“Jewish stories,” writes Adam Biro, “resemble every people’s stories.” Yet at the same time there is no better way to understand the soul, history, millennial suffering, or, crucially, the joys of the Jewish people than through such tales—“There’s nothing,” writes Biro, “more revelatory of the Jewish being.” With Is It Good for the Jews? Biro offers a sequel to his acclaimed collection of stories Two Jews on a Train . Through twenty-nine tales—some new, some old, but all finely wrought and rich in humor—Biro spins stories of characters coping with the vicissitudes and reverses of daily life, while simultaneously painting a poignant portrait of a world of unassimilated Jewish life that has largely been lost to the years. From rabbis competing to see who is the most humble, to the father who uses suicide threats to pressure his children into visiting, to three men berated by the Almighty himself for playing poker, Biro populates his stories with memorable characters and absurd—yet familiar—situations, all related with a dry wit and spry prose style redolent of the long tradition of Jewish storytelling. A collection simultaneously of foibles and fables, adversity and affection, Is It Good for the Jews? reminds us that if in the beginning was the word, then we can surely be forgiven for expecting a punch line to follow one of these days.

Body and Soul (1947), which stars John Garfield, Lilli Palmer, and Canada Lee, is written by screenwriter Abraham Polonsky and directed by Robert Rossen. Mr. Polonsky received a best screenplay nomination from the Motion Picture Academy for this film. He would go on to write and direct Force of Evil the next year before being blacklisted from 1951 through 1968. The story revolves around a boxer (Garfield) from the lower East side of New York who fights his way to becoming champion, and then agrees to fix his last fight to get the big monetary payoff he thinks he deserves. Realizing he's been double-crossed by the gambling interests who've set up the fight, he exacts his revenge. This publication of the complete script of Body and Soul blends the shooting script (written before the film was shot) and the continuity script (the elements which are contained in the finished film). The illustrated volume includes the complete text of "Fifty Grand" by Ernest Hemingway on which the screenplay is loosely based. Critical essays are written by Abaham Polonsky (a tribute to John Garfield), Dr. John Schultheiss (artistic and political betrayal), Peter Valenti (Warner Bros. and HUAC), Mark Rappaport (Jewish symbolism in the movies), Kevin Lewis (actor Canada Lee), and Joseph Janeti (Abe Polonsky's final days).

A collection of articles and editorials prompted by contemporary events, written between 1928-55, during the time that Klein served as editor of "The Judaean", "The Canadian Zionist", and the "Canadian Jewish Chronicle". Not included are items on literature, which deserve to be published in a separate volume. In the articles published here, Klein addresses such topics as antisemitism in interwar Canada; the rise of Nazism and Nazi policies in Germany; isolationism and "pacifism" in North America, which had anti-Jewish overtones; the Holocaust and the inaction of the world powers; Zionism and anti-Zionism; and postwar Stalinist anti-Jewish policies.

In the 16th century, there was great interest in the kind of magic that is in fact science. But the scientists were ahead of their time. There was no machinery. Da Vinci had already drawn plans for a submarine and an airplane, but it was impossible to have them built. Legends began to grow. Soon it was told, as absolute truth, that a living being had been created out of clay. Was there reason to believe this? Who can say? But one of the most enduring of all these legends was the story that a great rabbi, by the power of his mystic wisdom, had been permitted by God to create a manlike being in order to save the Jews from destruction. This was the Golem. Now Sulamith Ish-Kishor has written an exciting novel, based on this legend, told through the eyes of an orphan boy, Gideon ben Israyel. By a strange series of events, the High Rabbi of the city of Prague entrusts him with an awesome task. Brave, strong, and loyal, Cideon wants to do right. But he makes one fateful mistake.

With his father gunned down in a petty robbery and his aunt haunted by the threats of the Gestapo, Richard Michelson's experiences growing up in Brooklyn were far from ordinary, yet they remain all too common--too much a part of ongoing violence--to be dismissed as merely private events, safely past. In Counting to Six Million he writes out memory, anxiety, and grief, worry over his wife and children, and the recurring clashes between love and cruelty that test wisdom with suffering, day after day.

Book by Cohen, Matt

David Albahari is one of the most prominent writers to emerge from the former Yugoslavia in the last twenty years. His serious, understated explorations of the self have influenced many writers of his native land's younger generation. The narrator of Bait has just exiled himself to Canada after the collapse of Yugoslavia and the death of his mother. As he listens to a series of audio tapes recorded by the mother years before, the narrator ponders her life and their relationship while simultaneously trying to come to terms with a new life of his own-one of exile and the confusion of a new language and culture. Bait is an exquisitely crafted novel that exhibits the wit and raw honesty Albahari's readers have long admired.

In a Hotel Garden is a provocative work by the English novelist once described by Sir Frank Kermode as "an admirable and rare example of the writer-critic." It is a captivating novella, written almost entirely in dialogue. In a Hotel Garden unfolds character and meaning with a lovely, meditative tension. The narrator Ben relates to his friends his enthralling encounter with a Jewish woman in the Dolomite Alps. The tale of her compulsive visit to a hotel garden in Siena--where her grandmother fell in love with a man soon to be a victim of the Holocaust--illuminates Ben's half-lived life, and raises the question of how we can ever come to terms with the destruction of the European Jews in our century. The Independent in England (where this novel first appeared) said, "Its [the novel's] enigmas are those of life itself, and Josipovici sets them before us with clarity, tact and compassion."

From 1946 through the 1970s, Rabbi David Hartman, Congregational minister Martin Cooper, and their wives maintain a friendship that withstands small-town prejudices and envies and larger turmoil

The book is an innovative combination of fiction, Talmudic commentary, autobiography, and reflections on modern Jewish and Israel identity. the book fuses different media and styles to explore vastly different yet inescapably connected moments in Jewish history

Clive Sinclair's first collection of stories won the Somerset Maugham Award. His second was short-listed for the inaugural Dylan Thomas Award. His third won both the PEN Silver Pen, and the Jewish Quarterly Award for fiction. This is his fourth. The new stories range from New Orleans and Texas to Peru and Venice. Their subjects are loss, the fear of loss, and love, most especially that between husbands and wives, fathers and sons. Their cast includes the quick and the dead, the real and the imagined: Davy Crockett, Kinky Friedman, Captain Haddock, Princess Diana, and Shylock. They are as cruel as life, and as funny.

Carole Balin introduces us to dozens of Jewish women writers from late nineteenth- and early twentieth- century Tsarist Russia, focusing on five who were among the most prolific. Their extant literary remains include not only fiction, poetry, drama, translations, and essays, but also memoirs, autobiographies, diaries, and letters. Balin contextualizes the works of each within the culture in which she lived and wrote. Miriam Markel-Mosessohn (1839-1920) toiled to advance the goals of the Russian Haskalah (Enlightenment), translated German works into Hebrew, tried her hand at poetry, and became a foreign correspondent for a Hebrew newspaper at the age of 48. Hava Shapiro (1879-1943) published short stories and newspaper articles in Hebrew, earned a doctorate at the University of Berne, and was an active participant in the writing circle convened at the Warsaw home of Y. L. Peretz. Rashel Mironovna Khin (1861-1928) wrote numerous short stories and plays in Russian, two of which were staged at Moscow's Malyi Theater. Feiga Israilevna Kogan (1891-1974) composed books of Symbolist poetry in Russian while harboring a love of Hebrew, which she nurtured at the Society for Lovers of the Hebrew Language. Sofia Dubnova-Erlikh (1885-1986) was the daughter of historian Simon Dubnov, the wife of socialist Genrikh Erlikh, and an accomplished poet, essayist, biographer, and political activist in her own right. The life-like and touching portraits that emerge of these talented writers allow us a penetrating view of Jewish women within their Russian-Jewish milieu that is far more nuanced than the images of housewife and revolutionary currently held in collective Jewish memory. The lives and works of these women help to tell a larger story of Jewish cultural history in the Russian Empire.

Haunting and enigmatic, these nine loosely connected stories are evidence of the growing field of Jewish-Latin American fiction. "A Heaven Without Crows," structured as a letter from Kafka to his friend Max Brod, details the labyrinthine paths of his tortured soul. "The Invention of Memory," awarded the Gamma Literature Prize, is also a tribute to Eastern European letters, in which a Czech man with a portentous memory is diagnosed with a deteriorating illness. He travels to Mexico to look for his past and fight against oblivion by carefully staging his vanishing reminiscences. "Three Nightmares" proves that fantasy and reality, people and things, are form-shifting aspects of one another. And the title story is a bizarre tale, a succinct and tangential homage to Felisberto Hernandez's piano narratives and to Oliver Sacks's neurological anecdotes, in which a young woman loses touch with one of her hands. The volume concludes with an autobiographical essay, "Lost in Translation," in which Stavans comments on his experience growing up Jewish in Mexico. Told with wit and precision, these stories are at once a meditation on politics and the imagination in the Hispanic world, compelling allegories on the nature of freedom and individuality, a study of guilt, and a savage satire on the rigorous banality of life. The delicious secrets of Stavans's imagination unfold in these endearing tales with the authority of dreams, questioning our philosophical assumptions and portraying the universe as a vast, mysterious theater where everything is sacred but nothing is absolute.

A humorous collection of love stories from an award-winning author who has been called "a compassionate and witty satirist" ( Kirkus Reviews ). From Holocaust survivors to Yiddish artists, a petty thief and a Polish shiksa with a passion for Jewish history, what unites the delectable characters in Curt Leviant's witty collection of romantic tales is the universal desire for love and admiration. With settings as various as the Deep South, Boston, New York, Italy, Israel, each story is a wry look at romantic pursuit, each relationship as unique as the lovers themselves. Whether or not love succeeds for Leviant's all-too-human characters, the journey is always filled with humor and heart.

In evoking the joy and pain of the Jewish immigrant experience, Anzia Yezierska has no peer. Her stories, written from the 1920s to the 1960s, immortalized the lives of the Jews of New York's Lower East Side. The Open Cage collects sixteen of her best stories and excerpts from her autobiography to illustrate her extraordinary storytelling gift as well as her personal experience as an immigrant woman. Along with her novel Bread Givers, the work gathered here constitutes her enduring achievement. Included are "The Fat of the Land," Children of Loneliness," America and I," The Lost 'Beautifulness, '" and other stories; vignettes from Red Ribbon on a White Horse: My Story; and four remarkable stories of old age. The introduction by Historian Alice Kessler-Harris and the afterword by Yezierska's daughter and biographer, Louise Levitas Henriksen, place the writings in a rich and valuable context.

Esther, seventeen years old, wild and rebellious, is sent from Israel to Cameroon to stay with her hardheaded uncle Sicourelle, who is charged with straightening her out. But Esther resists her uncle's plans for her future-which include marriage to a cousin-and in the privileged indolence of postcolonial Africa, she looks to the past instead. Using sepia portraits and scraps of letters, Esther pieces together the history of her family, a once-grand Egyptian-Jewish clan, and its displacement from Cairo in the 1950s to Israel, West Africa, and New York. As the worn photographs yield their secrets, Esther uncovers a rich tale of wives and ex-wives; revolving mistresses and crushing marriages; intrigues and disappointments; poignant contrats between the living past and the dead present. In sensuous, inventive prose, Matalon penetrates the mysteries of cultural exile and family life to produce a first novel that is mature, authentic, and deeply moving.

Longing is a psychological novel focusing on a young woman's dependence on her husband and her attempts to forge an independent life for herself by escaping their unhealthy relationship. Rosa, a frail, sensitive American Jew living in Paris, marries an alcoholic expatriate from Chile and finds herself trapped in a sado-masochistic relationship. Amid a series of fast-moving events - the birth of their daughter, moves to her parents' home in New York and then to Sausalito, California, and various sexual encounters - Espinosa explores Antonio's fears and failures and Rosa's implicit trust in him to direct her life. Ultimately, Rosa begins to question her relationship with her husband and her parents.

"A wonderful dream and a horrific nightmare, a fuzzy consciousness of pain and family, Pockets is a novel of fragments--both literally and figuratively. In a series of prose-poem chapters, the nameless narrator, in a largely Jewish 1960s suburb in the northern reaches of Toronto, repeatedly enters the world, as if for the first time. His landscape is one of trilobite fossils, bicycles with banana seats, Red Skelton, and overwhelming loss. Among shadows that both comfort and threaten, a brother who drifts through the sky, he finds his narrative full of pockets of emptiness he can't help but try to fill. A heartbreakingly personal and profound work, Pockets redefines the novel, delivering infinite scope in something diminutive, pocket-sized. Every reading brings new revelations."--