Alec is a Jewish tailor working in the sweatshops of 1930s Whitechapel. He is part of an immigrant community which fills the streets around Brick Lane with colour and vitality. Yet he is weary of the stifling poverty and his Jewish bosses exploiting his labour. Rejecting the pull of Zionism, Alec instead chooses a unity that crosses racial and religious boundaries, finding his salvation in socialist politics and the arms of a gentile. Jew Boy captures the magic of a multi-layered Cockney culture and the common goals that linked the masses before the war.

Stark is an endangered species. He's the last Jewish private detective in the south Bronx and his days may be numbered. It's the summer of 1965: the Yankees are making another pennant run, the war in Vietnam is heating up, hemlines are rising and the old neighborhood is changing. These days it's easier to stumble on a mugging than to find a good bagel. Stark is not a tough guy. In the trade, he's what's known as a peeper. His business is adultery and his weapon is a camera with a long lens not a snub-nose revolver. But Stark's life is beginning to unravel. His wife left him, his secretary hates him, his mother wants to mother him, he can't shake his shrink's voice from his head and he's got a strange pain in his chest. Then things go from bad to worse. He witnesses a shocking murder and suddenly Stark goes from being the hunter to the hunted, as he races through a decaying world of bookies, transvestites, loan sharks, slum lords and thugs for hire. "Stark in the Bronx" is the dazzling first novel by acclaimed historian Saul Landau. A kind of comic noir, Landau's atmospheric novel is both thrilling and hilarious: imagine the "Maltese Falcon" narrated by Woody Allen.Praise for Saul Landau and Stark: "Saul Landau, like the narrator of 'The Great Gatsby, marvels at how the rich so joyously make messes secure in the knowledge that others will clean up. But what if, one day, they don't?" -- Gore Vidal"You'll believe him, laugh with him, weep and get off your ass." -- John Berger, author "Ways of Seeing"

The message was painted on the house of a controversial Jewish defense lawyer representing neo-Nazis. As this hate-crime escalates to murder, LAPD Detective Jessie Drake is called in on the case. To find the killer, Jessie must confront personal prejudice and uncover dangerous truths about her city and her own past--before the angel of death marks her also.

Modiano's debut novel is a sardonic, often grotesque satire of France during the Nazi occupation. We are immediately plunged into the hallucinatory imagination of Raphael Schlemilovitch, a young Jewish man, torn between self-aggrandisement and self-loathing, who may be the heir to a Venezuelan fortune, may have lived during the Nazi Occupation, may have rubbed shoulders with the most notorious collaborators and anti-Semites of the time, may even have been the lover of Eva Braun...or he may have been none of these things. But at the centre of this vortex is 'La Place de l'Etoile' - the Place of the Star - which is both the geographical and moral centre of Paris, and that place next the heart where French Jews were compelled to wear the yellow star, the symbol of their persecution.

In 1931 Worcester, Massachusetts, Joey Singer, the teenaged son of Jewish immigrants, suffers with his family through the early part of the Great Depression, trying to finish high school, working a milk delivery route, marching on Washington, and eventually even becoming a hobo, all the while trying to figure out how to go to college and realize his dream of becoming a writer. Includes author's note about the Depression.

"Twelve exquisitely written stories depicting the search for human connection and the attempt to fit in far from home. All the Shining People explores migration, diaspora, and belonging within Toronto's Jewish South African community, as individuals come to terms with the oppressive hierarchies that separate, and the connections that bind. Seeking a place to belong, the book's characters -- including a life-drawing model searching the streets for her lover; a woman confronting secrets from her past in the new South Africa; and a man grappling with the legacy of his father, a former political prisoner -- crave authentic relationships that replicate the lost feeling of home. With its focus on family, culture, and identity, All the Shining People captures the experiences of immigrants and outsiders with honesty, subtlety, and deep sympathy."--

In these disturbing, haunting, yet strangely beautiful stories, the terrible carnage of the Middle East is rendered in unforgettable form. In "An Unwelcome Guest, " a young Jewish settler from New York plays a deadly game of backgammon with a ghostly old Arab while his pregnant wife sleeps unaware. In "The King of the King of Falafel, " a restaurant rivalry ends in apocalyptic violence. And in the brilliant, horrifying title story, a lonely shepherd wanders a broken noman's land, carrying with him the burden of an unspeakable act. A collection of startlig authority and vivid imagination, it heralds the arrival of a masterful new storyteller. - Tragically, the devastating conflicts in the Middle East continue to make international news practically daily, with seemingly no end in sight. This collection couldn't be timelier. - Papernick is an important, fresh voice in American literature. - The hardcover edition has received terrific reviews and Papernick has been on a widely successful author tour, increasing his visibility. - Hardcover ISBN: 1-55970-619-8

New York City€™s Lower East Side on the eve of WWI. Abraham Cahan, editor-in-chief of The Jewish Daily Forward, receives a letter addressed to his €œBintel Brif€ column from a twenty-three-year-old girl who confesses to living in sin with her uncle and seeks his advice. The girl€™s description of her plight inflames Cahan€™s imagination; the enclosed photograph, a young woman in a white cotton shift gazing languidly up at the camera from her bed, overwhelms him with desire. €œPeering at the photograph, wondering if her slackened, unprotected presentation of herself was the aftermath of a feverish embrace, Cahan felt a ghostly invisible presence possess him, settling into the emptiness in his soul.€ Thus begins the drama of a righteous man€™s struggle to free himself from an obsession that threatens to destroy him and mortally wound his family. Desperate to fathom the mystery of her power, Cahan explores the girl€™s past only to discover that her st

The novel centres on a colourful group of refugee Tibetans. One of the group's members, the charismatic (and slightly dubious) Rabbi Chod, recognises himself as the reincarnation of Moses, and various friends as reincarnations of key Biblical figures. Despite condemnation from both the mainstream Jewish and Tibetan communities, he declares his followers the true 'lost tribe of Israel', and defiantly opens up a synagogue in a pet shop. a family where suppression and dysfunction are common currency. Both of his parents are Tibetan Jews, followers of Rabbi Chod. His father owns a cafe called 'Hush Hush', so called because within the cafe, all forms of noise are forbidden. Any customer who speaks is instantly banned and a Polaroid photo of them is pinned to a cork board in case they should dare to return. way not into the future, but the past. He falls asleep each night only to wake up the day before. In this way, as he grows up his parents get younger. By the end of the book his parents are children - too young to manage by themselves - and the adult Monlam has to look after them. In this way he witnesses his own family history, quite literally living backwards into their lives.

The dread shadow of Nazism falls upon the Carnovsky family, three generations of Jews who believe themselves totally assimilated into German society. David, who has prospered in "enlightened, civilized" Berlin and considers himself "more German than the Germans”, cannot rationalize the momentous events engulfing him. His son Georg, a famous doctor, taught by his father to be "Jewish at home, a German in the street", is stripped of his practice, his possessions, and ultimately his illusions. And his young son Jegor is pulled between his love for the fatherland and the Jewishness he scorns. A tragedy of torn loyalties, this powerful and panoramic novel has become one of the classics of our time.

Approaching the end of her eventful life, Elisabeth Rother has decided to write her memoirs, brushing aside her and her Jewish husband's narrow escape from the Nazis and their difficult arrival in New Jersey in order to concentrate her story on the wayward behavior of her impossible daughter, Renate, and granddaughter, Irene.

Twenty-four stories of Israeli and Jewish life, chosen from the more than one hundred Haim Watzman has written over the last nine years in his "Necessary Stories" column in the The Jerusalem Report. Bookended by a flashback to his first weekend in Israel forty years ago and a storytelling encounter on a recent flight back home from the US, these stories--funny, meditative, and sad, set in immigrant camps, the army, and the author's own neighborhood in south Jerusalem--uniquely capture what it is like, in our age, to be an Israeli and a Jew. Praise for Haim Watzman: "His stories detail the lives of ordinary Israelis, often touching on current events ... The dialogue, though written in English, has the distinct feeling of Hebrew speech -- that unmistakable combination of impatience and warmth." --Naomi Zeveloff, Forward "Watzman knows that every encounter, no matter how fleeting--a conversation in a cemetery with a long-dead Talmudic sage; Felix Mendelssohn's great aunt scolding the young prodigy; four Jews on a plane discussing the Bible, the Zohar and Wuthering Heights--is a matter of life and death. Necessary Stories is a quietly beautiful work, haunting in places, gently funny in others, written by a graceful, thoughtful, eloquent man who understands that life itself is not enough. One must live to tell the tale." --From the Introduction by Joseph Skibell "Author Haim Watzman is a master of the tiny moment, the exact point in time that leaves an impression on the future ... If you enjoy short stories, 'Necessary Stories' is a fine collection, filled with hints and hidden meanings. It's a perfect choice for a Jewish book club whose members can discuss these stories for hours." --Rivkah Lambert Adler, Jerusalem Post, June 14, 2017 "Watzman writes with immediacy, attentiveness and empathy, whether he's describing a pregnant feral cat he names Hagar, who makes her home in the dumpster of his Jerusalem building, or the best friend of the bride at a wedding, or his late son, who was killed in a tragic accident while serving in the IDF. Watzman ... has a good ear for dialogue. The stories, layered with meaning, speak to his wide-ranging interests." --Sandee Brawarsky, The Jewish Week/Times of Israel "All but one of these stories are relatively short ... Yet anyone who sits down with this collection will come away with a sense of something much larger--a multifaceted impression of what it's like to make a life in a place where the prosaic mixes with the fantastic; history, politics, and philosophy are around every corner, and each encounter with a stranger holds the potential to show you the world from a fresh angle." --Janice Weizman, The Jerusalem Report

The Bear Boy is a story specific to time and place, and about the dislocation of time and place too. It is set in 1935 at the only moment in history when the idea of socialism flickered to life in the United States, when Jewish intellectuals were fleeing out of the country where they were once respected writers and professors, and when a great many people were equal to each other in that the most had little material wealth. The oversize Mitwisser clan are German refugees who survive at the whim of their vagabond benefactor, James Albair. James is heir to the fortune amassed by his father, the author of a wildly popular series of children's books called The Bear Boy. Wayward, feckless and with money to burn, James has taken up the eccentric Mitwissers - scholarly patriach, invalid wife, and five scrappy children - as his latest caprice. Into this chaotic household comes Rose Meadows, orphaned at the age of eighteen. Rose quickly becomes indispensable as assistant to Professor Mitwisser in his research on an arcane sect and then, inevitably, as general nursemaid, nanny and companion to the entire family. Her sole inheritance is a book: the first title in the Bear Boy series. When the actual Bear Boy appears on the Mitwisser doorstep, Rose must resist the pull of his reckless orbit as she pursues her own desires. The Bear Boy evokes Depression-era New York from the perspective of perpetual outsiders. Brought together by coincidence and fate, the hard times they inherit still hold glimmers of past wonders and future dreams.

Investigating the murder of a woman found in the Baka neighborhood of Jerusalem, Chief Superintendent Michael Ohayon finds the case complicated by tensions between local Jewish and Arab residents.

In an ambitious departure from her usual form, Anita Brookner expands her canvas in Family and Friends to create a richly textured novel about the life of a wealthy Jewish family in London, focusing on the generation that came to maturity between the two World Wars. Presiding over the Dorn household is the formidable Sofka, an elegant and circumspect widow who watches as her four children find their way into adulthood. Frederick, the sybaritic eldest son, escapes to the comforts of the Riviera while stern, dutiful Alfred runs the family business and burns with unrealized longings; Betty—pleasure-loving, vain, and selfish—makes her ambitious way from Paris to Hollywood, leaving her dreamy, passive sister Mimi to languish at home. A brilliant social novel of lost innocence and the complex nature of family bonds, Family and Friends meticulously portrays the emotional cost of everyday life.

After a trip home to Moravia reveals that his father is not a businessman but actually a great composer, unsuccessful musician Leib Goldkorn returns to New York to launch a production of his father's opera "Rubezahl" to disastrous results.

"The Book of Blam ... is a modern-day retelling of the book of Job. The war is over. Miroslav Blam walks along the former Jew Street, and he remembers. He remembers Aaron Grün, the hunchbacked watchmaker; and Eduard Fiker, a lamp merchant; and Jakob Mentele, a stove fitter; and Arthur Spitzer, a grocer, who played amateur soccer and had non-Jewish friends; and Sándor Vértes, a lawyer who was a Communist. All dead. As are his younger sister and his best friend, a Serb, both of whom joined the resistance movement; and his mother and father in the infamous Novi Sad raid in January 1942--when the Hungarian Arrow Cross executed 1,400 Jews and Serbs on the banks of the Danube and tossed them into the river. Blam lives. The war he survived will never be over for him."--www.amazon.ca

An inventive literary account of Cixous's remarkable journey to her mother's birthplace Winner, French Voices Award for Excellence in Publication and Translation For about eighty years, the Jonas family of Osnabrück were part of a small but vibrant Jewish community in this mid-size city of Lower Saxony. After the war, Osnabrück counted not a single Jew. Most had been deported and murdered in the camps, others emigrated if they could and if they managed to overcome their own inertia. It is this inertia and failure to escape that Hélène Cixous seeks to account for in Osnabrück Station to Jerusalem. Vicious anti-Semitism hounded all of Osnabrück's Jews long before the Nazis' rise to power in 1933. So why did people wait to leave when the threat was so patent, so in-their-face? Drawn from the stories told to Cixous by her mother, Ève, and grandmother, Rosalie (Rosi), this literary work reimagines fragments of Ève's and Rosi's stories, including the death of Ève's uncle, Onkel André. Piecing together the story of Andreas Jonas from what she was told and from what she envisages, Cixous recounts the tragedy of the one she calls the King Lear of Osnabrück, who followed his daughter to Jerusalem only to be sent away by her and to return to Osnabrück in time to be deported to a death camp. Cixous wanders the streets of the city she had heard about all her life in her mother's and grandmother's stories, digs into its archives, meets city officials, all the while wondering if she should have come. These hesitations and reflections in the present, often voiced in dialogues staged with her own son or daughter, are woven with scenes from her childhood in Algeria and the half-remembered, half-invented stories of the Jonas family, making Osnabrück Station to Jerusalem one of the author's most intensely engaging books. This work received the French Voices Award for excellence in publication and translation. French Voices is a program created and funded by the French Embassy in the United States and FACE (French American Cultural Exchange).

Pages 327-339, reproduces a Jewish chronicle of the first crusade. Although the translation is made from a rather bold reconstruction of a German translation of the original Hebrew chronicle, it is still close enough to the original to give a good picture of some aspects of the crusade as it affected the Jews.

Isaiah Spiegel was an inmate of the Lodz Ghetto from its inception in 1940 until its liquidation in 1944. While there, he wrote short stories depicting Jewish life in the ghetto and managed to hide them before he was deported to Auschwitz. After being freed, he returned to Lodz to retrieve and publish his stories. The stories examine the relationship between inmates and their families, their friends, their Christian former neighbors, the German soldiers, and, ultimately, the world of hopelessness and desperation that surrounded them. In using his creative powers to transform the suffering and death of his people into stories that preserve their memory, Spiegel succeeds in affirming the humanity and dignity the Germans were so intent on destroying. Originally published as Malchut geto (Malkhes geto) in Yiddish.