1045 results for "Jewish Fiction"

Family and Friends

Anita Brookner
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.
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group 1998-01-12 192 pages

The book of Blam

Tišma, Aleksandar
"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
New York Review Books 2016-02-09 226 pages

Osnabrück station to Jerusalem

Cixous, Hélène
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).
Fordham University Press 2022-06-07 144 pages

Ghetto kingdom: tales of the Łódź ghetto

Spiegel, Isaiah
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.
Northwestern University Press 1998 128 pages

The book of margins

Jabès, Edmond
The death of Edmond Jabès in January 1991 silenced one of the most compelling voices of the postmodern, post-Holocaust era. Jabès's importance as a thinker, philosopher, and Jewish theologian cannot be overestimated, and his enigmatic style—combining aphorism, fictional dialogue, prose meditation, poetry, and other forms—holds special appeal for postmodern sensibilities. In The Book of Margins, his most critical as well as most accessible book, Jabès is again concerned with the questions that inform all of his work: the nature of writing, of silence, of God and the Book. Jabès considers the work of several of his contemporaries, including Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, Roger Caillois, Paul Celan, Jacques Derrida, Michel Leiris, Emmanuel Lévinas, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and his translator, Rosmarie Waldrop. This book will be important reading for students of Jewish literature, French literature, and literature of the modern and postmodern ages. Born in Cairo in 1912, Edmond Jabès lived in France from 1956 until his death in 1991. His extensively translated and widely honored works include The Book of Questions and The Book of Shares . Both of these were translated into English by Rosmarie Waldrop, who is also a poet. Religion and Postmodernism series
University of Chicago Press 1993-06-15 203 pages

Winter Eyes A Novel of Secrets

Lev Raphael
A coming-of-age novel set in New York and Michigan during the Vietnam War era, Winter Eyes shows how the past controls and divides the immigrant Borowski family, and isolates their American-born son Stefan. But when Stefan comes to learn the terrible secrets at the heart of his family, that knowledge transforms them all and points the way to a happy new future for him, despite his doubts about his sexual identity. A haunting and remarkable novel, Winter Eyes is a tale of family secrets, silence, revelation - and the hope for healing and change. A spellbinding achievement from a talented author of American fiction. This new 2022 edition contains a foreword by Brian Bouldrey (The Genius of Desire). "Raphael's Winter Eyes resembles a piano sonata, a piece he knows so well that his fingers breathed the music." - Los Angeles Times "Winter Eyes is one of the most affecting, absorbing, and quietly powerful American coming-of-age novels." - Booklist "Loneliness, separation, desire and the struggle with gay identity are leitmotifs of Lev Raphael's novel. What distinguishes it is Raphael's handling of grand themes, and his ongoing exploration of worlds both Jewish and gay and how they intersect, daring himself and his readers to contemplate wholeness." - Jenifer Levin
ReQueered Tales 2022-09-27 298 pages

Letters to an American Jewish friend: a Zionist's polemic

Halkin, Hillel
Hillel Halkin is an American-born Jew who has cast his personal and historical lot with Israel. The imaginary American Jewish friend to whom Halkin directs his onrush of argument is an equally committed young Jew who, however, upholds the possibility of a viable Jewish life outside of Israel. He has just returned to the United states after his second visit to Israel and written a letter of his impressions, which triggers the present correspondence. The two friends argue about Zionism, Israel, Jewish history and culture, the nature of Jewishness. As the gauntlet is flung back and forth, Halkin elaborates his case that Jewish history and Israeli history are two lines in the process of converging, so that for all practical purposes the struggle for Jewish survival and the struggle for Israel are the same; and that any Jew who chooses, in the absence of extenuating circumstances, not to live in Israel is removing himself to the peripheries of the struggle for Jewish survival and away from the center of Jewish history.
Jewish Publication Society of America 1977 246 pages

I Will Watch You Four Short Tales of Jewish Love and Lust

Shosha Pearl
Take a voyeuristic peep through the curtains of kosher love. From the naïve sexual fantasies of a seminary girl, to a key-hole view of private marital moments, you'll get a taste of it all in these four short tales of Jewish sex, lust and yearning. Set inside the Orthodox Jewish world, these tales are so intimate and real that you'll feel like you've been spying on your neighbors!
CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform 2015-12-21 38 pages

Blues in the Night

Rochelle Majer Krich
Sunday, July 13. 1:46 A.M. Near Lookout Mountain and Laurel Canyon. An unidentified woman in her twenties, wearing a nightgown, was the victim of a hit-and-run accident that left her unconscious and seriously injured. There were no witnesses. So reads the report on the accident off Mulholland Drive in Molly Blume's Crime Sheet column for a weekly Los Angeles tabloid. Just another small L.A. tragedy, soon forgotten. But the image of the young woman in her nightgown stumbling along a dark, winding road is one Molly, a freelance true-crime writer, cannot shake. In fact, it draws her to a bedside in intensive care, where the victim whispers to her three names: Robbie, Max, and Nina. It's not a smoking gun, but is sufficient to reinforce Molly's gut instinct that there are sinister circumstances behind the assault on Lenore Saunders. With fearless conviction, Molly asks questions that nobody--including Lenore's mom, her ex-husband, her shrink, or even Molly's L.A.P.D. buddy, Detective Connors--wants to answer. Nevertheless, the astute Molly discovers Lenore lived a fractured life, so different from Molly's own secure and loving Orthodox Jewish background. And as a chilling picture of the unfortunate woman begins to take shape, the menace of murders past and present stirs and quickens. In her first Molly Blume novel, award-winning novelist Rochelle Krich tells a story in the tradition of the great L.A. mysteries of the past--and introduces an investigator who is pure gold. Twentysomething divorcee Molly Blume, with her deep faith, short skirts, and nose for the truth, is a heroine to cherish. From the Hardcover edition.
Thorndike Press 2003-03 488 pages

The book of memories

Shua, Ana María
The Book of Memories, originally published in Spanish in 1994, is a humorous yet moving exploration of a Jewish family's history, as seen through the eyes of three generations of women. The story begins with Grandfather Gedalia leaving Poland with forged papers to escape the army and sailing to Argentina, the "other America." Sometimes charming, sometimes stingy, this patriarchal figure, a peddler and sometime moneylender, heads a clan that includes, among others, the feisty and foul-mouthed Aunt Judith, and Uncle Silvester, a seducer of young girls who has such high principles that he turns himself in after missing the Argentine police raid on his socialist printing press.
University of New Mexico Press 1998-09-01 178 pages

Family record

Modiano, Patrick
"A mix of autobiography and lucid invention, this highly personal work offers a deeply affecting exploration of the meaning of identity and pedigree. With his signature blend of candor, mystery, and bewitching elusiveness, Patrick Modiano weaves together a series of interlocking stories from his family history: his parents' courtship in occupied Paris; a sinister hunting trip with his father; a chance friendship with the deposed King Farouk; a wistful affair with the daughter of a nightclub singer; and the author's life as a new parent. Filled with a coterie of dubious characters - Nazi informants, collaborationist refugees, and black-market hustlers - Modiano's riveting vignettes capture the drama that consumed Paris during World War II and its aftermath. Written in tones ranging from tender nostalgia to the blunt cruelty of youth, this is a personal and revealing book that brings the enduring significance of a complicated past to life."--Publisher.
Yale University Press 2019-09-24 146 pages