Poxl West fled the Nazis' onslaught in Czechoslovakia. He escaped their clutches again in Holland. He pulled Londoners from the Blitz's rubble. He wooed intoxicating, unconventional beauties. He rained fire on Germany from his RAF bomber. Poxl West is the epitome of manhood and something of an idol to his teenage nephew, Eli Goldstein, who reveres him as a brave, singular, Jewish war hero. Poxl fills Eli's head with electric accounts of his derring-do, adventures and romances, as he collects the best episodes from his storied life into a memoir. He publishes that memoir, Skylock, to great acclaim, and its success takes him on the road, and out of Eli's life. With his uncle gone, Eli throws himself into reading his opus and becomes fixated on all things Poxl. But as he delves deeper into Poxl's history, Eli begins to see that the life of the fearless superman he's adored has been much darker than he let on, and filled with unimaginable loss from which he may have not recovered. As the truth about Poxl emerges, it forces Eli to face irreconcilable facts about the war he's romanticized and the vision of the man he's held so dear. Daniel Torday's debut novel, "The Last Flight of Poxl West, " beautifully weaves together the two unforgettable voices of Eli Goldstein and Poxl West, exploring what it really means to be a hero, and to be a family, in the long shadow of war.

Four complete works by Philip Roth in one volume. The complete comic saga of Nathan Zuckerman, his ordeals of conscience, from Manhattan, to Miami Beach, to Czechoslovakia! "Roth has transcended himself . . . . A comic genius . . . Certainly Philip Roth's finest achievement to date, eclipsing even his best single fictions . . . ZUCKERMAN BOUND binds together THE GHOST WRITER, ZUCKERMAN UNBOUND, and THE ANATOMY LESSON, adding to them as epilogue a wild short novel, THE PRAGUE ORGY, which is at once the bleakest and the funniest writing Roth has done." -- The New York Times Book Review "ZUCKERMAN BOUND proves that no one now writing can be funnier and, at the same time, more passionately serious than Philip Roth." -- Time "ZUCKERMAN BOUND shows the author's always ebullient invention and artful prose at their most polished and concentrated." -- The New Yorker

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

For Davita Chandal, growing up in New York in the 1930s and '40s is an experience of indescribable joy—and unfathomable sadness. Her loving parents, both fervent radicals, fill her with the fiercely bright hope for a new, better world. But the deprivations of war and the Depression take their ruthless toll. And Davita, unexpectedly, finds in the Jewish faith that her mother had long ago abandoned both a solace to her questioning inner pain and a test of her budding spirit of independence. To her, life's elusive possibilities for happiness, for fulfillment, for decency, become as real and resonant as the music of the small harp that hangs on her door, welcoming all guests with its sweet, gentle tones. Praise for Davita's Harp “Rich . . . enchanting . . . [Chaim] Potok's bravest book.” — The New York Times Book Review “It is an enormous pleasure to sink into such a rich . . . solidly written novel. The reader knows from the first few pages that he is in the hands of a sure professional who won't let him down.” — People “Engrossing . . . Filled with a host of richly drawn characters. Potok is a master storyteller.” — Chicago Tribune “Gripping and intriguing . . . A well-told tale that needed telling.” — The Philadelphia Inquirer

“A case study in elegant, honest tragicomedy…by the genuinely hilarious Paul Rudnick” (Gary Shteyngart, New York Times bestselling author) that follows the decades-long, rule-breaking romance between the son of one of America’s wealthiest families and a middle-class aspiring author. Devastatingly handsome and insanely rich, Farrell Covington is capable of anything and impossible to resist. He’s a clear-eyed romantic, an aesthete but not a snob, self-indulgent yet wildly generous. As the son of one of the country’s most powerful and deeply conservative families, the world could be his. But when he falls for Nate Reminger, an aspiring writer from a nice Jewish family in Piscataway, New Jersey, the results are passionate and catastrophic. Together, the two embark on a unique romance that spans half a century. They are inseparable—except for the many years when they are apart. Moving from the ivy-covered bastion of Yale to New York City, Los Angeles, and eventually all over the world, Farrell and Nate experience the tremendous upheaval and social change of the last fifty years. From the freedom of gay life in 1970s Manhattan to the Hollywood closet, the AIDS epidemic, and the profound strides of the LGBTQ+ movement, this witty and moving novel shows how the world changes around us while we’re busy doing other things. Written with “engaging wit, side-eyed perceptiveness, and barbed elan” (Michael Chabon), this modern classic proves that style has its limits, love does not.

The Sword of Moses: An Ancient Book of Magic by M. Gaster is a comprehensive study of an ancient Jewish magical text known as the Sword of Moses. The book explores the origins, history, and contents of this fascinating text, which is believed to date back to the 6th or 7th century CE. The Sword of Moses contains a variety of magical spells and incantations, including those for healing, protection, and divination. The book also includes detailed analysis of the text's language, structure, and symbolism, as well as its relationship to other Jewish magical traditions. The author provides extensive historical and cultural context for the Sword of Moses, drawing on a wide range of sources from Jewish and non-Jewish traditions. The Sword of Moses: An Ancient Book of Magic is a must-read for anyone interested in the history of Jewish magic and mysticism.1896. From a unique manuscript. With introduction, translation, an index of mystical names, and a facsimile. A Gnostic text, originally in Hebrew, discusses the names of God, which are thought by Kabbalists to have magical powers. With a complete original version and a facsimile of the original papyrus.This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the old original and may contain some imperfections such as library marks and notations. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions, that are true to their original work.

A story spanning two world wars and several generations in a German family. In the devastating opening scene, a woman named Helene stands with her seven-year-old son in a provincial German railway station in 1945, amid the chaos of civilians fleeing west. Having survived with him through the horror and deprivation of the war years, she abandons him on the station platform and never returns. The story quickly circles back to Helene's childhood with her sister Martha in rural Germany, which came to an abrupt end with the outbreak of the First World War. Their father is sent to the eastern front, and their Jewish mother withdraws from the hostility of her surroundings into a state of mental confusion. As we follow Helene into adulthood, we watch riveted as the costs of survival and ill-fated love turn her into a woman capable of the unforgivable.

"Do tell us a fairy tale, ganpa." "Well, will you be good and quiet if I do?" "Of course we will; we are always good when you are telling us fairy tales." "Well, here goes.--Once upon a time, though it wasn't in my time, and it wasn't in your time, and it wasn't in anybody else's time, there was a----" "But that would be no time at all." "That's fairy tale time." This is a lovely little book of fairy tales from throughout Europe. The author wrote the stories by finding tales that were common among many different European countries and cultures. The stories were very approachable, and are appropriate for all ages. There are 25 stories in totaly. European Folk and Fairy Tales (also known as Europa's Fairy Book) is a collection of Folk and Fairy Tales by Joseph Jacobs, first published in 1916, including: The Cinder-Maid The King of the Fishes Beauty and the Beast Reynard and Bruin The Dancing Water, The Singing Apple, and the Speaking Bird The Language of Animals Snowwhite Joseph Jacobs (1854 - 1916) was a folklorist, literary critic and historian. His works included contributions to the Jewish Encyclopedia, translations of European works, and critical editions of early English literature. Jacobs wrote for journals and books on the subject of folklore and produced a popular series of fairy tales.

Giorgio Bassani’s six classic books, collected for the first time in English as the epic masterwork they were intended to be. Among the masters of twentieth-century literature, Giorgio Bassani and his Northern Italian hometown of Ferrara “are as inseparable as James Joyce and Dublin or Italo Svevo and Trieste” (from the Introduction). Now published in English for the first time as the unified masterwork Bassani intended, The Novel of Ferrara brings together Bassani’s six classics, fully revised by the author at the end of his life: Within the Walls , The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles , The Garden of the Finzi-Continis , Behind the Door , The Heron , and The Smell of Hay . Set in the northern Italian town of Ferrara before, during, and after the Second World War, these interlocking stories present a fully rounded world of unforgettable characters: the respected doctor whose homosexuality is tolerated until he is humiliatingly exposed by an exploitative youth; a survivor of the Nazi death camps whose neighbors’ celebration of his return gradually turns to ostracism; a young man discovering the ugly, treacherous price that people will pay for a sense of belonging; the Jewish aristocrat whose social position has been erased; the indomitable schoolteacher, Celia Trotti, whose Communist idealism disturbs and challenges a postwar generation. The Novel of Ferrara memorializes not only the Ferrarese people, but the city itself, which assumes a character and a voice deeply inflected by the Jewish community to which the narrator belongs. Suffused with new life by acclaimed translator and poet Jamie McKendrick, this seminal work seals Bassani’s reputation as “a quietly insistent chronicler of our age’s various menaces to liberty” (Jonathan Keates).

Gamaliel Friedman is only a child when his family flees Czechoslovakia in 1939 for the relative safety of Hungary. For him, it will be the beginning of a life of rootlessness, disguise, and longing. Five years later, in desperation, Gamaliel’s parents entrust him to a young Christian cabaret singer named Ilonka. With his Jewish identity hidden, Gamaliel survives the war. But in 1956, to escape the stranglehold of communism, he leaves Budapest after painfully parting from Ilonka. Gamaliel tries, unsuccessfully, to find a place for himself in Europe. After a failed marriage, he moves to New York, where he works as a ghostwriter, living through the lives of others. Eventually he falls in with a group of exiles, including a rabbi––a mystic whose belief in the potential for grace in everyday life powerfully counters Gamaliel’s feelings of loss and dispossession. When Gamaliel is asked to help draw out an elderly, disfigured Hungarian woman who may be his beloved Ilonka, he begins to understand that a real life in the present is possible only if he will reconcile with his past.

Abraham Geiger's magnum opus provides a comprehensive history of Judaism from its biblical roots to the 19th century. Geiger was a pioneering scholar of Jewish studies and an instrumental figure in the development of Reform Judaism. This book remains an essential resource for scholars and lay readers alike seeking to deepen their knowledge of Jewish history and tradition. This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

"Of all the characters in modern Jewish fiction, the most beloved is Tevye, the buoyant, compassionate, philosophical, Bible-quoting dairyman whose life embodies the precarious existence of a Jew in Eastern Europe. Three of Tevye's daughters are well known from the musical and film Fiddler on the Roof. Here the story continues with the tales of his younger daughters, Schprintze and Beilke" --back cover.

Now in his mid-thirties, Nathan Zuckerman, a would-be recluse despite his newfound fame as a bestselling author, ventures onto the streets of Manhattan in the final year of the turbulent sixties. Not only is he assumed by his fans to be his own fictional satyr, Gilbert Carnovsky (" Hey, you do all that stuff in that book?" ), but he also finds himself the target of admonishers, advisers, and sidewalk literary critics. The recent murders of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., lead an unsettled Zuckerman to wonder if " target" may be more than a figure of speech. In Zuckerman Unbound-- the second volume of the trilogy and epilogue "Zuckerman Bound"-- the notorious novelist Nathan Zuckerman retreats from his oldest friends, breaks his marriage to a virtuous woman, and damages, perhaps irreparably, his affectionate connection to his younger brother...and all because of his great good fortune!

Raphael Lipkin is a man obsessed. He hears voices. He talks to ghosts. He is spending the summer at the Mountain Clinic, a psychiatric hospital in upstate New York--not as a patient, but as a visiting professional with a secret, personal quest.A professor of literature and a Holocaust survivor, Raphael, having rebuilt his life since the war, sees it on the verge of coming apart once more. He longs to talk to Pedro, the man who rescued him as a fifteen-year-old orphan from postwar Poland and brought him to Paris, becoming his friend, mentor, hero, and savior. But Pedro disappeared inside the prisons of Stalin's Russia shortly after the war. Where is Pedro now, and how can Raphael discern what is true and what is false without him?

The World of the Talmud by Morris Adler is a comprehensive guide to the history and teachings of the Talmud. The book covers the origins of the Talmud, the development of its teachings, and its impact on Jewish culture and society. Adler provides a detailed analysis of the Talmud's structure, language, and themes, as well as its relationship to other Jewish texts and traditions. The book also explores the Talmud's influence on Jewish law, ethics, and philosophy, and its relevance to contemporary issues facing the Jewish community. With its clear and accessible style, The World of the Talmud is a valuable resource for anyone interested in Jewish history, religion, and culture.Contents: Attempting a Definition; The Rise of the Oral Law; Why Oral? The Mishna; The Gemara; Halacha and Aggada (Law and Lore); Who Were the Rabbis? The Religion of the Rabbis; Aspects of Rabbinic Social Teaching; On Justice and Courts; The Denials of Rabbinic Teaching; The Enduring Worth of the Talmud.This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the old original and may contain some imperfections such as library marks and notations. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions, that are true to their original work.

From the author of "Comeback Love," a sweeping, panoramic tale of twentieth-century America, chronicling the decades-long love affair between a Jewish immigrant and the granddaughter of a slave. Julian Rose is only fifteen when he leaves his family and Germany for a new life in 1920s America. Lonely at first, he eventually finds his way first by joining up with Longy Zwillman and becoming one of the preeminent bootleggers on the East Coast, and later by amassing a fortune in real estate. Kendall Wakefield is a free-spirited college senior who longs to become a painter. Her mother, the daughter of a slave and founder of an African-American college in South Florida, is determined to find a suitable match for her only daughter. One evening in 1938, Mrs. Wakefield hosts a dinner that reunites Julian with his parents who have been rescued from Hitler s Germany by the college and brings him together with Kendall for the first time. From that encounter begins a thirty-year affair that will take the lovers from the beaches of Miami to the jazz clubs of Greenwich Village to postwar life in Paris, where they will mingle with Sartre, Picasso, and a host of other artists and intellectuals. Through his years serving in American intelligence and as an interrogator at the Nuremberg trials, what Julian wants most is to marry and find the joy that eluded his parents. Kendall craves her freedom, and after trading her oil paints for a Leica camera, becomes a celebrated photographer, among the first American journalists to photograph the survivors of a liberated concentration camp. Yet despite distance, their competing desires, and the rapidly changing world, their longing for each other remains a constant in the ceaseless sweep of time. Captivating and infused with historical detail, this is the epic tale of three generations, two different but intertwined families, and one unforgettable love story."

Joshua Then and Now is about Joshua Shapiro today, and the Joshua he was. His father a boxer turned honest crook, his mother an erotic dancer whose greatest performance was at Joshua’s bar mitzvah, Joshua has overcome his inauspicious beginnings in the Jewish ghetto of Montreal to become a celebrated television writer and a successful journalist. But Joshua, now middle-aged, is not a happy man. Incapacitated by a freak accident, anguished by the disappearance of his WASP wife, and caught up in a sex scandal, Joshua is besieged by the press and tormented by the ghosts of his youth. Set in Montreal, the novel chronicles the rocky journey we all make between the countries of the past and the present. Raucous, opinionated, tender, Joshua Then and Now is a memorable excursion into Mordecai Richler's comic universe.

"Selected by Cynthia Ozick from a dozen books written across more than fifty years, the essays and short stories gathered here constitute a summing-up of her remarkable literary career. In such classic essays as 'Who Owns Anne Frank?,' 'What Helen Keller Saw,' 'Dostoevsky's Unabomber,' and 'Transcending the Kafkaesque,' Ozick examines some of the world's most illustrious writers and their work, tackles compelling contemporary literary and moral issues, and looks into the wellsprings of her own lifelong engagement with literature. In her short stories, including 'A Hebrew Sibyl,' 'What Happened to the Baby?,' 'Dictation,' 'The Biographer's Hat,' and 'The Conversion of the Jews,' Ozick demonstrates again and again her stylistic brilliance and the originality of her distinctive interweaving of the strands of history and myth." -

The work of a woman who has invested her life in her art, and who will, I think be remembered as one of the significant writers of her generation.' Saul BellowBlue in Chicago collects together the sharp, bittersweet stories of Bette Howland and restores to our bookshelves an extraordinarily gifted writer, who was recognized as a major talent before all but disappearing from public view for decades, until nearly the end of her life. Bette Howland was an outsider: an intellectual from a working-class neighborhood in Chicago; a divorcée and single mother, to the disapproval of her family; an artist chipped away at by poverty and perfection. Each of these sides of her life plays a shaping role in her work. Mining her most precarious struggles for her art in each of these stories, she chronicles the fears and hopes of her generation.Blue in Chicago, and other stories introduces UK readers to a wry, brilliant observer and a writer of great empathy and sly, joyous humor. Published in the US under the title Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage.'If there's a Howland bandwagon (and there should be), hold me a seat, or I'll stand. No problem, I'll stand.' Paris Review

Set in the dire year of 1938, Ira Stigman journeys to the famed artists' colony Yaddo, where he meets a blond, aristocratic pianist whose "calm, Anglo-Saxon radiance" engages him. The conflict with his ghetto Jewish roots forces Ira to set out on an illusionary quest for the promise of the American West.