"In May of 1945, German forces surrendered to the Allied powers, effectively putting an end to World War II in Europe. But the aftershocks of this global military conflict did not cease with the signing of truces and peace treaties. Millions of lost and homeless POWs, slave laborers, political prisoners, and concentration camp survivors overwhelmed Germany, a country in complete disarray. British and American soldiers gathered the malnourished and desperate foreigners, and attempted to repatriate them to Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Ukraine, and the USSR. But after exhaustive efforts, there remained over a million displaced persons who either refused to go home or, in the case of many, had no home to which to return. They would spend the next three to five years in displaced persons camps, divided by nationalities, temporary homelands in exile, with their own police forces, churches, schools, newspapers, and medical facilities. The international community couldn't agree on the fate of the Last Million, and after a year of fruitless debate and inaction, an International Refugee Organization was created to resettle them in lands suffering from labor shortages. But no nations were willing to accept the 200,000 to 250,000 Jewish men, women, and children who remained trapped in Germany. In 1948, the United States, among the last countries to accept anyone for resettlement, finally passed a Displaced Persons Bill - but as Cold War fears supplanted memories of WWII atrocities, the bill only granted visas to those who were reliably anti-communist, including thousands of former Nazi collaborators, Waffen-SS members, and war criminals, while barring the Jews who were suspected of being Communist sympathizers or agents because they had been recent residents of Soviet-dominated Poland. Only after the passage of the controversial UN resolution for the partition of Palestine and Israel's declaration of independence were the remaining Jewish survivors finally able to leave their displaced persons camps in Germany."--

Children have been recruited for fighting throughout history - as soldiers in regular and guerilla armies, in armed revolts, and for political terrorism. However, these children cannot always be viewed as victims of remorseless and criminal leaders. In some situations, joining the fighting is the best or the only alternative for the young. Ch. 2 (pp. 19-56), "Fighting for Their Lives: Jewish Child Soldiers of World War II", discusses children's participation in the Jewish resistance during the Holocaust. Using mainly material from resistance and partisan groups in Lithuania, Poland, and Belarus, shows that joining the fighters was sometimes the Jewish children's only hope for survival. The children were motivated by necessity and a sense of honor and duty. Zionist and leftist movements, in particular Hashomer Hatzair, which headed the resistance in many ghettos, cultivated independence and militancy of the young and were especially inclined to draw children into their ranks.

How did we get into this mess? Every morning, many Americans ask this as, with a cringe, they pick up their phones and look to see what terrible thing President Trump has just said or done. Regardless of what he’s complaining about or whom he’s attacking, a second question comes hard on the heels of the first: How on earth do we get out of this? Alan Wolfe has an answer. In The Politics of Petulance he argues that the core of our problem isn’t Trump himself—it’s that we are mired in an age of political immaturity. That immaturity is not grounded in any one ideology, nor is it a function of age or education. It’s in an abdication of valuing the character of would-be leaders; it’s in a failure to acknowledge, even welcome the complexity of government and society; and it’s in a loss of the ability to be skeptical without being suspicious. In 2016, many Americans were offered tantalizingly simple answers to complicated problems, and, like children being offered a lunch of Pop Rocks and Coke, they reflexively—and mindlessly—accepted. The good news, such as it is, is that we’ve been here before. Wolfe reminds us that we know how to grow up and face down Trump and other demagogues. Wolfe reinvigorates the tradition of public engagement exemplified by midcentury intellectuals such as Richard Hofstadter, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Lionel Trilling—and he draws lessons from their battles with McCarthyism and conspiratorial paranoia. Wolfe mounts a powerful case that we can learn from them to forge a new path for political intervention today. Wolfe has been thinking and writing about American life and politics for decades. He sees this moment as one of real risk. But he’s not throwing up his hands; he’s bracing us. We’ve faced demagogues before. We can find the intellectual maturity to fight back. Yes we can.

This volume is a biography of English poet and children's writer Ted Hughes (1930-1998). Critics routinely rank him as one of the best poets of his generation. Hughes was British Poet Laureate from 1984 until his death. Hughes was married to American poet Sylvia Plath, from 1956 until her suicide in 1963 at the age of 30. His part in the relationship became controversial to some feminists and (particularly) American admirers of Plath. Hughes life was dogged by tragedy and controversy. He never entirely recovered from Plath's death, for which many have held his adultery responsible. The author explores a complex situation, throwing new light on Hughes' relationship with Assia Wevill, who later killed herself along with their young daughter.

A glimpse into the mind and life of one of the most creative and enigmatic visionaries of our time, filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky • Retraces the spiritual and mystical path Jodorowsky has followed since childhood, vividly repainting events from the perspective of an unleashed imagination • Explores the development of the author’s psychomagic and metagenealogy practices via his realization that all problems are rooted in the family tree • Includes photos from Jodorowsky’s appearance at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival and from the film based on this book, which debuted at Cannes Retracing the spiritual and mystical path he has followed since childhood, Alejandro Jodorowsky re-creates the incredible adventure of his life as an artist, filmmaker, writer, and therapist--all stages on his quest to push back the boundaries of both imagination and reason. Not a traditional autobiography composed of a chronological recounting of memories, The Dance of Reality repaints events from Jodorowsky’s life from the perspective of an unleashed imagination. Like the psychomagic and metagenealogy therapies he created, this autobiography exposes the mythic models and family templates upon which the events of everyday life are founded. It reveals the development of Jodorowsky’s realization that all problems are rooted in the family tree and explains, through vivid examples from his own life, particularly interactions with his father and mother, how the individual’s road to true fulfillment means casting off the phantoms projected by parents on their children. The Dance of Reality is autobiography as an act of healing. Through the retelling of his own life, the author shows we do not start off with our own personalities, they are given to us by one or more members of our family tree. To be born into a family, Jodorowsky says, is to be possessed. To peer back into our past is equivalent to digging into our own souls. If we can dig deep enough, beyond familial projections, we shall find an inner light--a light that can help us through life’s most difficult tests. Offering a glimpse into the mind and life of one of the most creative and enigmatic visionaries of our time, The Dance of Reality is the book upon which Jodorowsky’s critically acclaimed 2013 Cannes Film Festival film of the same name was based.

In 1904, New York nuns brought forty Irish orphans to a remote Arizona mining camp, to be placed with Catholic families. The Catholic families were Mexican, as was the majority of the population. Soon the town's Anglos, furious at this "interracial" transgression, formed a vigilante squad that kidnapped the children and nearly lynched the nuns and the local priest. The Catholic Church sued to get its wards back, but all the courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court, ruled in favor of the vigilantes. The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction tells this disturbing and dramatic tale to illuminate the creation of racial boundaries along the Mexican border. Clifton/Morenci, Arizona, was a "wild West" boomtown, where the mines and smelters pulled in thousands of Mexican immigrant workers. Racial walls hardened as the mines became big business and whiteness became a marker of superiority. These already volatile race and class relations produced passions that erupted in the "orphan incident." To the Anglos of Clifton/Morenci, placing a white child with a Mexican family was tantamount to child abuse, and they saw their kidnapping as a rescue. Women initiated both sides of this confrontation. Mexican women agreed to take in these orphans, both serving their church and asserting a maternal prerogative; Anglo women believed they had to "save" the orphans, and they organized a vigilante squad to do it. In retelling this nearly forgotten piece of American history, Linda Gordon brilliantly recreates and dissects the tangled intersection of family and racial values, in a gripping story that resonates with today's conflicts over the "best interests of the child."

The author discusses the issue of "inherited guilt" as he interviews the children and grandchildren of former Nazis.

"You can't let people be treated in an inhuman way around you....Otherwise you start to become inhuman." So declares rescuer Hetty Voûte in this updated edition of THE HEART HAS REASONS, an acclaimed historical account that offers an in-depth look into the hearts and minds of the Holocaust rescuers and explores the meaning that their lives and deeds have for us today. Individually or in small "humanitarian cells," the ten Dutch people Klempner profiles saved the lives of thousands of Jewish children during the Nazi occupation of Holland. How did they do what they did--and why did they risk everything to do it? Although their tales of rescue vary greatly, the integrity of the rescuers does not. Thus these narratives provide a glimpse into their personalities and character while shedding light on their extraordinary acts of courage and kindness. Framed by Klempner's quest for meaning, the rescuers' words resonate across generations, providing timeless insight into how people of conscience can navigate morally and resist tyranny in a world where the old specters of prejudice and fascism are again ascendant.

Originally published in Belgrade in 1969 and never before translated into English, Early Sorrows is a stunning group of linked stories that memorialize Danilo Kis's childhood. Kis, a writer of incomparable originality and eloquence, famous for his books The Encyclopedia of the Dead, Hourglass, and A Tomb for Boris Davidovich, was born in 1935 in Subotica, Yugoslavia, near the Hungarian border. "Back and forth over this land, during Danilo Kis's childhood, armies and ideologies washed with the brutal regularity of surf," William Gass noted in The New York Review of Books. "As a small boy and a Jew, in such circumstances, he was naturally surrounded by death and lies." All of the works of Danilo Kis show the crucial importance of his childhood experiences, but it is Early Sorrows that goes to the wellspring of his first bereavements. The twenty pieces that make up Early Sorrows strike various tones--from dreamy pastorals to exercises in horror. Kis's ingenuity, lyricism, and tonal subtlety are caught in all their luster by Michael Henry Heim. Early Sorrows centers on Andreas Sam, a highly intelligent boy whose life at first seems secure. His mother and sister dote on him; he excels at school; when he is hired out as a cowherd to help with the family's finances, he reads the day away in the company of his best friend, the dog. He can only sense that terrible things may be going on in the world. Soon soldiers are marching down the road, and then one day, many people from the village are herded together and taken away, among them, his father, the dreamer.

A leading authority's panoramic history compares the experiences of immigrant-ethnic groups, African-Americans, and Native Americans to each other and in relation to the national political culture. Winner of the John Hope Franklin Prize (1991) Winner of the Theodore Saloutos Award from the Immigration History Society (1993) Do recent changes in American law and politics mean that our national motto — e pluribus unum — is at last becoming a reality? Lawrence H. Fuchs searches for answers to this question by examining the historical patterns of American ethnicity and the ways in which a national political culture has evolved to accommodate ethnic diversity. Fuchs looks first at white European immigrants, showing how most of them and especially their children became part of a unifying political culture. He also describes the ways in which systems of coercive pluralism kept persons of color from fully participating in the civic culture. He documents the dismantling of those systems and the emergence of a more inclusive and stronger civic culture in which voluntary pluralism flourishes. In comparing past patterns of ethnicity in America with those of today, Fuchs finds reasons for optimism. Diversity itself has become a unifying principle, and Americans now celebrate ethnicity. One encouraging result is the acculturation of recent immigrants from Third World countries. But Fuchs also examines the tough issues of racial and ethnic conflict and the problems of the ethno-underclass, the new outsiders. The American Kaleidoscope ends with a searching analysis of public policies that protect individual rights and enable ethnic diversity to prosper. Because of his lifelong involvement with issues of race relations and ethnicity, Lawrence H. Fuchs is singularly qualified to write on a grand scale about the interdependence in the United States of the unum and the pluribus. His book helps to clarify some difficult issues that policymakers will surely face in the future, such as those dealing with immigration, language, and affirmative action.

Review ...should be required reading for all educators. Its maxims should be read and put into practice.>>>> (Childhood Education) ...should be required reading for all educators. Its maxims should be read and put into practice. (Childhood Education) Product Description These two works belong to that group of books written by one of this century's fiercest and most devoted child advocates. In the first, Korczak uses fiction to reveal the joys and sorrows of a child, a ten-year-old, juxtaposing them against the feelings of an adult as they both react to two days of adventure spent together. Two prominent themes in his writing are the exploration of the place of children in an adult world and the examination of the treatment and regard children are accorded in that world. In his second book, Korczak spells out his 'Magna Charta Libertatis' in defense of the child's right to respect, right to be him or herself, and, most importantly, right to respect for the strenuous effort expended in the process of 'growing up.' About the Author E. P. Kulawiec is Associate Professor of Education and Curriculum at the University of Southern Maine.

In this collection of short stories, originally published in 1974, Grace Paley "makes the novel as a form seem virtually redundant" (Angela Carter, London Review of Books ). Her stories here capture "the itch of the city, love between parents and children" and "the cutting edge of combat" (Lis Harris, The New York Times Book Review ). In this collection of seventeen stories, she creates a "solid and vital fictional world, cross-referenced and dense with life" (Walter Clemons, Newsweek ).

In this riveting account of the explosive relationship between Robert F. Kennedy and J. Edgar Hoover, renowned journalist and author Burton Hersh sets their highly publicized clashes in the context of Joe Kennedy's ongoing manipulation of Congress and his children's careers, and his lifelong connections to organized crime. Theirs was a unique triumvirate, marked by conflict and betrayal, and culminating in a near-Shakespearean tragedy. Based on compelling new research, and told in gripping anecdotal style, Hersh chronicles the complex relationship between the two antagonists, from their early brushes during the McCarthy years to their controversial deaths.

"Captures the resilience of human dignity and optimism. . . . A powerful must-read." -- Booklist (starred review) During World War II, Tama is sent to live in an incarceration camp in the desert. All Japanese Americans from the West Coast--elderly people, children, babies--now live in camps like Minidoka. To be who she is has become a crime, and Tama doesn't know when or if she will ever leave. Trying not to think of the life she once had, she works in the incarceration camp's tiny library, taking solace in pages bursting with color and light, love and fairness. And she isn't the only one. George waits each morning by the door, his arms piled with books checked out the day before. As their friendship grows, Tama wonders: Can anyone possibly read so much? Is she the reason George comes to the library every day? Maggie Tokuda-Hall and Yas Imamura's beautifully illustrated, elegant love story features a photo of the real Tama and George--the author's grandparents--and an unflinching and necessary afterword that helps readers to learn more about a time in our history that continues to resonate.

Originally published in Algiers in 1943, Joseph Kessel's Army of Shadows is one of the first books to have been written about the French Resistance. Now available in paperback, Contra Mundum Press is proud to present the first new translation in over 70 years, and the first edition since Jean-Pierre Melville's iconic 1969 film. "What, then, when it comes to recounting the story of France, an obscure, secret France, which is new to its friends, its enemies, and new especially to itself? France no longer has bread, wine, fire. But mainly it no longer has any laws. Civil disobedience, individual or organized rebellion, have become duties to the fatherland. The national hero is the clandestine man, the outlaw. Nothing about the order imposed by the enemy and by the Marshal is valid. Nothing counts. Nothing is true any more. One changes home, name, every day. Officials and police officers are helping insurgents. One finds accomplices even in ministries. Prisons, getaways, tortures, bombings, scuffles. One dies and kills as if it's natural. France lives, bleeds, in all its depths. It is toward the shadow that its true and unknown face is turned. In the catacombs of revolt, people create their own light and find their own law. Never has France waged a nobler and more beautiful war than in the basements where it prints its free newspapers, in its nocturnal lands, and in its secret coves where it received its free friends and from where its children set out, in torture cells where, despite tongs, red-hot pins, and crushed bones, the French died as free men."

An inspiring memoir about love, race, identity, and contested narratives told with unflinching mettle. Through her childhood spent in 1940s New York being raised by two mothers, her work with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee during the Civil Rights Movement, and raising her own children in the coalfields of West Virginia, Faith S. Holsaert has been defined by the intertwined forces of race, activism, and family. As a young woman on the front line of the Civil Rights Movement, she learned the power of contested narratives and came to understand her whiteness, her queer identity, and her stakes in overturning racism. Later in life, she confronted sexual abuse and mental illness across three generations of women in her family to find that these painful histories have played a significant role in the development of her identity as a woman, activist, and mother. Through a lifetime laid bare in prose and poetry, Holsaert beautifully quilts memoir, social history, and historic events into a gripping and inspirational narrative. This powerful and structurally innovative work lends new categories of meaning to those who would strive to find their place, hope, and sense of belonging in efforts to fight against systemic racism and lead lives characterized by openness and love.

For over five hundred years the Russians wondered what kind of people their Arctic and sub-Arctic subjects were. "They have mouths between their shoulders and eyes in their chests," reported a fifteenth-century tale. "They rove around, live of their own free will, and beat the Russian people," complained a seventeenth-century Cossack. "Their actions are exceedingly rude. They do not take off their hats and do not bow to each other," huffed an eighteenth-century scholar. They are "children of nature" and "guardians of ecological balance," rhapsodized early nineteenth-century and late twentieth-century romantics. Even the Bolsheviks, who categorized the circumpolar foragers as "authentic proletarians," were repeatedly puzzled by the "peoples from the late Neolithic period who, by virtue of their extreme backwardness, cannot keep up either economically or culturally with the furious speed of the emerging socialist society."Whether described as brutes, aliens, or endangered indigenous populations, the so-called small peoples of the north have consistently remained a point of contrast for speculations on Russian identity and a convenient testing ground for policies and images that grew out of these speculations. InArctic Mirrors, a vividly rendered history of circumpolar peoples in the Russian empire and the Russian mind, Yuri Slezkine offers the first in-depth interpretation of this relationship. No other book in any language links the history of a colonized non-Russian people to the full sweep of Russian intellectual and cultural history. Enhancing his account with vintage prints and photographs, Slezkine reenacts the procession of Russian fur traders, missionaries, tsarist bureaucrats, radical intellectuals, professional ethnographers, and commissars who struggled to reform and conceptualize this most "alien" of their subject populations.Slezkine reconstructs from a vast range of sources the successive official policies and prevailing attitudes toward the northern peoples, interweaving the resonant narratives of Russian and indigenous contemporaries with the extravagant images of popular Russian fiction. As he examines the many ironies and ambivalences involved in successive Russian attempts to overcome northern-and hence their own-otherness, Slezkine explores the wider issues of ethnic identity, cultural change, nationalist rhetoric, and not-so European colonialism. --

In the desegregation era of the 1970s, a first grader copes with being bused to a white school in this story for young children about racism and an essential time of change. "One of the Ten Best Books of the Year," The New York Times . Brewster is excited about starting first grade . . . until Mama announces that he'll be attending Central, a school in the white part of town. Mama says they have art and music and a library bursting with books, but Brewster isn't so sure he'll fit in. And he's right. Being black at a white school isn't easy. Brewster winds up spending his first day in detention at the library. But there he meets a very special person: Miss O'Grady. The librarian sees into Brewster's heart and gives him not only the gift of books but also encourages Brewster to believe in himself. This is an invaluable, unique, view into a tumultous time and the good that came into the lives of school children.

inspired by recent women's marches, sisters Lucy and Grace Lang's book for very young children honors the centennial of the passage of the 19th Amendment, which secured women's right to vote in the United States. As the world churns, all parents are striving to raise informed, courageous children, equipped to handle a changing and dangerous world in the most responsible and productive ways possible. March On! draws on the iconography of the women's march that started it all, the historic 1915 New York City women's march, highlighting the tremendous potential for collective activism, in rhyme, coupled with unique and diverse pictures to appeal to both children's imaginations and adults' familiarity with archetypal American imagery.

A valuable study of what the term "genocide" means - and what the concept should include. To solve the problem of precision, UCLA emeritus professor Kuper starts with the UN Convention on Genocide (1948). There, genocide was defined as any of the following acts "committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such": killing members of the group, or causing them serious physical or mental harm; prevention of birth within the group, or transfer of children out of the group; infliction of conditions calculated to bring death or destruction to the group. By tracing the path of this document through the UN, Kuper shows the political processes that helped narrow the concept of genocide. For example, the West wanted a provision labeling the destruction of political groups as genocide, but the Soviets blocked it; conversely, the Soviets wanted cultural genocide included, and the West blocked that. Kuper concludes that nations don't want to block their own possible future actions - and argues that political groups should be included in the definition. Then, accepting the UN definition as a starting point, he turns his attention (via historical instances of genocide) to the 20th century and the nature of genocide. It is a feature of plural societies, he contends - of societies that contain "persistent and pervasive cleavages" between the racial, ethnic, and/or religious groups that compose them. In cases of extreme pluralism, the divisions between these groups are overlaid with divisions between power, and genocide is one possible means by which an elite can maintain itself. The classic case of this is the Turkish massacre of its subject Armenians, the first of two cases Kuper explores in some depth. The second, the German extermination of Europe's Jews, differed in degree; it knew no national boundary, employed more sophisticated technology, had a more developed