"Howard Jacobson's funny, revealing and tender memoir of his path to becoming a writer. It's my theory that only the unhappy, the uncomfortable, the gauche, the badly put together, aspire to make art. Why would you seek to reshape the world unless you were ill-at-ease in it? And I came out of the womb in every sense the wrong way round. In Mother's Boy, Booker-Prize winner Howard Jacobson reveals how he became a writer. It is an exploration of belonging and not-belonging, of being an insider and outsider, both English and Jewish. Jacobson was forty when his first novel was published. In Mother's Boy he traces the life that brought him there. Born to a working-class family in 1940s Manchester, the great-grandson of Lithuanian and Russian immigrants, Jacobson was raised by his mother, grandmother and aunt Joyce. His father was a regimental tailor, as well as an upholsterer, a market-stall holder, a taxi driver, a balloonist, and a magician. Grappling always with his family's history and his Jewish identity, Jacobson takes us from the growing pains of childhood to studying at Cambridge under F.R. Leavis, and landing in Sydney as a maverick young professor on campus." --

Children have been recruited for fighting throughout history - as soldiers in regular and guerilla armies, in armed revolts, and for political terrorism. However, these children cannot always be viewed as victims of remorseless and criminal leaders. In some situations, joining the fighting is the best or the only alternative for the young. Ch. 2 (pp. 19-56), "Fighting for Their Lives: Jewish Child Soldiers of World War II", discusses children's participation in the Jewish resistance during the Holocaust. Using mainly material from resistance and partisan groups in Lithuania, Poland, and Belarus, shows that joining the fighters was sometimes the Jewish children's only hope for survival. The children were motivated by necessity and a sense of honor and duty. Zionist and leftist movements, in particular Hashomer Hatzair, which headed the resistance in many ghettos, cultivated independence and militancy of the young and were especially inclined to draw children into their ranks.

The author describes his love for Vermont, sharing his thoughts on the history of the region, the reason for the state's live and let live attitude, and how Vermont's free-thinking traditions can survive in the modern world.

Edward Cooper was a hard man to know. Dour and exuberant by turns, his moods dictated the always-uncertain climate of the Cooper household. Now - balding, octogenarian - he makes an unlikely literary muse. But to his now middle-aged son, he looms larger than life, an overwhelming, baffling presence. Edward Cooper made his name as a divorce attorney in LA whose cases were devoured by the tabloids. Now, he is slowly succumbing to dementia. As Bernard attempts to forge a coherent picture of his family history, he uncovers Edward's lawsuits against other family members, and recalls the itemized invoice his father once sent him for the total cost of his upbringing, for the sum of two million dollars. 'Bernard Cooper's The Bill from My Fathe r is a glorious cornucopia of love and pain. Not only is Cooper an exemplary writer but he can parse an emotion down to its most resonant note. This memoir amazes' Alice Sebold, author of The Lovely Bones 'Cooper is a beautiful writer . . . his book is in a class of its own . . . Somehow, this is a story about all parents and their grown-up children and how they manage to keep going through all the insults and mixed messages and botched attempts to express love' Observer 'Cooper's wry, rueful memoir of a lifetime's wrangling with the old guy is memorably moving, emotionally disciplined, devilish in the detail and smartly funny. Read it now' The Times

An Incisive Account of the Bizarre, Often Bewildering Art World of Today Arthur Danto's new collection finds him, and the art world, at a point when the art world has become pluralistic, even chaotic-with one medium as good as the next-when the moment for "next things" has passed. Since 1984, when Danto-already an eminent philosopher--became "The Nation's" art critic, he has been one of the foremost theorists of contemporary art's history and evolution, and at the same time the most incisive and illuminating critic of new work. In his view, the historical development of art reached a kind of zenith in the pop period, most famously with Warhol's Brillo Boxes. Danto's five volumes of review essays (all published by FSG) form a kind of chronicle of the art world since the Brillo moment, and a running appraisal of the great variety of significant work made since then. In this new book, he shows how work that bridges the gap between art and life is now the definitive work of our time: Damien Hirst's arrays of skeletons and anatomical models, Barbara Kruger's tchotchke-ready slogans, Renee Cox's nude portrait of herself at the Last Supper. To the obvious question--is this stuff really art?--Danto replies with an enthusiastic yes, explaining, with a philosopher's clarity and an art lover's sense of delight, how these "unnatural wonders" show us who we are.

"...this definitive anthology of major nineteenth- and twentieth-century fiction, nonfiction and poetry by eighty Jewish-Russian writers explores both timeless themes and specific tribulations of a people's history"--Publisher's info.

Gerald Feldman's history of the internationally prominent insurance corporation Allianz AG in the Nazi era is based largely on new or previously unavailable archival sources, making this a more accurate account of Allianz and the men who directed its business than was ever before possible. Feldman takes the reader through varied cases of collaboration and conflict with the Nazi regime with fairness and a commitment to informed analysis, touching on issues of damages in the Pogrom of 1938, insuring facilities used in forced labor camps, and the problems of denazification and restitution. The broader issues examined in this study--when cooperation with Nazi policies was compulsory and when it was complicit, the way in which profit, ideology, and opportunism played a role in corporate decision making, and the question of how Jewish insurance assets were expropriated--are particularly relevant today given the ongoing international debate about restitution for Holocaust survivors. This book joins a growing body of scholarship based on open access to the records of German corporations in the Nazi era. Gerald D. Feldman is Professor of History at the University of California at Berkeley. His book, The Great Disorder (Oxford, 1993) received the DAAD Book Prize of the German Historical Association and the Book Prize for Central European History from the American Historical Association. He was an invited expert at the London Gold Conference in December 1997 and at the U.S. Conference on Holocaust Assets in Washington, D.C. in December 1998 and served as an advisor to the Presidential Commision on Holocaust Assets in the United States. --

Hang on for a Wild Journey through the Political and Spiritual Adventures of the Baby-Boom Generation Join Wes "Scoop" Nisker as he takes us on a hilarious, wild ride through the heyday of the Beats and the Hippies and the birth of the modern environmental movement, and the surge of Buddhism in the West.

Set during the summer heatwave of 1953, 'England Expects' finds Mirabelle and Vesta investigating the seemingly unrelated murders of a racing journalist and a cleaning woman. Their searches lead them through Brighton Pavilion's crumbling passageways to the quad of a Cambridge college and finally into the shady underworld of Brighton freemasonry. And, while not on the murder trail, Vesta has to make some difficult decisions about her personal life.

In 1935, while Virginia Woolf was alive and building her career as a woman writer, Ruth Gruber published a seminal essay on the novelist that is now seen as the first feminist interpretation of Woolf's writings and life. Seventy years after its original publication, Gruber's seminal critique is available once again, with new material that makes it more relevant for readers today. Virginia Woolf: The Will to Create as a Woman includes several previously unpublished letters exchanged between Woolf and Gruber, and a new introduction in which Gruber recalls her 1933 meeting with the English writer, examining the questions surrounding Woolf's bi-polar illness and anti-Semitism. In this groundbreaking assessment of Woolf's philosophy, influences, and style, Gruber laid the groundwork for a generation of future feminist analyses. She cogently examines Woolf's concept of gender and her literary influences, adeptly discussing how Woolf constructed a feminine writing style in a realm dominated by men. Above all, she shows how Woolf consciously strove to create as a woman. Virginia Woolf's experimental prose and her struggles with mental illness have made her an enduringly provocative figure, and today, more than sixty years after her suicide, Woolf's writing continues to fascinate and inspire readers.

Children are the largely neglected players in the great drama of American immigration. In one of history's most remarkable movements of people across national borders, almost twenty-five million immigrants came to the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—from Mexico, Japan, and Canada as well as the more common embarkation points of southern and eastern Europe. Many of them were children. Together with the American-born children of immigrants, they made up a significant part of turn-of-the-century U.S. society. Small Strangers recounts and interprets their varied experiences to illustrate how immigration, urbanization, and industrialization—all related processes—molded modern America. Growing up in crowded tenements, insular mill towns, rural ethnic enclaves, or middle-class homes, as they came of age they found themselves increasingly caught between Old World expectations and New World demands. The encounters of these children with ethnic heritage, American values, and mass culture helped shape the twentieth century in a United States still known symbolically around the world as a nation of immigrants.

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).

"A detailed, first-hand account of the atrocities committed against Hungarian Jews during the Holocaust ..."--Provided by publisher.

"Visitors tells the story of feminist activist Ann Snitow's work as an organizer in East Central Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Over a period of 20 years, Snitow captures the changes and struggles in the new political landscape of post-communism as they unfold, and presents insight into the origins and development of the multi-faceted internationalist feminism that is evolving today"--

This book highlights a central, but neglected component of Africa's complicated and intractable wars: the militarization of governance. Political cultures of militarism stand in the way of enduring peace, democracy, and the development of civil society. Militarism comes in both right-wing and left-wing guises -- the latter practiced by former liberation fronts in power across much of Africa which have all betrayed the ideals that enthused their earlier struggles. Seven comparative essays, drawn from the experience of conflict and peacemaking, focus on different aspects of militarism in contemporary Africa and ways of overcoming it. 7How can we create a coherent, "joined-up" peacemaking that knits together the many tasks necessary for establishing peace in Africa? 7Can Africa establish "security communities" at a trans-national level, abolishing both interstate conflict and the readiness of countries to intervene militarily in their neighbors' affairs? What is the role of the African Union? 7How can constitutional rule promote peace and security at a national and international level? 7What are the political cultures of militarism in Africa today? How are we to understand the widespread phenomenon of left-wing militarism as manifest by former liberation fronts now ruling their countries? 7How can key social groups, such as women, youth, and the poor, organize to promote peace? 7What roles are played by mercenaries in modern African wars? Are we witnessing the "mercenarization" of war and the entanglement of commerce with conflict? 7What are the challenges of post-conflict transitions to peace and democracy? The essays, edited by Alex de Waal, are unsigned and based on contributions byAfrican political leaders and policymakers. They represent some of the most innovative thinking on African security dilemmas. This book is based on a project by Justice Africa and InterAfrica Group, the regional center for dialogue on issues of peace in the Horn of Africa.

Now in paperback and "brimming with wondrous surprises . . . There's magic in The Pinch " ( The Boston Globe ) Steve Stern's prodigious imagination finds a wondrous home in the Pinch, a once-thriving Jewish community in Memphis. The Pinch revolves around a single enchanted day containing years, during which the antics of a group of Jewish mystics threaten to ravage the life of general store proprietor Pinchas Pin with miracles, and his nephew Muni's ardor for an alluring tightrope walker collides with his passion for chronicling the wonders of North Main Street. Their stories, gleaned by a hapless bookseller from a fabulist history book, transform the fate of the neighborhood. Now in paperback, The Pinch is a sparkling reminder that Steve Stern is one of our most talented and inimitable storytellers. "[A] big, rangy, saturated, antic new novel, a Pynchonian tragicomedy . . . Stern, an ebullient maestro of words and mayhem, wonder and conscience, orchestrates a cacophonous, whirling, gritty, tender, time-warping saga that encompasses a cavalcade of horror, stubborn love, cosmic slapstick, burlesque humor, and a scattering of miracles." -- Booklist (starred review) "Weird and wonderful . . . [ The Pinch is] a backdrop to Stern's poignant and antic drama, a playground on which his exuberant, larger-than-life characters can run wild . . . The Pinch is composed of . . . perfectly calibrated moments, all of which pulse with a dynamic inventiveness." -- Star Tribune (Minneapolis)

Designed as a textbook for A-level students and lower level undergraduates, this study presents an interpretation of major trends in British domestic history since the beginning of the 18th century.

The Jews of post-World War I Iraq saw themselves as patriots of the new state, and the Jewish intelligentsia shared ideas of Arab nationalism. Several factors made the Arab elites regard the Jews as a problematic minority and put their Iraqi identities into question: the growing popularity of Zionism, Arab nationalism, and communism, which began to spread among both Muslim and Jewish youth. In the late 1930s the anti-colonial (i.e. anti-British) struggle, growing conflation of Judaism with Zionism, and Nazi propaganda led to a rise in anti-Jewish sentiments. These erupted in the "Farhud", a series of anti-Jewish riots in Baghdad in June 1941, during which ca. 180 Jews were killed. The Baghdad riots were followed by anti-Jewish excesses in Diwaniyya, Basra, Hila, and elsewhere. The authorities suppressed the riots, and a large number of pogromists were killed. Against the background of the Jewish-Arab conflict in Palestine in 1946-51, Iraqi Muslims increasingly identified the Jews with Zionism. The situation for the Jews became unbearable because of their social ostracism and outright discrimination, restrictions, and growing antisemitism. When a new government introduced a denationalization law for the Jews who wished to emigrate; the anti-Jewish atmosphere in the country, repressions, and the hysteria of fear for their future caused a great majority of the Jews to leave.

Consists of material published between 1966 and 2003. About half deals with the late Ottoman Empire and the other half with the Republic of Turkey and the territories of the newly independent ex- Soviet Turkic Republics in the Caucasus and Central Asia.