Kadya Molodowsky (1894-1975) was among the most accomplished and prolific of modern Yiddish poets. Between 1927 and 1974, she published six major books of poetry, as well as fiction, plays, essays, and children's tales. Molodowsky participated in nearly every aspect of Yiddish literary culture that existed in her lifetime, first in Poland, where she lived until 1935, when she emigrated, and then in America. Before her emigration, Molodowsky taught young children in the Yiddish schools of Warsaw. In New York, she supported herself by writing for the Yiddish press and founded a literary journal, Svive (Surroundings), which she edited for nearly thirty years. Briefly during the early 1950s, Molodowsky wrote and edited Yiddish publications in the new state of Israel. She returned there in 1971 to receive the Itzik Manger Prize, the most prestigious award in Yiddish letters.

A summer in paradise. That's all Marne wants. That's all she can think of when she asks her parents permission to spend the summer in Hawaii with Aunt Carole and her family. But Marne quickly realizes her visit isn't going to be just about learning to surf and morning runs along the beach, despite the cute surfer boy she keeps bumping into. For one thing, Aunt Carole isn't even Aunt Carole anymore—she's Aunt Chaya, married to a Chasidic rabbi and deeply rooted in her religious community. Nothing could be more foreign to Marne, and fitting into this new culture—and house full of kids—is a challenge. But as she settles into her newfound family's daily routine, she begins to think about spirituality, identity, and finding a place in the world in a way she never has before. This rich novel is a window into a different life and gets to the very heart of faith, identity, and family ties. From the Hardcover edition.

The untold life story of All-of-a-Kind Family author Sydney Taylor, highlighting her dramatic influence on American children's literature.

Jewish stories set in Jerusalem, adapted from the Talmud and Midrash, Hasidic sources, and oral tradition, with origins in the Middle East, Eastern Europe, Spain, Italy, and Greece.

In 1939 Sweden, two Jewish sisters wait for their parents to join them in fleeing the Nazis in Austria, but while eight-year-old Nellie settles in quickly, twelve-year-old Stephie feels stranded at the end of the world, with a foster mother who is as cold and unforgiving as the island on which they live.

Memoirs of a Jew who, as an eight-year-old boy in 1944, was placed by his parents (along with his sister) in a Catholic orphanage in the town of Žilina, Slovakia. The family had converted to Catholicism in order to hide from the Nazi occupiers. His parents were deported to Auschwitz; only his mother survived. Breznitz now lives in Israel.

Writing a Jewish Life chronicles novelist Lev Raphael's struggle to claim both his religious and sexual identities, and the happiness he subsequently found. Until he reached his mid-20s, the author felt alienated from other Jews, ambivalent about his homosexuality; or as he puts it, "twice strange ... in each [community], different, lesser, ashamed." A son of Holocaust survivors, Raphael grew up in an unmistakably Jewish but nonreligious home. However, as an adult he initiated his own affiliations with Judaism: He had a bar mitzvah at age 30, went to Israel twice, and fell in love with a Jewish man. It was "coming out as a Jew,' he writes, that "ultimately made it possible for me to come out as a gay man and then work at uniting the two identities." Attesting to his journey is the contrast between his confused childhood and the joyful domestic life he now shares with his lover, Gersh, and their two sons.

The rabbi came from the Slobodka Yeshiva; his congregation came from Broadway. The synagogue was a modest brick building a block from Broadway in the middle of that colorful New York neighborhood known fifty years ago as Hell's Kitchen. Between prayers on Yom Kippur you could hear a chorus of would-be Ruby Keelers tap-dancing in the rehearsal hall next door. This is the exuberant story of Bernard Birstein—his immigrant travels and travails in America, his ever-increasing family of five children and countless poor relations, and his adventurous rabbinical life. The narrator is his youngest daughter, Ann, the blond-haired enfant terrible who grew up to write six novels and now this captivating book.

Young people in Israel write about their experiences dealing with personal problems, handicaps, fears, and relationships with parents and others.

An informative memoir of kibbutz life that reveal a piece of Israel's early story that should not be forgotten.

Text: English, French (translation)

Jacob G. Rosenberg was born in Lodz, Poland, the youngest member of a working-class family. After the Germans occupied Poland, he was confined with his parents, two sisters, and their little girls in the Lodz Ghetto, from whch they were eventually transported to Auschwitz.

EAST OF TIME is a rendezvous of history and imagination, of realities and dreams, hopes and disenchantments. This extraordinary book, by turns stark and poetic, unfolds in a succession of short reminiscences that weave together into a shimmering tapestry depicting a lost world. The setting is Lodz, Poland, in the years of the author's childhood, when he witnessed the grand belief in a just new world overtaken by the cataclysmic events of the 1930s, imprisoned between the walls of ghettos, and finally silenced at Auschwitz. The book's touchstone is the determination of an entire community to remain human, even at the last frontier of life.

Examines what life was like for children - German, Polish, and Jewish - under Nazi rule, based mainly on the diaries and memoirs of 14 persons, five of them Jews: Yehuda Bacon, Janina Dawidowicz (Janina David), Thomas Geve, Dawid Sierakowiak, Miriam Wattenberg (Mary Berg). Pt. 2 (pp. 103-227), "The Race War", focuses on the experiences of the Jewish children, especially in the ghettos of Łódź and Warsaw, and includes the experiences of Bacon in Theresienstadt and Auschwitz. Provides examples of how the games of all these children reflected life and death around them.

From the practical...to the poignant...to the profound The Balancing Act is a book of the questions we have, and the answers we need. They come from men and women, old and young, newly religious and scions of generations of observant Jews. They range from

Winner of seven Molières, the Pulitzer Prize of France, Jean-Claude Grumberg is one of France's leading dramatists and a distinguished voice of modern European Jewry after the Shoah. His success in portraying contemporary Parisian Jews on the stage represents a new development in European theater and a new aesthetic expression of European Jewish experience and sensibility of the Holocaust and its aftermath, a perspective quite different from either the American or the Israeli one. Grumberg's Jews are French to their fingertips, yet they have been made more consciously Jewish by the war and the difficulties of reintegrating into a society in which too many neighbors denounced them or ignored their pleas to save their children. Affirming the new status of Jewish culture, Grumberg's plays insist on the recognition of Jewish identity and uniqueness within the majority societies of Europe. This volume offers the first English translation of three of Grumberg's prize-winning plays: The Workplace ( L'Atelier , 1979), On the Way to the Promised Land ( Vers toi Terre promise , 2006) and Mama's Coming Back, Poor Orphan ( Maman revient, pauvre orphelin , 1994). Presented in the order of the history they record and steeped in Grumberg's personal experience and insights into contemporary Parisian life, these plays serve as documentary witnesses that begin with the immediate postwar reality and continue up to the end of the twentieth century. Seth Wolitz provides notes on the plays' themes, structures, characters, and settings, along with an introduction that discusses Grumberg's place within the emergence of French-Jewish drama and a translation of an interview with the playwright himself.

Most research on intermarriage between Jews and non- Jews focuses on the United States. Th is volume takes a path-breaking approach, examining countries with smaller Jewish populations so as to better understand countries with larger Jewish populations. It focuses on intermarriage in Great Britain, France, Scandinavia, the Soviet Union, Mexico, Venezuela, Canada, South Africa, Australia, Argentina and Curacao, then applies the fi ndings to the United States. In earlier centuries such a volume might have yielded much diff erent conclusions. Th en Jews lived in more countries, intermarriage was not as prevalent, and social science had little to contribute. Before World War II, the Jewish population was dispersed much diff erently, and it continues to shift around the world because of both push and pull factors. Like demography, intermarriage is a dynamic process. What is true today was probably not true in the past, nor will it be true tomorrow. The contributors to this volume locate new forms of Jewish family life--single parents, gay/lesbian parents, adults without children, and couples with multiple backgrounds. Th ese multiple family forms raise a new question--what is a Jewish family--as well as a variety of related issues. Do women and men have diff erent roles in intermarriage? Does a family need two people to raise children? Should there be patrilineal descent? Where do adoption, single parenting, lesbian and gay identities, and more, fit into the picture? Broadly, what role does the family play in transmitting a group's culture from generation to generation? This volume presents a portrait of Jewish demography in the twenty-fi rst century, brilliantly interweaving global processes with signifi cant local variations.

Excerpt from Jewish Folk-Lore in the Middle Ages We look with other eyes on the heaped up treasures of Jewish aggadah, on the diamonds which oriental fancy made brilliant by a fiery inspiration. Brought under this new light cast on them they glitter and gleam in a thousand colours like the dew in the flower when lighted by the sun. We value as a poetical story, or picturesque image, legends like the following: In the time when the Lord remembers His children, and sees them dwelling in sorrow and grief amongst We look with other eyes on the heaped up treasures of Jewish aggadah, on the diamonds which oriental fancy made brilliant by a fiery inspiration. Brought under this new light cast on them they glitter and glean in a thousand colours like the dew in the flower when lighted by the sun. We value as a poetical story, or picturesque image, legends like the following: "In the time when the Lord remembers His Children, and sees them dwelling in sorrow and grief amongst the nations, He sheds two tears, and they drop into the great ocean, and their noise is heard from one end of the world to the other. Hence the earthquake." What a wonderful picture to express, the sympathy of heaven and earth with the heartstricken grief of the people! Or take another: "In the same day when King Solomon married the daughter of Necho, the Egyptian king, the angel Michael descended from heaven and planted a reed in the great ocean; and there came up loam, and upon that Rome was afterwards built." And further: "On the day when Jeroboam first established the two golden calves to be worshipped by Israel, Romulus and Remus erected their tents." Only ill-will, or prejudiced misunderstandings could not see the historical truth in the symbolical explanation of the relation which exist between the fall of Judah and the rise of Rome. Under the form of an allegory, they said that the power of the Jewish nation is intimately connected with the true and unchanged religious belief, and a change in such belief necessarily brings about an avoidable decline. In the curious tales of Rabbah bar-bar Channah, we recognize further, now-a-days, Indian sailor and travellers' tales, and in some of them Buddhistic legends, as for instance, the story of the gigantic fish, which destroys sixty towns, and out of whose bones to his pupils one of his former existence. Innumerable are the examples on which our feet stumble as we tread through the forest thousands of years old, called Jewish literature, where palms and hyssop, trees and bushes, flowers and thorns are often inextricably intertwined. On the other hand, we have learned to-day to recognize only as legends, the absurd accusations hurled against the Jews during the middle ages: such as the use of blood in their ceremonials, the poisoning of wells, the piercing of the host, so that it bled, even the accusations that the Jews have been usurers to so great an extent as it was presumed. All these, and similar accusations, are the outcome of prejudice, they are cobwebs spun by poisonous spiders, which hide the true light, and render the approach to the Ghetto disgusting and obnoxious. But we sweep them away, we know that they are only floating material to be found everywhere in the air, waiting only for the right time and the right men to appropriate and make use of them. They are for us nothing more than one of the those numerous legends, devoid of every internal truth, and interesting only for the student of folk-psychology and folk-lore. One more legend refers to the seclusion of the Jews within the walls of their houses, who are said to care nothing for the movement of the times, and who let the waves of the rolling sea pass over their shelter. But be the walls as high as towers and the prejudice as powerful as ever, they never form a real barrier against the spirit, which pours in through a thousand invisible channels. "The sun shines for the righteous as well as...

My Mother's Body, Marge Piercy's tenth book of poetry, takes its title from one of her strongest and most moving poems, the climax of a powerful sequence of Poems to her mother. Rooted in an honest, harrowing, but ally ecstatic confrontation of the mother / daughter relationship in all its complexity and intimacy, it is at the same time an affirmation of continuity and identification. "The Chuppah" comprises poems actually used in her wedding ceremony with Ira Wood. This section sings with powerfully female love poetry. There is also a sustained and direct use of her Jewish identity and faith in these poems, as there is in a number of other poems throughout the volume. Readers of Piercy's previous collections will not be surprised to encounter her mixture of the personal and the political, her love of animals and the Cape landscape. There are poems about doing housework, about accidents, about dreaming, about bag ladies, about luggage, about children's fears of nuclear holocaust; about tomcats, insects in the rafters, the influence of a name, appleblossoms and blackberries, pollution, and some of the ways women objectify one another. In "Does the light fail us, or do we fail the light?" Piercy writes with lacerating honesty about our relationships with the elderly and about hers with her father. Some of the most moving poems are domestic, as in the final sequence, "Six underrated pleasures," which finds in daily women's tasks both pleasure and mystery, affirmation of serf and connection with the mother. In all, My Mother's Body is one of Piercy's most powerful and balanced collections.