Fiction. Named one of Kirkus Reviews' Best Fiction Books of 2014. Each of the characters in SCOUTING FOR THE REAPER faces an unanticipated challenge: transporting a truckload of penguins across the country, arranging a proper Jewish burial for the remains of Gregor Samsa, and selling tombstones dressed as a Girl Scout. These stories explore the domestic and professional adventures of people in over their heads, while leavening their struggles with humor. "Jacob Appel's stories echo with secrets. There are the secrets we keep from those closest to us, of course. Our parents, our doctors, our clergy, our ex-wives and unrequited loves. Any run of the mill story has those. Good stories traffic in the kind of secrets we keep from ourselves. Why, for instance, what and who we love are so close in content and character to what we can't abide. Appel's that kind of trafficker. Even better, throughout this fine collection, he is most concerned with still another kind of secret: that which, when revealed, doesn't solve anything. Like the very best stories, they carry the mystery forward. Revelation, in the end, isn't an end at all. It's a beginning. SCOUTING FOR THE REAPER is full of such revelations. Here's hoping it signals the beginning of a long string of books penned by this talented polymath."--TJ Beitelman

A witch who can turn children into diamonds, a prince who thinks he's a rooster, a giant who hitches a ride on Noah's ark--they're all here in this compilation of Jewish folktales, a rich mix of magic and mysticism, prophets, wise men, and fools.

'Brisk, smart, witty, elliptical ... Recalls the directors of the New Wave ... Bracing and brilliant' Independent When Patrick Modiano was awarded the 2014 Nobel Prize for Literature he was praised for using the 'art of memory' to bring to life the Occupation of Paris during the Second World War. Born in 1945, Modiano's brilliant, angry writings burst onto the Parisian literary scene and caused a storm. His first, ferociously satirical novel, La Place de l'Étoile , was remarkable in seriously questioning both Nazi collaboration in France and the myths of the Gaullist era. The Night Watch tells the story of a man caught between his work for the French Gestapo and for a Resistance cell. Ring Roads recounts a son's search for his Jewish father, who disappeared ten years previously. These brilliant, almost hallucinatory, evocations of the Occupation attempt to exorcise the past by exploring the morally ambiguous worlds of collaboration and resistance.

Avram Davidson was one of the great original American writers of this century. He was erudite, cranky, Jewish, wildly creative, and sold most of his wonderful stories to pulp magazines. They are wonderful. Now his estate and his friends have brought together a definitive collection of his finest work, each story introduced by an SF luminary: writers like Ursula K. Le Guin, William Gibson, Poul Anderson, Gene Wolfe, Guy Davenport, Peter S. Beagle, Gregory Benford, Thomas M. Disch, and dozens of others. This is a volume every lover of fantasy will need to own.

Deborah Green is a woman of passionate contradictions--a rabbi who craves goodness and surety while wrestling with her own desires and with the sorrow and pain she sees around her. Her life changes when she visits the hospital room of Henry Friedman, an older man who has attempted suicide. His parents were murdered in the Holocaust when he was a child, and all his life he's struggled with difficult questions: Can happiness really come after such loss, or does the very wish profane the dead? Can religious promises ever bring peace? Deborah's encounter with Henry and his family draws her into a world of tragedy, frailty, love, and, finally, hope. The New Yorker called Rosen's first novel "An impressive debut--a highly original addition to the distinguished line of Jewish-American romances." He has fulfilled the promise of his first fiction in this contemporary story of classic scope, whose characters hunger for love, grapple with faith and doubt, and seek to bind themselves to something sacred in the midst of modern chaos.

From its founding in 1873 until the coming of the Nazis in 1938, a Viennese Jewish family bravely endures and flourishes in their beloved home on the street called Turk Place

A novel about a mysterious mail-order bride in the wake of World War II, whose sudden decision ripples through time to deeply impact the daughter she never knew.

A Jew from Boston travels to Jerusalem to convince his Orthodox twin brother to leave a yeshiva and return to the family in America. The mission fails when the Orthodox twin surprises the new arrival in the arms of a homosexual.

Epstein first introduced Leib Goldkorn in "The Steinway Quintet". In this volume, Goldkorn - Holocaust survivor, flautist, and pianist - is back in an expanded account of the original novella along with two other long tales that continue his richly comic spiral of misadventures that are at once comedies of manners and serious accounts of culture colliding with casual violence.

Myrna Yates was cool, attractive--a real society lady--and in trouble. Benny Cooperman, a private eye in Grantham, Ontario, Canada with a hard head and a tender heart, was ready to help her in any way he could. Her concern? Whether her husband Chester was having an affair. But when Ches commits suicide the day Benny begins his investigation, our detective realizes he may be dealing with something beyond a simple "family affair."Probing into the curious circumstances surrounding the death, Benny finds himself in the midst of a strange group of people--one that involves a mysterious psychiatrist, eminent but shady citizens, and soon, a few more suicides. Or are they murders? --

"If you, Jakob Bronsky, meet such a girl, she will wonder: Who is Jakob Bronsky? ... What does Bronsky know about the 'American way of life'? Does Jakob Bronsky know that only success counts and nothing else? Is he a guy who ruthlessly gets his way but still believes in God Almighty? Does he know that our world is an idyllic one? ... Is he familiar with the ideals of our forefathers who arrived on the first boat, the Mayflower, and what does he think of Coca-Cola Culture?" For more information, please see: http: //doi.org/10.4444/10.4

Fleeing the chaos of World War I and the terror of the Soviet Revolution, practical, sensible Pearl Kahn and her lovestruck, impulsive younger sibling Frieda sail for America to join their sister in New York. But discriminatory new immigration laws bar their entry, and the young women are turned back at Ellis Island. With few options, Pearl and Frieda head for Havana, Cuba, convinced they will find a way to overcome this setback. At first, life in big-city Prohibition-era Havana is overwhelming, like nothing Pearl and Frieda have ever experienced--or could have ever imagined in the rural shtetl where they grew up. As the sisters begin to adjust, their plans for going to America together become complicated. Frieda falls for the not-so-dreamy man of her dreams while Pearl's life opens up unexpectedly, offering her a taste of freedom and heady romance, and an opportunity to build a future on her own terms. Though to do so, she must confront her past and the shame she has long carried. A heartbreaking, epic family story, Hotel Cuba explores the profound courage of two women displaced from their home who strive to create a new future in an enticing and dangerous world far different from anything they have ever known.

From Sholom Aleichem to Avram Davidson, Isaac Bashevis Singer to Tony Kushner, the Jewish literary tradition has always been one rich in the supernatural and the fantastic. In these pages, gathered from the best short fiction of the last ten years, twenty authors prove that their heritage is alive and well -- in the spaces between stars that an alphabet can bridge, folklore come to life and histories become stories, and all the places where old worlds and new collide and change.

Product Description Journeys beyond the Pale is the first book to examine how Yiddish writers, from Mendele Moycher Sforim to Der Nister to the famed Sholem Aleichem, used motifs of travel to express their complicated relationship with modernization. The story of the Jews of the Pale of settlement encompasses current-day Russia, the Ukraine, Belarus, and Poland. Review "This book is deliciously subversive. Garrett demonstrates that the major writers in Yiddish, a language without its own territory, wrote as if their Jewish subjects lived and traveled freely at the center of the world; not on its margins, not in a ghetto, not in a valorized state of exile."—David G. Roskies, Jewish Theological Seminary "Garrett’s work goes a long way towards conceptualizing and analyzing a phenomenon omnipresent in Yiddish short stories, novels, poetry, and drama, combining theoretical considerations of the journey in general and specific, nuanced readings of Jewish journeys in particular."—Jeremy Dauber, Columbia University "This kind of scholarship is vital for the further progress in Yiddish studies and its integration into the mainstream humanities."—Mikhail Krutikov, Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies and author of Yiddish Fiction and the Crisis of Modernity, 1905–1914 From the Back Cover "This book is deliciously subversive. Garrett demonstrates that the major writers in Yiddish, a language without its own territory, wrote as if their Jewish subjects lived and traveled freely at the center of the world; not on its margins, not in a ghetto, not in a valorized state of exile."-David G. Roskies, Jewish Theological Seminary "Garrett's work goes a long way towards conceptualizing and analyzing a phenomenon omnipresent in Yiddish short stories, novels, poetry, and drama, combining theoretical considerations of the journey in general and specific, nuanced readings of Jewish journeys in particular."-Jeremy Dauber, Columbia University "This kind of scholarship is vital for the further progress in Yiddish studies and its integration into the mainstream humanities."-Mikhail Krutikov, Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies and author of Yiddish Fiction and the Crisis of Modernity, 1905-1914 About the Author Leah V. Garrett is assistant professor of Judaic studies and English literature at the University of Denver, Colorado.

Awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1966, S. Y. Agnon is considered the towering genius of modern Hebrew literature for his hard-edged modernism and soft-hued imagery. With this new collection of stories, the English-speaking audience has, at long last, access to the rich and brilliantly multifaceted fictional world of one of the great writers of this century. These stories span the lifetime of a quintessential wandering Jew - born in Buczacz, Poland, living in Germany, and finally settling in Jerusalem - and they bring to life the full gamut of the modern Jewish experience in fiction. This broad selection of Agnon's fiction introduces the full sweep of the writer's panoramic vision as chronicler of the lost world of Eastern European Jewry and the emerging society of modern Israel. Here are stories that portray the richly textured culture of traditional Jewish life in Poland, as well as changes in the life of the community over time. Several stories reflect on the Jewish infatuation with German and Western culture in the interwar period: "On the Road," for example, narrates an eerie encounter on the eve of a holy day between an itinerant Jew and a ghostly company of martyred Jews from the Crusades. The early years of Jewish settlement in the land of Israel are recalled in "Hill of Sand," which is also a revealing portrait of the artist as a young man; "A Book That Was Lost" is a powerful metaphor for the writer's own journey from Buczacz to Jerusalem.

In this unique memoir, renowned poet, fiction writer, critic, and activist Marjorie Agosin writes in the voice of her mother, Frida, the daughter of European Jewish immigrants, living in Chile in the years before, during, and after World War II. Frida recounts stories from her family's Jewish/Chilean history: of her father, who had to leave Vienna in 1920 because he fell in love with a Christian cabaret dancer; of her paternal grandmother, who came to Chile later with a number tattooed on her arm; and of her great grandmother, an immigrant from Odessa, who learned to speak Spanish in Chile and loved the language so much that she repeated its harmonious sounds even in her sleep. Frida's stories of the past soften the realities of present times, when some immigrants from Germany still display portraits of Hitler m their homes and Jews still remain, after two generations, strangers in their own land. These stories are permeated with the shadow of faraway war in Europe, which haunts Frida's dreams and is a vivid presence in the everyday life in this Chilean town. For Frida the cross and the star of the title come to define two worlds that are for her distinct, yet inexorably entwined. Agosin's poetic reflections reveal a culture and a landscape little-known outside of her native land, explore the boundaries of "voice", and create a moving testament to endurance and to the power of memory and of words.

"This beautiful work of historical fiction was inspired by the diary of an actual 18th-century Roman Jewish girl, imprisoned by the Catholic Church because someone with a grudge offered her to the Church. Anything But Yes is the true story of a young woman's struggle to defend her identity in the face of relentless attempts to destroy it. In 1749, 18-year-old Anna del Monte was seized at gunpoint from her home in Rome's Jewish ghetto and thrown into a convent cell at the Casa dei Convertiti, the house of converts. With no access to the outside world, she withstood isolation, sleep deprivation, endless lectures, and threats and promises. If Anna were to utter the simple word "yes," she would risk forced baptism, which meant never returning to her home and losing contact with any Jew-including her own family-for the rest of her life. Even in Italy today, few people know the full story of Rome's Jewish ghetto, the abduction of Jews, or the popes who were intent on forcibly converting every non-Catholic living in the long shadow of the Vatican. Young girls and small children were the primary targets of these forced conversions, for they were most vulnerable. But Anna del Monte was different. She was strong, brilliant, and educated, and wrote a diary of her experiences. Her diary became lost for more than 200 years but was rediscovered in Israel in 1989. Anything But Yes is based on Anna's diary and Joie Davidow's extensive research on life in the 18th-century Roman Jewish ghetto and its personalities, traditions, foods, and dialect"--

This first fully documented biography of Simon Wiesenthal, the legendary Nazi hunter, is also a brilliant character study of a man whose life was part invention but wholly dedicated to ensuring both that the Nazis be held responsible for their crimes and that the destruction of European Jewry never be forgotten. Like most Jews in Eastern Europe on the eve of Hitler's invasion of Poland, twenty-four-year-old Simon Wiesenthal did not grasp the nature of the Nazi threat. But six years later, when a skeletal Wiesenthal was liberated from the concentration camp at Mauthausen, he fully fathomed the crimes of the Nazis. Within days he had assembled a list of nearly 150 Nazi war criminals, the first of dozens of such lists he would make over a lifetime as a Nazi hunter. A hero in the eyes of many, Wiesenthal was also attacked for his unrelenting pursuit of the past, when others preferred to forget. For this new biography, rich in newsworthy revelations, historian and journalist Tom Segev has obtained access to Wiesenthal's private papers and to sixteen archives, including records of the U.S., Israeli, Polish, and East German secret services. Segev is able to reveal the intriguing secrets of Wiesenthal's life, including his stunning role in the capture of Adolf Eichmann, his relationship with Israel's Mossad, his controversial investigative techniques, his unlikely friendships with Kurt Waldheim and Albert Speer, and the nature of his rivalry with Elie Wiesel. Segev's challenge in writing this biography was Wiesenthal's own complicated relationship to truth. Wiesenthal told many versions of his life, his suffering in the camps, and his involvement with the arrest of individual Nazis. Segev shows that in order to gain the information he sought and twist the arms of reluctant government figures, Wiesenthal needed to seem more influential than he really was. For two generations of Americans, Simon Wiesenthal was a Jewish superhero--depicted on film by Ben Kingsley and Laurence Olivier--and the muse for a Frederick Forsyth thriller. Now Segev demonstrates that the truth of Wiesenthal's existence is as compelling as the fiction. "Simon Wiesenthal" is an unforgettable life of one of the great men of the twentieth century.

"A major influence on the BBC and independent television in Britain in the 1960s, as well as on CBC and the National Film Board in Canada, Sydney Newman acted as head of drama at a key period in the history of television. For the first time, his comprehensive memoirs--written in the years before his death in 1997--are being made public. Born to a poor Jewish family in the tenements of Queen Street in Toronto, Newman's artistic talent got him a job at the NFB under John Grierson. He then became one of the first producers at CBC TV before heading overseas to the U.K. where he revitalized drama programming. Harold Pinter and Alun Owen were playwrights whom Newman nurtured, and their contemporary, socially conscious plays were successful, both artistically and commercially. At the BBC, overseeing a staff of 400, he developed a science fiction show that flourishes to this day: Doctor Who. Providing further context to Newman's memoir is an in-depth biographical essay by Graeme Burk, which positions Newman's legacy in the history of television, and an afterword by one of Sydney's daughters, Deirdre Newman."--

PROMISE AND FULFILMENT Palestine TO ABRAM AND JASHA WEINSHALL CITIZENS OF ISRAEL AS A TOKEN OF A QUARTER-CENTURY OF FRIENDSHIP ACKNOWLEDGMENTS MY sincere thanks are due to R. H. S. Grossman, M. P., and Messrs. Hamish Hamilton, for permission to use the long extract pp. 102-7 from Grossmans Palestine Mission to a member of the Israeli Foreign Office, who wishes to remain anonymous, for per mission to print his Report from Jerusalem pp. 234-8 to Mr. George Pape, Librarian of the Public Information Office in Tel Aviv, and Dr. G. Pollack of the Israeli Ministry of Finance, for valuable research work and to Miss Daphne Wood ward, for helping with the proofs. A. K. PREFACE THIS book consists of three parts, Background, Close-up and Perspective . The first part is a survey of the develop ments which led to the foundation of the State of Israel. It lays no claim to historical completeness, and is written from a specific angle which stresses the part played by irrational forces and emotive bias in history. I am not sure whether this emphasis has not occasionally resulted in over-emphasis as is almost in evitable when one tries to redress a balance by spot-lighting aspects which are currently neglected. But it was certainly not my intention, by underlining the psychological factor, to deny or minimize the importance of the politico-economic forces. My aim was rather to present, if I may borrow a current medical term, a psycho-somatic view of one of the most curious episodes in modern history. The second part, Close-up, is meant to give the reader a close and coloured, but not I hope technicoloured, view of the Jewish war and of everyday life in the new State. It opens and ends with extracts fromthe diary of my last sojourn as a war correspondent in Israel. The emphasis here is on life in the towns, with only occasional glimpses of the collective settlements, since I have given a detailed description of these in an earlier book. The third part, Perspective, is an attempt to present to the reader a comprehensive survey of the social and political structure, the cultural trends and future prospects of the Jewish State. I have tried to show elsewhere that the creative processes of the artist and the scientist follow the same mental pattern, and that the sciences may legitimately be called neutral arts, separated from the emotive arts not by any distinct barrier but merely by the quality of our emotive reactions. In this sense vii Viii PROMISE AND FULFILMENT history, too, is a neutral art with mythology and bardic folklore as connecting links to the emotive arts of drama and fiction. But the emotive neutrality which should characterize the chronicler is not the same thing as indifference, and his object ivity can only be the result of a subjective passion for the pursuit of truth. It is a poor sort of impartiality which stands outside the parties, untouched by their emotions the good judge, like the playwright and historian, absorbs the subjective truth con tained in each of the conflicting pleas, and his verdict is a syn thesis of their part-truths, not their denial. In other words, r objectivity is a state of balanced emotions, not an emotive vacuum. This book, then, should be regarded as a subjective pursuit of the objective truth. I lived in Palestine from my twentieth to my twenty-third year, as a farmer, tramp, and on various odd jobs finally as a foreign correspondent. Ihave since revisited the country at fairly regular intervals, and each of these visits provided an occasion not only to study developments in the country, but also my personal attitude to it. The last phase of this pilgrims progress through a thicket of emotive and ideo logical entanglements is summed up in the Epilogue. It may also be read as a prologue, and serve as an indication of the point of view from which certain controversial problems are treated in this book...