The first novel written and published in English by an American Jewish woman Published serially in the spiritualist journal Banner of Light in 1860, Cosella Wayne: Or, Will and Destiny is the first coming-of-age novel, written and published in English by an American Jewish woman, to depict Jews in the United States and transforms what we know about the history of early American Jewish literature. The novel never appeared in book form, went unmentioned in Jewish newspapers of the day, and studies of nineteenth-century American Jewish literature ignore it completely. Yet the novel anticipates many central themes of American Jewish writing: intermarriage, generational tension, family dysfunction, Jewish-Christian relations, immigration, poverty, the place of women in Jewish life, the nature of romantic love, and the tension between destiny and free will. The narrative recounts a relationship between an abusive Jewish father and the rebellious daughter he molested as well as that daughter’s struggle to find a place in the complex social fabric of nineteenth-century America. It is also unique in portraying such themes as an unmarried Jewish woman’s descent into poverty, her forlorn years as a starving orphaned seamstress, her apostasy and return to Judaism, and her quest to be both Jewish and a spiritualist at one and the same time. Jonathan Sarna, who introduces the volume, discovered Cosella Wayne while pursuing research at the Israel Institute for Advanced Studies in Jerusalem. This edition is supplemented with selections from Cora Wilburn’s recently rediscovered diary, which are reprinted in the appendix. Together, these materials help to situate Cosella Wayne within the life and times of one of nineteenth-century American Jewry’s least known and yet most prolific female authors.

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A witty and erudite love letter to a bygone age, from one of Europe's last great humanists. "A sparkling slice of eighteenth-century life" Paul Bailey, Independent In August 1785 Paris buzzed with scandal. It involved an eminent churchman, a notorious charlatan, a female fraudster, a part-time prostitute and the hated Queen herself. At its heart was the most expensive diamond necklace ever assembled and the web of fraud, folly and self-delusion it had inspired. In Szerb's last major work, a witty and often surprising account of events, the story is used as a standpoint from which to survey the entire age. Written in war-torn Hungary in the early 1940s,it constitutes a remarkable gesture of defiance against the brutal world in which the writer lived and died. Antal Szerb (1901-1945) was born in Budapest. Though of Jewish descent, he was baptised at an early age and remained a lifelong Catholic. He rapidly established himself as a formidable scholar, through studies of Ibsen and Blake and histories of English, Hungarian and world literature. He was a prolific essayist and reviewer, ranging across all the major European languages. Debarred by successive Jewish laws from working in a university, he was subjected to increasing persecution, and finally murderedin a forced labour camp in 1945. Pushkin Press publishes his novels The Pendragon Legend , Oliver VII and his masterpiece Journey by Moonlight , as well as the historical study The Queen's Necklace and Love in a Bottle and Other Stories .