Growing up, Daniel seemed like a model son: a student activist blessed with easy charm and a fluid intelligence, who believed that he was heir to a better and brighter future. When that dream faded, he drifted from his family and into a rootless life, marked by wasted possibility.Bearing the Body begins when Daniel’s younger brother, Nathan, a medical resident in Boston, learns that Daniel has died in San Francisco. The circumstances are unclear, and the police are involved. Nathan, who suffers from chronic anger and uncontrollable compulsions, travels to New York to inform their father, Sol, of Daniel’s death. Sol is an Auschwitz survivor who has spent most of his adult energy compiling an archive of the fates of Hitler’s victims. Due in part to this obsessive research, he has lost touch with his sons. He nevertheless decides to join Nathan on a trip to the West Coast, where both men hope to learn more about Daniel’s untimely death. In San Francisco they meet Abby and her son, Ben, who were Daniel’s companions in a life that his family never knew about or shared.A moving study of isolation and its costs, Bearing the Body is a book about history and memory, about family and loss. Most of all, it is a book about the past, which, far from receding quietly, weighs ever more heavily on those who hope to leave it behind

A remarkable insight into Jewish history in Britain, 'My Mother's House' is a poignant story of belonging, nationhood and identity set in Wales, England and Palestine. The first novel from the acclaimed author of Eunice Fleet - a poignant story of belonging, nationhood and identity set in Wales, England and Palestine. First novel from the acclaimed author of EUNICE FLEET a poignant story of belonging, nationhood and identity set in Wales, England and Palestine Simon is a troubled young manborn in Wales, of Jewish heritage, and in love with Englishness and an English heiress. He determines to reject his Jewish and Welsh identity and the industrial valleys he grew up in and seeks to fulfil his ambition to rise in the Civil Service. His experiences in love and his professional life see him reject Edith on discovering that she is not what he believed her to be, and taking up arms in the fight against Englands enemies in the Great War. Ultimately, he must embrace his family and his heritage before he can experience a sense of wholeness. Simons experience raises questions of belonging, language, nationhood and identity that are as relevant now as they were in 1931 when the novel was first published. Lily Tobiass sensitive individual and communal portraits illuminate some of the most topical personal, social and political issues of the twenty-first century.

"Drawing on the remarkable events of her own life, ... author and Holocaust survivor Edith Bruck tells the story of Ditke, a young Jewish girl living in Hungary during World War II"--Page 4 of cover.

A collection of interrelated short stories centering on the author's Egyptian family and ancestors exiled from Castile.

It is September 1944; the war is going badly for the Germans, and they are in a hurry to complete their 'final solution'. Compromises are being made on all sides, conditions are unspeakable, rumours are rife, but nothing definite is known of the Nazis' intentions. On the outskirts of a concentration camp in northern Bohemia three people - two eighteen-year-old men and a desperately lost young woman, Leah - are thrown together, sharing their precarious existence in an attic room. While the world disintegrates around them their relationships are charged with passion, their days filled with erotic and spiritual attraction. Caught in the web of their relationships, their futures are uncertain and any choices they have left to make will be made in the face of almost certain death...

A collection of essays, all published previously. The following deal with antisemitism:

A collection of essays, all published previously. The following deal with antisemitism:

They Won't Let You Live is the story of two small shop-owners - one Christian, one Jewish - in 1930s London. Simon Blumenfeld's 4th and final novel, first published in 1939, critically revisits the themes evoked by Shakespeare's The Merchant Of Venice. Blumenfeld sets out to confound the reader's prejudices and expectations in a plot that does not shy away from the difficult and the disturbing. In an ever-growing atmosphere of violence in both public and private life, Blumenfeld explores how language that springs from our emotions and misapprehensions shapes our world and, indeed, how it appears to us.

Poetry. Latino/Latina Studies. Jewish Studies. Translated from the Spanish by Antena. The narrator of TELA DE SEVOYA / ONIONCLOTH travels to Bulgaria, searching for traces of her Sephardic heritage. Her journey becomes an autobiographical and imagined exploration of childhood, diaspora, and the possibilities of her family language: Ladino or Judeo- Spanish, the living tongue spoken by descendants of the Jews expelled from Spain in 1492. Memoir, poetry, storytelling, songs, and dreams are interwoven in this visionary text--this tela or cloth that brings the past to life, if only for a moment, and that looks at the present though the lens of history. In 2012, TELA DE SEVOYA / ONIONCLOTH was awarded one of Mexico's most prestigious literary prizes, the Premio Xavier Villaurrutia, whose previous winners include Octavio Paz, Carlos Fuentes, and Mario Bellatin. "TELA DE SEVOYA / ONIONCLOTH is an absolutely extraordinary text... it successfully joins past and present, life and death, memory and imagination."--Juan Gelman "Readers will find, through this tale of the relationship between a girl and her embittered grandmother, an entirely singular world narrated from the point of view of an 'I' whose range exceeds the territory of any private life."--Mario Bellatin

Rafael, a young Jewish boy living in Spain during the Inquisition, wants to have a Bar Mitzvah and when his father opposes it, Rafael leaves, meets and falls in love with Miriam, and journeys with her toward Safed, Israel, the spiritual home of mystical Jews.

Claper is a novel of Venezuelan Jewish life originally published in Spanish in 1987. Narrated by a father, a first-generation emigrant from Eastern Europe, and his daughter, a second-generation Jewish Venezuelan, it tells a classic story of the twentieth-century Jewish experience, of Old World struggles for economic survival and New World struggles for acceptance and independence. The novel's appeal lies in the author's success in rendering two diverse voices convincingly, and in so doing representing a range of immigrant and post immigrant experiences.

“Jewish stories,” writes Adam Biro, “resemble every people’s stories.” Yet at the same time there is no better way to understand the soul, history, millennial suffering, or, crucially, the joys of the Jewish people than through such tales—“There’s nothing,” writes Biro, “more revelatory of the Jewish being.” With Is It Good for the Jews? Biro offers a sequel to his acclaimed collection of stories Two Jews on a Train . Through twenty-nine tales—some new, some old, but all finely wrought and rich in humor—Biro spins stories of characters coping with the vicissitudes and reverses of daily life, while simultaneously painting a poignant portrait of a world of unassimilated Jewish life that has largely been lost to the years. From rabbis competing to see who is the most humble, to the father who uses suicide threats to pressure his children into visiting, to three men berated by the Almighty himself for playing poker, Biro populates his stories with memorable characters and absurd—yet familiar—situations, all related with a dry wit and spry prose style redolent of the long tradition of Jewish storytelling. A collection simultaneously of foibles and fables, adversity and affection, Is It Good for the Jews? reminds us that if in the beginning was the word, then we can surely be forgiven for expecting a punch line to follow one of these days.

From 1946 through the 1970s, Rabbi David Hartman, Congregational minister Martin Cooper, and their wives maintain a friendship that withstands small-town prejudices and envies and larger turmoil

From Kirkus Reviews paper 0-8142-0780-4 A second collection from English professor (U. of Mass.) and critic Clayton, the first winner of the Sandstone Prize for Short Fiction. Clayton's new volume is, in many ways, a maturing of the concerns of his previous collection. As in Bodies of the Rich (1984), he focuses on the minutiae of daily life as a reflection of the ways in which his intelligent, middle-class protagonists express and experience loss. In Radiance, the protagonists are almost all Jews, assimilated to varying degrees but aware of and generally comfortable with their ethnic/religious identity. What they arent comfortable with is their lives--marriage as an act of settling for less, marriages that are failing or have long since dissolved, friends and family who die, parents who commit suicide. For several of his low-key heroes--in ``Glory,'' ``Open-Heart Surgery,'' and the most fully realized piece here, ``The Man Who Could See Radiance''--coping with loss takes the form of a sort of magic realist device in which people see and feel beyond their senses, becoming aware of a larger presence that may be understood as having a religious significance. The use of this device in three stories out of only ten, though, makes for a certain repetitiveness. Two tales, ``Muscles'' and ``Time Exposure,'' about episodes in an unhappy marriage that involves the husband's domineering brotherall as experienced by the couples sonhave the feeling of sketches for a novel-in-progress; theyre affecting but seem unfinished. Still, Clayton's best, ``Talking to Charlie'' and ``History Lessons,'' have a poignance that comes from an intense sensitivity to the quiet suffering that most often goes unexpressed in the rush of daily life. Uneven but distinctive short fiction from an author with a genuine gift. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. Product Description A collection of short stories about the lives of assimilated American Jews, who attempt to reach an opening into the spiritual realm while dealing with unsuccessful marriages, middle-class life, and the unhappiness of existence Review ...[Clayton writes] with compassion, simplicity and power... -- The New York Times Book Review, Patrick Farrell

Part Bildungsroman, part hymn to the city of Glasgow, Jericho Sleep Alone is without a doubt the finest book written about the Scots-Jewish experience. From Bar Mitzvah to an unfulfilling teaching career, Jericho Eli Broock finds himself a perennial outsider and unlucky in love, neither his on-off affair with the flighty Ninna or his financially prudent dalliance with the homely Camilla coming to fruition. Will the sometimes oppressive aid of the Jewish community make all well in his world?