"The Exiles Return is set in Occupied Vienna in 1954-5. It describes five people who grew up there before the war and have come back to see if they can re-establish the life they have lost. The novel begins with Professor Kuno Adler, who is Jewish and fled Vienna after the Anschluss (the events of March 1938 when Hitler's troops marched into Austria). He is returning from New York to try and take up his old life as a research scientist. We realise through his confrontation with officialdom and with the changed fabric of the city (the lime trees are there no longer, it is hard to know who behaved well during the war and who was a Nazi sympathiser) that a refugee who goes back has a very difficult time. Next we are introduced to a wealthy Greek named Kanakis..."--Publisher description.

Descent , a novella published in 1920, is set against the background of Jewish life in Russia and Ukraine during the turbulent period leading up to the October Revolution of 1917, a period characterized by the rise of secularism, the rejection of old traditions, the alienation of intellectuals, and the attempt of different generations to find a place for themselves inside and out of the shtetl. The novella centers on the mystery of the suicide of a young pharmacist in Rakitne, a provincial town. Did his death have anything to do with the two women who loved him? Was it the result of despair or an act of protest? And if protest, against what? His old friend seeks answers but finds none. The prose is immaculately crafted, the narrative indirect, and the mood poignant, dark, and disquieting.

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.

“A moving act of absolution . . . . This strong novel about a girl who is debased but never destroyed pushes the reader to a new level of understanding of the things people do—and the things that are done to them.”— Washington Post Book World She has hair of ginger and lovely green eyes, and she has just been transported with her family from Terezín to Auschwitz. In short order, her father commits suicide, and her mother and younger brother are dispatched to the gas chambers, but fifteen-year-old Hanka Kauderzová is still alive. Faced with the choice of certain death in the camp or working in a German military brothel, she chooses a chance at life. Passing for an Aryan, Hanka spends her days in the brothel cold, hungry, fearful, and ashamed. She is sustained only by her loathing of the men who visit her and by a fierce, indomitable will to live. This devastatingly beautiful novel explores and delineates the impossible choices one sometimes has to make in life, when the fabric of the world is rent asunder. Soaring beyond the nightmare, it leaves the reader with a transcendent sense of hope. Skyhorse Publishing, as well as our Arcade, Yucca, and Good Books imprints, are proud to publish a broad range of books for readers interested in fiction—novels, novellas, political and medical thrillers, comedy, satire, historical fiction, romance, erotic and love stories, mystery, classic literature, folklore and mythology, literary classics including Shakespeare, Dumas, Wilde, Cather, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.

Winner of the Helen and Stan Vine Jewish Book Award and finalist for the Man Booker Prize In Far to Go, one of our most accomplished young writers takes us inside the world of an affluent Jewish family in Prague during the lead-up to Hitler's invasion of Czechoslovakia. In 1939, Pavel and Anneliese Bauer are secular Jews whose lives are turned upside down by the arrival of Hitler. They are unable to leave the country in time to avoid deportation, but they do manage to get their six-year-old son Pepik a place on a Kindertransport. Meanwhile, a fascinating and compelling present-day strand in the story slowly reveals the unexpected fates of each of the Bauers. Through a series of surprising twists, Pick leads us to ask: What does it mean to cling to identity in the face of persecution? And what are the consequences if you attempt to change your identity? Inspired by the harrowing five-year journey Alison Pick's own grandparents embarked upon from their native Czechoslovakia to Canada during the Second World War, Far to Gois an epic historical novel that traces one family's journey through these tumultuous and traumatic events. A layered, beautifully written, moving, and suspenseful story by one of our rising literary stars.

In turn of the century Eastern Europe, a brother and sister have been chosen to guard an ancient cemetery of Jewish martyrs situated on an isolated mountain. The endless snows protect them from the pogroms and plagues that rage in the world below, but that same protective blanket cuts them off from their people and tradition. Escape--from loneliness, from wavering piety, and from the burgeoning desire they feel for one another--becomes impossible. A parable for our times, by the writer whom Irving Howe called "one of the best novelists alive," Unto the Soul lays bare the deepest stirrings of religious feeling and despair within the human soul. From the Trade Paperback edition.

Now available as a New Directions paperbook, Love and Terror, William Herrick's second novel with ND, both reflects and anticipates today's headlines. Terrorist kidnappings, hijackings, and dramatic rescues all form a part of the plot, but Herrick's interest lies less in tension-filled heroics than in the human cost of flawed idealism. Through the notebook of the principal terrorist, Viktor X, the complex characters of Viktor and Gabriele, for whom love and terrorism are intertwined and inseparable, are revealed. And in a series of interviews with a nameless reporter, the lives of three disillusioned revolutionaries--"the old ones," now hostages to a new brand of revolution--gradually and movingly unfold. In his earlier Shadows and Wolves (New Directions, 1980), Herrick showed us the possibility of human solutions that transcend politics. In Love and Terror he shows us why any ideology, inflexibly adhered to, makes such solutions necessary.

"Rachel is a Jew living in Kishinev, Russia. At fourteen, Rachel knows that she wants more from life than the traditional role of wife and mother. She has dreams of being a writer. But everything is put on hold when a young Christian man is murdered and Rachel is forced to keep the murderer's identity a secret. Tensions mount as the Christians' distrust of the Jews is fueled by prejudice and rumour. While Rachel keeps the truth to herself, she watches as lies and anti-Jewish propaganda leap off the pages of the local newspaper, inciting Christians to riot against the Jews. Violence breaks out on Easter Sunday, 1903, and when it finally ends, Rachel finds that the person she loves most is dead and that her home has been destroyed. As she struggles to survive the aftermath of the riots-or pogroms-support comes from someone totally unexpected, when a young Christian named Sergei turns against his father, a police officer complicit in the riots, to help Rachel. With everything against them, the two young people find comfort in the bond that is growing between them, one of the few signs of goodness and hope in a time of chaos and violence."--Publisher's website.

They came from the stetl to a new land, to a new life. Another year in Africa, they said, another year in exile. Old bonds break as they adjust from the old world of pogroms to their new life in Africa. Six-year-old Ruth is haunted by memories of tragedy and persecution that are not even hers. Award-winning author, Rose Zwi, evokes with tenderness the 1930s and 40s with a tale of loss of innocence alongside the stirrings of Apartheid.

Oskar, a survivor of the Holocaust, is a man of little faith. Despite his inability to find answers, he persists in asking questions that all human beings have a right to ask. He encounters diverse characters, such as Bella, a New York prostitute, mystic Martin Buber, and an anti-Semitic high school teacher on the Canadian prairies. Strong language.

"A luxuriously comic novel in which three awesome women of different generations raise Armageddon tempests in otherwise mild and humble familial teapots. Oldest of the volcanic trio is Malka--born in Russia and never popular ("no one would rise up to call her blessed") in New York, where she's discovered dead by her despised daughter Helen only after a half-hour of the usual one-sided conversation. And, alas, years later in California, Helen finds the spirit of Malka "Here she was back again"--in her own first-born, Marilyn: the grandmother's interior lava pit of fierce frustrations, her intelligence, scorn, and madness, "had been handed down intact and unmistakable." After all, Marilyn is horn screaming, swings the whip over her two sisters--good-natured Phyllis and meek Natalie and says she hates Helen (and means it); she's the kind of child who wouldn't clap for Tinker Bell. Marilyn is instead Daddy Lenny's girl--and with the keen aim of a stalking cheetah, she claims his total adoration. She even marries gentle CPA Ira merely because Daddy likes him, but later she shrugs off hubby and kids, pursuing her own law career. All this infuriates mama Helen, and after Lenny dies of cancer (a torment that nearly kills Marilyn too), full-scale war breaks out. Helen brings off a mating of Ira and dear, unprepossessing Natalie just when recuperating Marilyn is thinking of reacquiring him: Marilyn retaliates by ripping to pieces every one of Helen's plants. A cease-fire follows, true, yet at the close there are tiny inklings of revived sniper activity. . . Kohan's dialogue crackles; there are some marvelous originals (including a shrewd, Yiddish-accented Greek chorus in Lenny's mother); and there's a breadth of scale which admits both irony and hilarity, as giant passions are forced to play on a stage of Muppets Kohan (Save Me a Seat, 1979) is gaining in control and stature."--Kirkus

One night, Agatha Winter's phone rings. Jasmine, her 13-year-old sister, has run away from home and needs to be picked up at the bus terminal. It's the anniversary of their mother's accident and subsequent split from the family. Jasmine is determined to exact revenge. Their mother, now a flashy self-help guru under a new moniker, preaches "willing amnesia" liberation by deliberately forgetting and disowning the past. But "willing amnesia" is no innovation: it runs in the family. The girls' grandmother and great-grandmother, both Holocaust survivors, have found their own superficially innocuous yet fiercely destructive ways to fend off memory. In separate struggles, the girls work to break free from the burden of their family's silence. Told in three major and two minor voices, Cricket in a Fist offers sophisticated psychological insight. Lewis's rich command of language transports us into a world of richly imagined characters.

Focuses on one catastrophic day in the life of businessman Rafael Mendes, weaving together stories of his ancestors and occurrences of the present as Mendes learns how the past informs and shackles the present

This gripping novel of adventure, love, and religious persecution follows the life and flight of a Jew under the Spanish Inquisition.

This a story about decisions, and the difficulty making them, as Hitler's power spreads across Europe. It is told through linked diaries, letters, interviews and poems, which portrary the three main characters as they pursue their own love story to its end. Across their obsessions, the figure of Walter Benjamin, first in Paris, then at the Spanish border, adds a poignant dimension to their hopes and fears.

Shock number one for Dinah is that she is actually dating Geoff, star quarterback and all-around great guy. Shock number two is that her usually supportive family objects and that Geoff does not understand why. Why must difficult choices always come with wanting to have fun?

Coney Island, 1939: On the eve of World War II, fifteen-year-old Harry Carzker spends his after-school hours on his bike, picking up betting slips from Coney Island carnival freaks for the local bookie and racing his imaginary sworn enemy, German Captain Ziegenbaum, whose ship menaces the coastline. His parents are in their own world: his father writes a serial novel for the local Yiddish newspaper by day and hangs out with other intellectuals at the Cafe Royal by night; his beautiful mother grows increasingly bitter, yearning for a glamorous life that is certain to be denied to the wife of a writer. As the lights of the Cyclone and Luna Park glow in the Coney Island night. Harry finds a surrogate family in the freaks and low-lifes. A premature victim of Welischmerz, "lovingly applied by loved ones, ignorant of its toxicity on the young", Harry ponders life, art, and philosophy with Aba, a Yiddish poet who boards with his family, yet he is unable to shake the dark foreboding of a disaster that finally materializes, changing his life utterly. Coney, soaked through with atmosphere and guided by an uncommon comic touch, captures the essence of a young man's coming of age in an extraordinary place and time. Depicting Coney Island in all its garish and gritty human spectacle. Amram Ducovny's dark and brilliant first novel has the stark intensity of a Weegee photograph, the heart of E. L. Doctorow's Ragtime, and the soul of an Isaac Bashevis Singer novel.