1045 results for "Jewish Fiction"

The Garden

Carol Matas
During the struggle to create the state of Israel in 1947, Ruth Mendolsohn, who helped young refugees flee Poland in "After the War", is a member of the Haganah, a group of Israeli fighters that believes only in self-defense. Her brother thinks that terrorism is necessary to get results. War seems inevitable and both will have to fight. Will they find the security of a place they can call home?
Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing 1998-12 144 pages

Caspian Rain

Gina B. Nahai
From the best-selling author of Moonlight on the Avenue of Faith , a stirring, lyrical tale that offers American readers unique insight into the inner workings of Iranian society. In the decade before the Islamic Revolution, Iran is a country on the brink of explosion. Twelve-year-old Yaas is born into an already divided family: Her father is the son of wealthy Iranian Jews who are integrated into the country’s upper-class, mostly Muslim elite; her mother was raised in the slums of South Tehran, one street away from the old Jewish ghetto. Yaas spends her childhood navigating the many layers of Iranian society. Her task, already difficult because of the disparity in her parents’ worldview, becomes all the more critical when her father falls in love with a beautiful woman from a noble Muslim family. As her parents’ marriage begins to crumble and the country moves ever closer to revolution, Yaas is plagued by a mysterious and terrifying illness. But despite her ailment, when she learns that her father is about to abandon her and her mother—to immigrate to America with his mistress—Yaas is determined to save herself and her family. At once a cultural exploration of an as-yet-unfamiliar society and a psychological study of the effects of loss, Caspian Rain takes the reader inside the tragic and fascinating world of a brave young girl struggling against impossible odds. From the Hardcover edition.
Doubleday Canada, Limited 2008-08-19 304 pages

Reunion

Uhlman, Fred
"The romantic forested landscape of southwestern Germany in 1932 is the setting for the birth of a friendship that will haunt sixteen-year-old Hans Schwarz for the rest of his life. Hans is Jewish, the son of a middle-class doctor who is confident that the rise of the Nazis is only "a temporary illness" afflicting his beloved country. Hans's newest classmate, Count Konradin von Hohenfels, is a dazzling young aristocrat whose glamorous mother keeps a portrait of Hitler on her dresser. Hans is immediately drawn to Konradin, and thrilled when a close bond forms between the two boys, forged by common interests that set them apart from their classmates. But their loyalties are soon tested in ways they could not have imagined. Three decades later, from the vantage point of New York City, Hans once again confronts this life-shaping episode from his childhood, through a stunning revelation that he stumbles upon by chance. In its story of simple friendship undone by not-so-simple times, Reunion combines the explosive compression of a fable with the emotional depth of an epic novel many times its length. Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket. Contemporary Classics include an introduction, a select bibliography, and a chronology of the author's life and times."--
Alfred A. Knopf 2022-11-01 74 pages

A hero of France: a novel

Furst, Alan
"From the bestselling master espionage writer, hailed by Vince Flynn as "the best in the business," comes a riveting novel about the French Resistance in Nazi-occupied Paris. Paris, 1941. The City of Light, occupied by the Nazis, is dark and silent at night. Streetlamps are painted blue and apartment windows draped or shuttered in the blackout ordered by the Germans. But when the clouds part, the silvery moonlight defies authority, and so does a leader of the French Resistance, known as Mathieu. In Paris and in the farmhouses, barns, and churches of the French countryside, small groups of ordinary men and women are determined to take down the occupying forces of Adolf Hitler. Mathieu leads one such Resistance cell, helping downed British airmen escape back to England. This suspenseful, fast-paced thriller by the author whom Vince Flynn calls "the most talented espionage novelist of our generation" captures this dangerous time as no one ever has before. Alan Furst brings Paris and occupied France to life, along with courageous citizens who outmaneuver collaborators, informers, blackmailers, and spies, risking everything to fulfill perilous clandestine missions. Aiding Mathieu as part of his covert network are Lisette, a seventeen-year-old student and courier; Max de Lyon, an arms dealer turned nightclub owner; Chantal, a woman of class and confidence; Daniel, a Jewish teacher fueled by revenge; Joëlle, who falls in love with Mathieu; and Annemarie, a willful aristocrat with deep roots in France, and a desire to act. As the German military police heighten surveillance, Mathieu and his team face a new threat, dispatched by the Reich to destroy them all. Shot through with the author's trademark fine writing, breathtaking suspense, and intense scenes of seduction and passion, Alan Furst's A Hero of France is at once one of the finest novels written about the French Resistance and the most gripping novel yet by the living master of the spy thriller. Praise for Alan Furst "Furst never stops astounding me."--Tom Hanks "Suspenseful and sophisticated. No espionage author, it seems, is better at summoning the shifting moods and emotional atmosphere of Europe before the start of World War II than Alan Furst."--The Wall Street Journal "Though set in a specific place and time, Furst's books are like Chopin's nocturnes: timeless, transcendent, universal. One does not so much read them as fall under their spell."--Los Angeles Times "[Furst] remains at the top of his game."--The New York Times "A grandmaster of the historical espionage genre."--The Boston Globe"--
Random House 2016 234 pages

The Certificate

Isaac Bashevis Singer
It's 1922 and David Bendiger, an aspiring eighteen-and-a-half-year-old writer, arrives in Warsaw, penniless and homeless. His only contacts are Sonya, a young woman with whom he has had amorous dealings in the village they have left, and a Zionist functionary who informs him he has qualified for a certificate permitting him to emigrate to Palestine. But in order to make the journey David must enter into a fictitious marriage with a woman so eager to get to Palestine that she will pay all the expenses. While David waits for his certificate, he becomes involved not only with Sonya but with Edusha, the sexually avant-garde Communist Party member in whose apartment he finds a temporary haven; and with Minna, the well-to-do young woman who wants to join her fiance in Palestine and agrees to "marry" David. Grappling with romantic, political, and youthful turmoil, David also confronts his literary future and religious past when his older brother - a writer disillusioned by a recent sojourn in Russia - and his father, an Orthodox rabbi, both turn up in Warsaw. The Certificate was serialized in Yiddish in 1967, but may have been written much earlier. The translator, Leonard Wolf, in a postscript calls it "a very young man's book" and "certainly the most playful of Singer's long fictions", with its alternately comic and poignant shifts in plot. Young David's passions for women, philosophizing, Jewish religious speculation, and Walter Mitty-like fantasies make The Certificate a captivating novel in the great tradition of a master storyteller.
Macmillan 1992 231 pages

They called her Rebbe, the maiden of Ludomir

Winkler, Gershon
Chana Rochel Werbermacher was a remarkable child, imbued with a love of Torah and a fervent desire to learn. Her destiny beckoned, and she became a scholar-and the focus of great controversy in the shtetl of Ludomir and the Jewish community at large. Many sought her advice. They called her "Rebbe," for that is what she was. The story of her struggle, her courage, and her life will be an inspiration for generations to come. You will not forget her.
Judaica Press 1991 235 pages

The dinner party: a novel

Janowitz, Brenda
"This Passover Seder is not just any Passover Seder. Yes, there will be a quick service and then a festive meal afterwards, but this night is different from all other nights. This will be the night the Golds of Greenwich meet the Rothschilds of New York City. The Rothschilds are the stuff of legends. They control banks, own vineyards in Napa, diamond mines in Africa, and even an organic farm somewhere in the Midwest that produces the most popular Romaine lettuce consumed in this country. And now, Sylvia Gold's daughter is dating one of them. When Sylvia finds out that her youngest of three is going to bring her new boyfriend to the Seder, she's giddy. When she finds out that his parents are coming, too, she darn near faints. Making a good impression is all she thinks about. Well, almost. She still has to consider her other daughter, Sarah, who'll be coming with her less than appropriate beau and his overly dramatic Italian mother. But the drama won't stop there. Because despite the food and the wine, despite the new linen and the fresh flowers, the holidays are about family. Long forgotten memories come to the surface. Old grievances play out. And Sylvia Gold has to learn how to let her family go"--
St. Martin's Griffin 2016-04-12 288 pages

Yiddish for Pirates

Gary Barwin
Shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and nominated for the Governor-General's Award for Literature, a hilarious, swashbuckling yet powerful tale of pirates, buried treasure and a search for the Fountain of Youth, told in the ribald, philosophical voice of a 500-year-old Jewish parrot. Set in the years around 1492, Yiddish for Pirates recounts the compelling story of Moishe, a Bar Mitzvah boy who leaves home to join a ship's crew, where he meets Aaron, the polyglot parrot who becomes his near-constant companion. From a present-day Florida nursing home, this wisecracking yet poetic bird guides us through a world of pirate ships, Yiddish jokes and treasure maps. But Inquisition Spain is a dangerous time to be Jewish and Moishe joins a band of hidden Jews trying to preserve some forbidden books. He falls in love with a young woman, Sarah; though they are separated by circumstance, Moishe's wanderings are motivated as much by their connection as by his quest for loot and freedom. When all Jews are expelled from Spain, Moishe travels to the Caribbean with the ambitious Christopher Columbus, a self-made man who loves his creator. Moishe eventually becomes a pirate and seeks revenge on the Spanish while seeking the ultimate booty: the Fountain of Youth. This outstanding New Face of Fiction is filled with Jewish takes on classic pirate tales--fights, prison escapes, and exploits on the high seas--but it's also a tender love story, between Moishe and Sarah, and between Aaron and his "shoulder," Moishe. Rich with puns, colourful language, post-colonial satire and Kabbalistic hijinks, Yiddish for Pirates is also a compelling examination of mortality, memory, identity and persecution from one of this country's most talented writers.
National Geographic Books 2016-10-12 352 pages

Necessary angels: tradition and modernity in Kafka, Benjamin, and Scholem

Alter, Robert
In four elegant chapters, Robert Alter explains the prismlike radiance created by the association of three modern masters, Franz Kafka, Walter Benjamin, and Gershom Scholem. The volume pinpoints the intersections of these divergent witnesses to the modern condition of doubt, the no-man's-land between traditional religion and modern secular culture.Scholem, the devoted Zionist and master historian of Jewish mysticism, and Benjamin, the Marxist cultural critic, dedicated much of their thought and correspondence to Kafka, the explorer in fiction of radical alienation. Kafka's sense of spiritual complexities was an inspiration to both thinkers in their resistance to the murderous simplification of totalitarian ideology. In Necessary Angels Alter uncovers a moment when the future of modernism is revealed in its preoccupation with the past. The angel of the title is first Kafka's: on June 25, 1914, the writer recorded in his diary a dream vision of an angel that turned into the painted wooden figurehead of a ship. In 1940, at the end of his life, Walter Benjamin devoted the ninth of his Theses on the Philosophy of History to a meditation on an angel by the artist Paul Klee, first quoting a poem he had written on that painting. In Benjamin's vision, the figure from Klee becomes an angel of history, sucked into the future by the storm of progress, his face looking back to Eden. Benjamin bequeathed the Klee oil painting to Scholem, it hung in the living room of Scholem's home on Abarbanel Streetin Jerusalem until 1989, when his widow placed it in the Israel Museum. Alter's focus on the epiphanic force of memory on these three great modernists shows with sometimes startling, sometimes prophetic clarity that a complete break with tradition is not essential to modernism. Necessary Angels itself continues the necessary discovery of the future in the past. --
Harvard University Press 1991-01 131 pages

The death of the adversary

Keilson, Hans
Written while Hans Keilson was in hiding during World War II, The Death of the Adversary is the self-portrait of a young man helplessly fascinated by an unnamed "adversary" whom he watches rise to power in 1930s Germany. It is never stated outright that our narrator is Jewish, nor that his adversary is Adolf Hitler, though there can be no mistaking either fact. It shows the minutiae of fear, anger, denial and perseverance that accompany life under the shadow tyranny. It is a tale of horror, not only in its evocation of Hitler's gathering menace but also in its hero's desperate attempt to discover logic where none exists. The Death of the Adversary is a lost classic of modern fiction
Vintage Classic 2012 208 pages

The innocents

Segal, Francesca
WINNER OF THE COSTA FIRST NOVEL AWARD 2012 LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2013 WINNER OF THE BETTY TRASK AWARD 2013 WINNER OF THE SAMI ROHR PRIZE FOR JEWISH LITERATURE 2013 What if everything you'd ever wanted was no longer enough? Adam and Rachel are getting married at last. Childhood sweethearts whose lives and families have been intertwined for years; theirs is set to be the wedding of the year. But then Rachel's cousin Ellie makes an unexpected return to the family fold. Beautiful, reckless and troubled, Ellie represents everything that Adam has tried all his life to avoid - and everything that is missing from his world. As the long-awaited wedding approaches, Adam is torn between duty and temptation, security and freedom, and must make a choice that will break either one heart, or many. 'Wonderful...witty...an astonishingly accomplished debut which will draw comparisons between Segal and Zadie Smith and Monica Ali' Stylist
Vintage Books 2013 436 pages