singer's narrative strategies, his blurring of the distinctions between fiction and reportage. Fear of Fiction captures an intriguing paradox of Singer's writing: Singer fictionalizes the factual and historicizes the imaginative. Miller demonstrates that Singer is no "inspired innocent," but that this blending of genres is the work of a craftsman who uses genre to mediate between the world and the imagination. The book is enriched by Miller's careful and sensitive translations of many illustrative Yiddish passages. Fear of Fiction is both erudite and entertaining. Miller not only examines Singer's skillful undermining of our expectations of different genres, but also draws the reader into Singer's work as a whole. This book will fascinate both the scholar and the sophisticated reader of Singer.

Download or read book The Forgotten written by Elie Wiesel and published by Schocken. This book was released on 2011-09-14 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Distinguished psychotherapist and survivor Elhanan Rosenbaum is losing his memory to an incurable disease. Never having spoken of the war years before, he resolves to tell his son about his past—the heroic parts as well as the parts that fill him with shame—before it is too late. Elhanan's story compels his son to go to the Romanian village where the crime that continues to haunt his father was committed. There he encounters the improbable wisdom of a gravedigger who leads him to the grave of his grandfather and to the truths that bind one generation to another.

Download or read book Maatschappij Belangen written by and published by . This book was released on 1876 with total page 686 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Arguing with God written by Anson Laytner and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 1998 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As an old proverb puts it, "Two Jews, three opinions." In the long, rich, tumultuous history of the Jewish people, this characteristic contentiousness has often been extended even unto Heaven. Arguing with God is a highly original and utterly absorbing study that skates along the edge of this theological thin ice--at times verging dangerously close to blasphemy--yet also a source of some of the most poignant and deeply soulful expressions of human anguish and yearning. The name Israel literally denotes one who "wrestles with God." And, from Jacob's battle with the angel to Elie Wiesel's haunting questions about the Holocaust that hang in the air like still smoke over our own age, Rabbi Laytner admirably details Judaism's rich and pervasive tradition of calling God to task over human suffering and experienced injustice. It is a tradition that originated in the biblical period itself. Abraham, Moses, Elijah, and others all petitioned for divine intervention in their lives, or appealed forcefully to God to alter His proposed decree. Other biblical arguments focused on personal or communal suffering and anger: Jeremiah, Job, and certain Psalms and Lamentations. Rabbi Laytner delves beneath the surface of these "blasphemies" and reveals how they implicitly helped to refute the claims of opponent religions and advance Jewish doctrines and teachings.

Download or read book Landmark Yiddish Plays written by and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2010-03-10 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offering snapshots of a pivotal era in which the Jews of Europe made the transition from a traditional to a more modern world, the Yiddish plays translated and collected here wrestle with issues that continue to concern us today: changing gender roles, generational conflict, class divisions, and religious persecution. In their introduction to the volume, Joel Berkowitz and Jeremy Dauber place the plays in the context of the development of modern drama and Yiddish drama and examine their treatment of social, political, and religious issues. The many ways in which the plays address these issues make them transcend their own time, exciting a new generation of readers and theatergoers.

Download or read book The Collected Stories of Pinchas Goldhar written by Pinchas Goldhar and published by Hybrid Publishers. This book was released on 2018-09-01 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of stories by Australia's most significant Yiddish writer translated into English, some never before published. Goldhar was the literary voice of his generation, as well as a leading cultural and social commentator. This new collection will ensure that this wonderful writer is not forgotten. Pinchas Goldhar (1901-1947) arrived in Australia in 1926, escaping growing anti-Semitism in Poland. Here he laid the foundations of the now substantial literature on Jews in this country. He wrote short stories about Polish Jewish immigrants and, despite the fact that he wrote in Yiddish, his work made a deep impression on Australian writers and critics through English translations. He wrote of the tensions, trials and mental agony of lonely migrants uprooted from their former homes trying to adjust themselves to life in a new world.

Download or read book The Hanukkah Anthology written by Philip Goodman and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2018-07 with total page 601 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Back by popular demand, the classic JPS holiday anthologies remain essential and relevant in our digital age. Unequaled in-depth compilations of classic and contemporary writings, they have long guided rabbis, cantors, educators, and other readers seeking the origins, meanings, and varied celebrations of the Jewish festivals. The Hanukkah Anthology delves into the stories and messages of Hanukkah as they have unfolded in Jewish literature over the past two thousand years: biblical intimations of the festival, postbiblical writings, selections from the Talmud and midrashim, excerpts from medieval books, home liturgies, laws and customs, observances in different nations, stories and poems, art, and recipes. This timeless volume features many works by prominent authors, including Herman Wouk, Judah L. Magnes, Chaim Potok, Heinrich Heine, Emma Lazarus, Howard Fast, Sholom Aleichem, Curt Leviant, I. L. Peretz, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

Download or read book A Consuming Fire written by John K. Roth and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2016-08-26 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No catastrophe challenges treasured beliefs and cherished hopes more than the Holocaust, Nazi Germany's genocide against the European Jews during World War II. Fueled by virulent, racist anti-Semitism, that disaster, which targeted Judaism as well as every Jewish life within the Third Reich's lethal grasp, still underlines the fragile status of human rights and ethics, still undercuts optimism about human "progress," and still undermines confidence about God's moral authority, providential engagement with human history, and even God's existence itself. Elie Wiesel, who died in 2016, was one of the relatively few Jews who survived Auschwitz. Before and after receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986, he wrote profoundly in varied genres about the reverberations of the Holocaust. In A Consuming Fire, John K. Roth, a Christian philosopher transformed by Wiesel's writings and friendship, explores how to cope constructively with the daunting realization that Christianity and Western philosophy were deeply implicated in the Nazi genocide--so much so that, in the case of Christianity, one can credibly argue: No Christianity = No Holocaust. A Consuming Fire is not a biography, a literary analysis, a philosophical critique, or a history. Instead it offers a story all its own--one that seeks to enliven a post-Holocaust Christian humanism, an outlook that Roth shares by underscoring his own journey, his quest to be responsible and accountable, as he responds to Holocaust challenges intensified poignantly and insistently by Wiesel's testimony.

Download or read book The Reform Advocate written by and published by . This book was released on 1910 with total page 1196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Eliyahu s Branches written by Chaim Freedman and published by . This book was released on 1997 with total page 714 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "After decades of research, a noted Israeli genealogist has produced a book about the Vilna Gaon that contains a rare portrait of the illustrious 18th-century Eastern European sage, a discussion of his substantial influence on the Jewish world and a thoroughly-documented family tree listing more than 20,000 descendants of the rabbi and his siblings ... Besides exploring the life and times of the Vilna Gaon, the 704-page book identifies, provides documentation for more than 20,000 descendants of the Vilna Gaon and his siblings. There is an index listing all persons in the book. The Gaon's descendants seem as diverse as the Jewish people itself, Freedman said. Some descendants were prominent rabbis and academicians. Some were involved in a rare agricultural settlement experiment in Russia, while others variously served in the American Civil War and emigrated to places like England and Australia well before the mass migrations of the 1880s.

Download or read book A Father s Love written by Luisa Smith and published by iUniverse. This book was released on 2000-09 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Father's Love is an autobiographical novel about childhood suffering and endurance. The story opens in 1951, when Leah, age six, a child of Holocaust survivors, arrives with her family in New York from Displaced Person's Camps in Germany. What follows is a classic tale of immigrant struggle and success, as well as its antithesis: family dysfunction and child sexual abuse. Unable to comprehend or process her father's molestation and nighttime sexual attacks, Leah becomes increasingly fearful and dissociated. She begins to live a dual existence. At school she learns English, excels in her studies and adapts to her American environment. At home, where the traumas and losses of war remain her parents' daily reality, life is chaotic and sometimes violent. While Leah absorbs her family's suffering, she must also silently cope with the mysterious assaults of an "unknown" assailant. As she strives for insight and comprehension, she begins to view her parents with a dispassionate eye, and is thus well on her way to forging her own identity.