Memoirs of a Jew who was born in 1926 in the village of Bikoly and grew up in the town of Pápa, west of Budapest. Pp. 99-221 deal with the Holocaust period. At first, Hungary's anti-Jewish policies did not affect the family much, but the situation changed drastically with the German occupation in March 1944. A ghetto was established in Pápa, and in June 1944 Laszlo was drafted into a military labor service unit. While he was working at Kőszeg, his parents were deported. After his labor unit was destroyed by the Soviets in Jibou, northwestern Romania, Laszlo fled to Budapest, then under the control of the Arrow Cross. In October 1944 Laszlo was deported to Bergen-Belsen, and then to Theresienstadt. There he met his father, who died shortly after the liberation; the rest of his family had perished earlier. After the war he settled in the USA.

The manager's name was Love. His first-floor flat was diagonally across the private road and the rose beds from ours. Each weekday morning, at eight fifteen, he hooked open his lattice-paned bedroom window and did exercises, in a white sleeveless vest and white drawers. So begins the extraordinary life story of one of Britain's most celebrated writers, Frederic Raphael. Going Up is a journey from Chicago to Putney, to Charterhouse, on up to Cambridge, and beyond to Hollywood and France, recording experiences that were absorbed in his opulent novels and screenplays. Raphael is the author of over twenty novels, the most celebrated being The Glittering Prizes and its sequels, following the aspirations and changing lives of a group of Cambridge students through to middle age. The Glittering Prizes became a critically acclaimed six-part BBC television series for which Raphael would win a Royal Television Society Writer of the Year Award. He also won an Oscar for his screenplay for the 1965 movie Darling.Going Up is a dazzling piece of virtuoso prose writing that is fabulously indiscreet but also deeply moving, and punctuated throughout by Raphael's indefatigable wit and incomparable erudition.

Memoirs of a Jew born in 1937 in Odessa, relating his childhood experiences in the postwar period. Popular antisemitism was rampant in Odessa, and the people in power, from school teachers to local authorities, turned a blind eye to it. Between 1948-53 popular antisemitism gave way to officially-sponsored antisemitic campaigns. Draitser, who had a traditional Jewish upbringing, was taught to be quiet, to maintain a low profile, and never to stress his Jewishness publicly. Contends that all Soviet Jews of his generation received the same upbringing of self-hatred, learned fear (including fear of "gentile" women), and an inferiority complex. In 1974 he emigrated to the USA. Describes, also, his family's evacuation from Odessa in 1941, and how some relatives perished either in German-occupied Minsk or in Ukraine.

All the time when I lived in Algeria, my native country, I dreamt of one day arriving in Algeria. Born in Oran, Algeria, Hélène Cixous spent her childhood in France's former colony. Reveries of the Wild Woman is her visceral memoir of a preadolescence that shaped her with intense feelings of alienation, yet also contributed, in a paradoxically essential way, to her development as a writer and philosopher. Born to a French father and an Austro-German mother, both Jews, Cixous experienced a childhood fraught with racial and gender crisis. In her moving story she recounts how small events--a new dog, the gift of a bicycle--reverberate decades later as symbols filled with social and psychological meaning. She and her family endure a double alienation, by Algerians for being French and by the French for being Jewish, and Cixous builds her story on the themes of isolation and exclusion she felt in particular under the Vichy government and during the Algerian Civil War. Yet she also concedes that memories of Algeria awaken in her a longing for her home country, and ponders how that stormy relationship has influenced her life and thought. A meditation on postcolonial identity and gender, Reveries of the Wild Woman is also a poignant recollection of how a girl's childhood is, indeed, author to the woman.

"An insider's account of how the Washington Post broke the Watergate story, depicting the tensions, challenges, and personal conflicts that were overcome as it laid bare the criminal wrongdoings of the Nixon administration"--

This powerful memoir chronicles the life of one of America’s most celebrated rabbis—Rabbi Zalman M. Schachter-Shalomi, or “Reb Zalman” as he is fondly known to friends and followers. The book traces his life from a youth in the shadow of the Nazis through the tumultuous 1960s in America to his position as a renowned religious leader today. Often controversial for his attraction to cultural mavericks and religious rebels, Reb Zalman’s colorful lifetime includes a striking cast of characters across faith traditions, including Timothy Leary, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Thomas Merton, the Dalai Lama, and more. The book traces Reb Zalman’s work creating the vibrant Jewish Renewal movement that emphasizes spiritual experience and continues to touch Jews around the world today. Reb Zalman often illustrates his talks with anecdotes from his life, and My Life in Jewish Renewal brings together the life story of this beloved leader for the first time.

Growing up, Robert Lipsyte was the smart-aleck fat kid, the bully magnet who went to the library instead of the ballpark. As the perpetual outsider, even into adulthood, his alienation from Jock Culture made him a rarity in the press box: the sportswriter who wasn't a sports fan. This feeling of otherness has colored Lipsyte's sports writing for fifty years, much of it spent as a columnist for the New York Times. He didn't follow particular athletes or teams; he wasn't awed by the access afforded by his press pass or his familiarity with the players in the locker room. The experience and insight earned over a half-century infuse An Accidental Sportswriter . Going beyond the usual memoir, Lipsyte has written "a memory loop, a circular search for lost or forgotten pieces in the puzzle of a life." In telling his own story, Lipsyte grapples with American sports and society—from Mickey Mantle to Bill Simmons—arguing that Jock Culture has seeped into our business, politics, and family life, and its definitions have become the standard to measure value. Full of wisdom and an understanding of American sports that contextualizes rather than celebrates athletes, An Accidental Sportswriter is the crowning achievement of a rich career and a book that will speak to us for years to come.

Joanne Limburg suffers from Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder: she thinks things she doesn't want to think, and she does things she doesn't want to do. As a small child, she would chew her hair all day and lie awake at night wondering if heaven had a ceiling; a few years later, when she should have been doing her homework, she was pacing her bedroom, agonising about the unfairness of life as a woman, and the shortness of her legs. By the time she was an adult, obsessive thoughts and compulsive behaviours had come to dominate her life. She knew that something was wrong with her, but it would take many years before she understood what that something was. "The Woman Who Thought Too Much" follows Limburg's quest to understand her predicament and to manage her symptoms, taking the reader with her on a long, twisted journey through consulting rooms, libraries and internet sites, as she seeks to discover all she can about rumination, scrupulosity, avoidance, thought-action fusion, fixed-action patterns, anal fixations, schemas, basal ganglia, tics and synapses. On the way, she encounters competing interpretations of her condition, as offered by psychoanalysts, neuropsychiatrists and cognitive psychologists, and does her best to come to terms with an illness which turns out to be both common, and even - sometimes - treatable. This candid, moving and beautifully written memoir is a sometimes shocking, often sad, and yet also humorous revelation of what it is like to live with so debilitating a condition. It is also an exploration of the inner world of a poet and an intense evocation of the persistence and courage of the human spirit in the face of mental illness.

" For Solo Violin is a gracefully written, elegiac memoir of childhood."— The Los Angeles Times "An eloquent tribute to [and] a moving account of those who, despite the cruelty of so many around them, found ways to rejoice and trust in the kindness of a few. One is instantly reminded of Life Is Beautiful ."—André Aciman, author of Out of Egypt In an extraordinary literary debut, Aldo Zargani reconstructs the lost world of his Jewish childhood during the perilous years 1938–45 when he and his family fled from Fascists and Nazis in northern Italy. His haunting memoir acquires a cinematic intensity as he crosscuts from the blood-red stone spires of Basel, where his father failed to find refuge for his family in 1939, to fiery scenes of the Allied bombing of Turin in 1942, to the freezing winter of 1943–44, which Zargani and his brother spent hidden in a Catholic boarding school deep in the countryside. For Solo Violin is filled with colorful portraits of Italian aristocrats and peasants, priests and soldiers, teachers and students, informers and partisans. At its heart is Zargani's vivid depiction of his father, a concert violinist forced to give up his career when the Fascists came to power. In this time of persecution, the Zargani family survived through their own resourcefulness and through the efforts of the many Italians who came to their aid, from the young doctor who helped them escape from Turin to the shepherd who supplied them with milk during the last year of the war, when they lived among the partisans in a remote Piedmont valley. Looking back over a distance of fifty years, Zargani rediscovers the enchantment of childhood shining in "fable-like constellations" even amidst the inferno of war. Lullabies and school games, fairy tales and family jokes are interwoven with the events of terror and oppression. Lyrical, humorous, tender, and wise, For Solo Violin is a testament to resilience and hope during the darkest period in human history. "A broad panorama of Italian-Jewish history in [the last] century. Elegant in its style and, however tragic, also rich with understatement, irony, and wit, For Solo Violin counts among the great, enduring works of art."— Focus Magazine , Germany "A tragic, deeply engaging, delicious book—yes delicious, too. (Reading it makes you smile.) It's a miracle…It makes one think of the wit of Kafka!"— L'Espresso , Italy "Zargani depicts a wealth of sad, despairing, but often also incredibly funny episodes…But vibrating along with the humor is always the sense of threat, and behind it opens the abyss of terror."— Neue Zürcher Zeitung , Switzerland

Contains primary source material.

"Evelyn Fox Keller trained as a theoretical physicist at a time when women didn't "do physics." Unable to find a supportive advisor, she moved into the new field of molecular biology just getting off the ground. After receiving her doctorate, she returned to physics but then took another swerve, joining a small interdisciplinary effort to develop mathematical models of biological systems. This work led to her appointment to a special position as Professor of Mathematics and Humanities at Northeastern University. When second-wave feminism arrived in the 1960s, it changed the lives of everyone in its path. It certainly changed Keller's, leading her beyond the borders of science altogether. Eventually she began to think of herself as a dual citizen of the proverbial two cultures―science and humanities. The trajectory was hardly straightforward, nor was it conducive to building a conventional career, or even getting a job. Now in hindsight, after an illustrious career and having published fourteen books, Keller reflects on her life, influences, successes and struggles along her trailblazing path as a scientist and feminist." -- From publisher's website

This autobiography of William G. Dever is unabashedly his story that offers not only candid reflections on his life, but also on the remarkable generation of giants in archaeology in Israel and the evolving history of the fields of biblical and Israeli archaeology. Chapters cover the ups and downs in both his life and career with brutally honesty. His memoir concludes with a postscript on the likely future of biblical archaeology, and an annotated bibliography provides a guide for serious readers who wish to explore some of the scholarly literature to flesh out Dever's narrative--

Musically Speaking A Life Through Song Dr. Ruth K. Westheimer "Touching and frequently witty."-- Publishers Weekly "Dr. Ruth sees music as a kind of conscience. Melody is something she has measured her life on. It's an extraordinary story, her story."--Bono "Dr. Ruth shows us how and why music functions in her life, with lessons for all of us. A real gem of a book."--Wynton Marsalis "A wonderful book, both moving and delightful. With her customary charm and brio, Westheimer shares with us how a life can be shaped by music. Brava!"--Zubin Mehta "Who would have thought that when Dr. Ruth finally explained the rhythm method, she'd be talking about music? To read her is to know her, to know her is to adore her."--Harvey Fierstein "Music, I have come to realize, is for me a kind of golden thread running through my life. It has helped maintain my connection with the past that otherwise might have been severed by catastrophe and time. I am often asked--indeed, I often wonder myself--why it is that I should always have had such joie de vivre in the face of the losses and dislocations I had to endure in my early years. The answer I always gave was that the warmth and security of my early childhood had a remarkable power and influence. This is certainly true. But now I have realized that there is another part to the answer. And that is music."--from the introduction Who among us does not have a song that triggers vivid memories--of jubilation, of belonging, of sorrow, of love? In Musically Speaking , Dr. Ruth K. Westheimer, one of America's most beloved personalities, has written a warm and contemplative book about the role music has played in her life and the ineradicable traces it has left on her thoughts, emotions, her very being. In this memoir through song, Dr. Ruth invites us to share her story from a uniquely musical perspective. By the time she was thirty, Ruth Westheimer had lived in five countries, each with a distinctive musical culture, each with a different hold on her sensibility. For the first ten years of her life, the comforting melodies of childhood helped drown out the anthems of Nazism to be heard elsewhere in her native Germany; as an adolescent refugee in Switzerland, she came to be aware that, however loudly she sang the patriotic songs of the land that gave her shelter, she could never truly be at home there. Present at the creation of the modern state of Israel, she sang and danced to the new music of a new nation; as a young woman eagerly absorbing all that Paris had to offer in the way of romance and worldliness in the early 1950s, the songs of Edith Piaf, Mouloudji, and Yves Montand were her tutors. An almost accidental emigration to America brought new challenges and new stability, as she became a wife, mother, and professional; tremendous and unforeseen celebrity came later, and with it the giddy opportunity to indulge her love of music as never before. Dr. Ruth K. Westheimer is a psychosexual therapist who pioneered the field of media therapy. She is author of 24 books. An Adjunct Professor at New York University, she also holds visiting appointments at Princeton and Yale. Personal Takes 2003 152 pages 5 1/2 x 8 1/2 ISBN 978-0-8122-3746-7 Cloth $24.95t £16.50 ISBN 978-0-8122-0835-1 Ebook $24.95t £16.50 World Rights Biography, Music

"When her marriage suddenly ends, and a diary documenting her beloved grandfather's escape from Nazi-occupied Netherlands in the summer of 1942 is discovered, Naomi K. Lewis decides to retrace his journey to learn about her family history. Despite suffering from extreme disorientation and a lifetime of anxiety, she travels alone for the first time. Moving from Amsterdam to Lyon--relying on the marvels of GPS--she discovers family secrets and her own narrative as a second-generation Jewish Canadian. With vulnerability, humour, and wisdom, Lewis's memoir asks tough questions about her identity as a secular Jew, the accuracy of family stories, and the impact of the Holocaust on subsequent generations. How do immigrants weave their sense of identity into their chosen countries? Must we be able to locate ourselves within family and cultural geography to belong?"--

"The Jerusalem of the Balkans is today a city of ghosts. Saloniki or Salonika, as Thessaloniki was known its Jewish community, today barely numbers a thousand Jews whereas from 1500 to World War I the Jews constituted the majority of its inhabitants. Moshe Ha-Elyon and his extended family were part of the deportation from Salonika of some 45,000 Jews to Auschwitz where all but a handful were gassed, beaten, or starved to death during the spring of 1943 to the end of the war. This memoir differs from the many memoirs of Greek Jews. Moshe Ha- Elyon portrays the religious and cultural life of his ancestral community as well as the spiritual and mystical research of his father who predicted, prior to his death at the onset of the war, both the persecution of the Jews and the subsequent rise of a Jewish state in its aftermath. It is the moving story of a teenager who suffered in extremis yet lived to transmit to his family in Israel the legacy of a vanished era. A most informative and worthwhile insight into the inner world of Greek Jewry before and during its destruction during World War II"--

"Part memoir, part history, part political commentary - and all Richler - This Year in Jerusalem is a personal, passionate, and quirkily comic examination of the idea of Israel-as-homeland: for Jews, for Palestinians, and, not least, for the author himself. Richler re-creates the Montreal of his adolescence - the local Zionist youth organization functioning as an escape from the zealous Hasidism of his grandfathers; the idea of emigration to Israel growing into a shimmering dream for himself and his friends. And, going to Israel to look up his old pals from St. Urbain Street, he shows us what happened to those who actually did "make aliyah"--Who settled in the cities and on the kibbutzim, survived the turmoils of war, and are faced today with the opportunities and dangers of peace with the Palestinians. He shows us, as well, the course of his own migration - away from Zionism and through the maze of his own sense of Judaism until he rediscovers his true homeland: "I owe as much to the thin gruel of my Canadian experience as I do to my Jewish provenance." Woven through his story are his fond (and not so fond) recollections of his family, his encounters in today's Israel with the kids he grew up with in Montreal a million years ago, and his most mordant observations on the state of the state of Israel and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Witty, intelligent, well reasoned, and across-the-board provocative, here is Mordecai Richler at his inimitable - and controversial - best." -- dust jacket

Dubbed-some would say drubbed-the "godfather behind creative nonfiction" by Vanity Fair, Lee Gutkind takes the opportunity of these essays, and the rich material of his own life, to define, defend, and further expand the genre he has done so much to shape. The result is an explosive and hilarious memoir of Gutkind's colorful life as a motorcyclist, a medical insider, a sailor, a college professor, an over-aged insecure father, and a literary whipping boy. In Forever Fat Gutkind battles his weight, his ex-wives, his father, his rabbi, his psychiatrist, and his critics in a lifelong cross-country, cross-cultural search for stability and identity. And from Gutkind's battles, the reader emerges a winner, treated to a sometimes poignant, sometimes harrowing, sometimes uproarious, and always engrossing story of the simultaneous awakening of a man and his mission, and of the constant struggle, in literature and in life, to sort out memory and imagination. Here, enacted in technicolor terms, is the universal, symbolic truth that no matter how far you travel, over how many years, you will never completely shed the weighty baggage of adolescence. Yet, as Gutkind proves again and again, he has learned to describe his burden with an ever-lightening brilliance. Lee Gutkind is the founder and editor of the journal Creative Nonfiction. The author and editor of a dozen books, including the award-winning Many Sleepless Nights: The World of Organ Transplantation, he is a professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh and the director of the Mid-Atlantic Creative Nonfiction Writers' Conference at Goucher College.

"Howard Jacobson's funny, revealing and tender memoir of his path to becoming a writer. It's my theory that only the unhappy, the uncomfortable, the gauche, the badly put together, aspire to make art. Why would you seek to reshape the world unless you were ill-at-ease in it? And I came out of the womb in every sense the wrong way round. In Mother's Boy, Booker-Prize winner Howard Jacobson reveals how he became a writer. It is an exploration of belonging and not-belonging, of being an insider and outsider, both English and Jewish. Jacobson was forty when his first novel was published. In Mother's Boy he traces the life that brought him there. Born to a working-class family in 1940s Manchester, the great-grandson of Lithuanian and Russian immigrants, Jacobson was raised by his mother, grandmother and aunt Joyce. His father was a regimental tailor, as well as an upholsterer, a market-stall holder, a taxi driver, a balloonist, and a magician. Grappling always with his family's history and his Jewish identity, Jacobson takes us from the growing pains of childhood to studying at Cambridge under F.R. Leavis, and landing in Sydney as a maverick young professor on campus." --

"It's a long way from a large, luxurious rambling estate in the Connecticut country side to 77 Sunset Strip, but Efrem Zimbalist, Jr. made that journey, traveling many different roads, during the life he so engagingly recreates in this memoir. His parents, Alma Gluck and Efrem Zimbalist, acclaimed for their artistry throughout the world, provided their son with a childhood of comfort and security - and, of course, music."