Robin McGrath’s poetry is alive with the rhythms of speech and storytelling. Her work sings, shouts, cries. A wry humour escapes from almost every corner of the book, whose themes of community, loss and anger never fail by moralizing or sliding into the dotage of self-helpism. Arranged in four parts, these poems travel from Newfoundland meadows and the delights of rural living, to experiences and memories of the Canadian arctic. They then move to Jerusalem and to a portrait of the Jewish faith and circle back to examine domestic life with poems on home and marriage

The Flutter of an Eyelid, originally published in 1933, is a vicious, and often quite funny, satire of Southern California's bohemian community in the 1920s by Jewish-American novelist Myron Brinig (1896-1991). Illustrated by Lynd Ward (1905-1985). Some of the novel's characters are loosely based on prominent residents of the Los Angeles neighborhood of Echo Park, an early center of film-making on the West Coast. These include the rare book dealer Jake Zeitlin (1902-1987), whose shop became a gathering place for local writers and artists, and who introduced Brinig to his circle of friends; and the charismatic evangelist and media celebrity Aimee Semple McPherson (1890-1944). Zeitlin, who was caricatured as a self-loathing Jewish antique dealer in the novel, considered the book an "insulting betrayal" and, after seeing an early set of galleys, threatened to sue. He succeeded in having some of its more offensive anti-Semitic passages removed prior to its publication. Jewish himself, Brinig was no anti-Semite; he and Zeitlin simply did not get along. One source reports that shortly after the book was released, it was pulled from stores because of further legal threats from McPherson and some of the other individuals who were too "thinly disguised" in the novel.

Life in a town in the north of England can be tough on a lad. Especially this lad. His mum is always embarrassing him; his dad is not around; and money is scarce. He falls out of a tree house trying to stop his friends from stealing school test answers -- and winds up with a broken leg. He wins second prize in an art contest -- but the drawing isn't his. And then he finds himself taking sides with a bunch of bullies when a new Jewish boy comes to school. If he doesn't act mean, the bullies will thump him, but he feels so guilty being mean.... No wonder he can't wait to swap. On the school exchange, he'll swap houses for a week with some posh lad from London. Who knows what he'll discover? George Layton brilliantly captures the balancing act of one boy's eleventh year, when he faces up to prejudice, poverty and pride, and unwittingly discovers who he is...and who he isn't.

Set in post-war London, The Limits of Love is an examination of the lives and tensions of several Jewish families. Otto Kahane, a Dachau refugee, his nephew, delicatessen-keeper Isidore, Ben the zealous Communist, Paul the reluctant Jew and his girl-friend, Julia--Frederic Raphael probes the characters and their shifting relationships with a touch at once clinical and sympathetic. His long, intricately woven novel displays the same gift for detail and dialogue that characterizes all the work of this talented writer.

‘Sinclair matches his brisk and original intelligence with an abundant yet sharply controlled prose that makes The Lady with the Laptop a hugely enjoyable and stimulating collection’ Nicholas Wroe, Independent ‘His natural irony is a consistently benevolent force, undermining prejudice, cultural division and paranoia . . . The Lady with the Laptop confirms him as a great observer of both the Jewish diaspora and the instability of any cultural identity’ Ra Page, Guardian ‘Sinclair is great fun, a canny court jester juggling big issues of life, death and cultural chaos, to the tune of a belly laugh’ Angela Neustatter, Literary Review ‘As the title suggests, there is a Chekovian theme running through the stories. They are laced with a wonderful black irony, but they are also very poignant’ Shena Mackay, Scotland on Sunday , Books of the Year ‘This outstanding collection should consolidate Clive Sinclair’s reputation as one of the most inventive writers working in the form today’ Elizabeth Lowry, Times Literary Supplement

In this English translation of the 1993 Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize winner Dulcinea encantada (1992) by Mexican author Angelina Muñiz-Huberman, Dulcinea travels in a car writing novels in her mind about several Dulcineas: a medieval princess on a quest, a nineteenth-century lady-in-waiting in Mexico, and a twentieth-century young woman who was sent to Russia as a girl to escape the Spanish Civil War and later journeys to Mexico to reunite with her parents. Unsure of her identity, Dulcinea remembers, debates, and records memories of her exile. As she circles Mexico City, she examines the role of memory, speech, and writing through her fragmented narrative voice. Dulcinea explores her place in the world through storytelling, blurring the line between reality and imagination. This novel pairs a lyrical and contemplative style with experimental writing to present common themes of identity formation and exile in a unique form. Dulcinea’s quest is also one of spiritual connection with apocalyptic and mystical overtones. With allusions to both Christian and Jewish mystical traditions, this novel reveals a crypto-Jewish presence typical of Muñiz-Huberman’s writing, forming part of a Sephardic literary tradition. This edition includes an introduction and annotations by the translator, Rebecca Marquis.

Jungk gives a profound meditation on a Jewish family and its past, especially the lasting distorting effects on a son of a famous, vital father and a clinging, overwhelming mother, and of the differences between the generation of European intellectual refugees who arrived in the United States during the Second World War and the children of that generation.

From Kirkus Reviews paper 0-8142-0780-4 A second collection from English professor (U. of Mass.) and critic Clayton, the first winner of the Sandstone Prize for Short Fiction. Clayton's new volume is, in many ways, a maturing of the concerns of his previous collection. As in Bodies of the Rich (1984), he focuses on the minutiae of daily life as a reflection of the ways in which his intelligent, middle-class protagonists express and experience loss. In Radiance, the protagonists are almost all Jews, assimilated to varying degrees but aware of and generally comfortable with their ethnic/religious identity. What they arent comfortable with is their lives--marriage as an act of settling for less, marriages that are failing or have long since dissolved, friends and family who die, parents who commit suicide. For several of his low-key heroes--in ``Glory,'' ``Open-Heart Surgery,'' and the most fully realized piece here, ``The Man Who Could See Radiance''--coping with loss takes the form of a sort of magic realist device in which people see and feel beyond their senses, becoming aware of a larger presence that may be understood as having a religious significance. The use of this device in three stories out of only ten, though, makes for a certain repetitiveness. Two tales, ``Muscles'' and ``Time Exposure,'' about episodes in an unhappy marriage that involves the husband's domineering brotherall as experienced by the couples sonhave the feeling of sketches for a novel-in-progress; theyre affecting but seem unfinished. Still, Clayton's best, ``Talking to Charlie'' and ``History Lessons,'' have a poignance that comes from an intense sensitivity to the quiet suffering that most often goes unexpressed in the rush of daily life. Uneven but distinctive short fiction from an author with a genuine gift. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. Product Description A collection of short stories about the lives of assimilated American Jews, who attempt to reach an opening into the spiritual realm while dealing with unsuccessful marriages, middle-class life, and the unhappiness of existence Review ...[Clayton writes] with compassion, simplicity and power... -- The New York Times Book Review, Patrick Farrell

Part Bildungsroman, part hymn to the city of Glasgow, Jericho Sleep Alone is without a doubt the finest book written about the Scots-Jewish experience. From Bar Mitzvah to an unfulfilling teaching career, Jericho Eli Broock finds himself a perennial outsider and unlucky in love, neither his on-off affair with the flighty Ninna or his financially prudent dalliance with the homely Camilla coming to fruition. Will the sometimes oppressive aid of the Jewish community make all well in his world?

"Michael Kuperman's innovative company, Fusion, is on the cusp of a hoped-for merger when he's informed of something rotten with Chemicorp, a major factor in the deal: the company is making legal-to-produce chemicals specifically for clients with nefarious purposes, and the bad guys will do anything to protect their secrets. The actions of Michael's maternal grandfather, Jacob Goldstein, guide Michael in thinking about what to do next."--Amazon.com

Cultural Writing. Essays. Fiction. Jewish Studies. Writer Joshua Cohen and artist Michael Hafftka interpret the twenty-two letters of the "Aleph Bet," the Hebrew alphabet, in this collection of short writings. Through their images and texts, both writer and artist engage these letters, in form and in function, in manners both mundane and mystical: the letter "hey" becomes a hat, or a ritual head-covering; the letter "yod" is said to represent a young girl, etc. Together they formulate a challenge to the Second Commandment, which forbids representation, in a style at once traditional and modern, expressively mindful of what it means to lack faith and yet, in the turn of a phrase, at the stroke of a paintbrush, refusing the consolation of cult.

Product Description From the melting pot that was Iraqi society comes a tale, recounted by a grand old man of Canadian letters, of growing up as a Jewish boy in Baghdad in the 1940s. Naim Kattan was born into an intellectual Jewish family in Baghdad in 1928. He, his brother, and his friend Nessim were the only Jews in a group of young men who met every evening in a cafe to talk passionately abut creating a national Iraqi literature in their newly independent country. They had good reason, for although the Jewish community in Iraq dated back 2500 years, and Jews were abmong the best Arabic scholars in the country, they were never considered equals by the Muslim majority. In 1941, after British forces defeated the German-backed Iraqi insurgents, angry Bedouins entered Baghdad before it could be secured and began the Farhoud, the massacre of Jews in the city. The violence stopped just short of the Kattans' house, but the family immediately began the long application process for visas. Kattan began selling stories to literary magazines and speculating about the role of women in a country where even Jewish women wore veils. He eventually won a scholarship to the Sorbonne and left his family, not to be reunited with them until five years later, when he found them in a settlement camp in Israel This is a memoir of identity, of growing up in a tumultuous polyglot society, of change both personal and societal, of finding one's place in life. Here is a fascinating portrait of a people, a city, a state, and a culture that are as troubled today as Kattan found them sixty years ago. Review A fine portrait of a particular place and time that is no more. --Library Journal In all respects, a most moving and haunting work. --Montreal Star In all respects, a most moving and haunting work. --Montreal Star About the Author Naim Kattan has lived in Montreal since 1954. He has written more than thirty books of poetry, essays and fiction, which have been translated into many different languages. He has received many honors including the France-Canada Prize and France's prestigious Legion d'Honneur.

Algorithmic Shapeshifting is the first poetry collection of Bogi Takács, winner of the Lambda award for editing Transcendent 2: The Year's Best Transgender Speculative Fiction, and finalist for the Hugo and Locus awards. The collection includes poems from the past decade and previously unpublished work. The scope of pieces extends from the present and past of Jewish life in Hungary and the United States to the far-future, outer-space reaches of the speculative—always with a sense of curiosity and wonder. “Bogi Takács is a poet of visceral exuberance and Talmudic invention. Moving as dazzlingly between genres as languages, e makes the reader eir kaleidoscope where ancient traditions, unenvisioned technologies, and children's toys tumble with ordinary, transcendent precision, imagining new ways of being and observing others signally extant. These poems draw blood and spark synapses, make dauntingly familiar and tenderly strange. You should let them change you.” Sonya Taaffe, author of Forget the Sleepless Shores “Bogi Takács's poetry is gleefully and unabashedly itself, pulling the reader through surreal worlds of visceral magic, body modification, political wit, and interpersonal devotion. Whether looking back into Talmudic history, forward into a science fictional psychic war, or sinking into the earth and growing flowers from its own eye sockets, "Algorithmic Shapeshifting" presents a voice that is consistently fresh, startling, and sincere.” Ada Hoffmann, author of The Outside

In the years between 1929 and 1939, when Itzik Manger wrote most of the poetry and fiction that made him famous, his name among Yiddish readers was a household word. Called the Shelley of Yiddish, he was characterized as being "drunk with talent." This book -- the first full-length anthology of Manger's work -- displays the full range of his genius in poetry, fiction, and criticism. The book begins with an extensive historical, biographical, and literary-critical introduction to Manger's work. There are then excerpts from a novel, The Book of Paradise, three short stories, autobiographical essays, critical essays, and finally, Manger's magnificent poetry -- ballads, bible poems, personal lyrics, and the Megilla Songs. These works, which have the patina of myths acquired ages ago, also offer modern psychological insight and irrepressible humor. With Manger we make the leap into the Jewish twentieth century, as he recreates the past in all its layered expressiveness and interprets it with modernist sensibilities.

Poetry. Jewish Studies. Blasphemy is holy--and exciting, outrageous literature in TREYF PESACH (Unkosher Passover). Novelist Paul Auster declares that this book "strikes with all the force of an exploding bomb--because it speaks the truth." This collection of poems presents radical departures from traditional rituals, formats and conventions: alternative Passover Seders, Yom Kippur liturgy, Thanksgiving prayers, psalms and other poems in the form of proclamations, resolutions, jazz improvisations, incantations, rants, orations, comic monologues, oil spills, life spills, songs, visions, undocumented documents, borders, suns, farewells, minutes of meetings, talk-stories, and all accompanied by provocative drawings of Treyf Passover Seder plates by artist Charles Steckler. In this book the symbolic plate is arrayed with treyf (un-kosher food) and the story of the Exodus with untypical meanings, whiskey instead of wine, recounting the continual slavery of wars and military occupations. The poems in TREYF PESACH have taken place over the course of years and various occasions, from vicious aggressions, to absurd walls, to smallpox blankets, to oil spouting across the Gulf, and more, all framed by the first months of the Trump regime. Some have been read out loud at Seders, Yom Kippur services, Thanksgiving Day benedictions, Sunday fellowships, and other ceremonies. But those are the exceptions. For the most part TREYF PESACH has been placed under arrest and shoved across the borders of respectability. Hilton Obenzinger writes poetry, fiction, history, and criticism, and is the recipient of the American Book Award. According to poet Diane di Prima, "he is the American Jonathan Swift."

These vibrant short stories are about the lives of Jewish families in New York in the mid-twentieth century. But, in Kaplan's vision, everyday life, with its complexity, disorder, and comic subtleties can never obscure a deeper reality. Her sharp-eyed, quirky children and adults are haunted by history, both individual and collective. About this book, Cynthia Ozick said, "Johanna Kaplan's first book of stories blissfully renews character as fiction's chief adventure. Other People's Lives is the source of every intelligent joy, and restores to reading its old flavor of visits busy with crisis, comedy, wisdom, dreaming, irony, redemption." Other People's Lives won the Jewish Book Award, and the Ernest Hemingway-PEN Prize in 1976.

The acclaimed author of Original Cyn finds fertile ground for her wicked wit in this ferociously funny new novel about babies, sex, celebrity...and daring to date a gynecologist. Ruby (still single at thirty-two) Silverman has made a name for herself at Les Sprogs, her exclusive baby boutique where trust-fund mothers swaddle their infants in the hottest designer wear. But all those bumps and babes can’t prepare Ruby for the bombshell her fifty-year-old mother drops on her: Ruby’s about to get…a baby brother or sister! When Ruby recovers from the shock of her mother’s pregnancy, she can’t help but question her own baby-making future. Is catering to celebrity moms and cooing over her friends’ kids all she has to look forward to? Sam Epstien would passionately disagree. He’s the gorgeous Jewish gynecologist who has set his amorous sights on her. Soon they’re seriously involved, and life seems to be looking up for Ruby. Until she stumbles upon a shady baby-brokering business that could erupt into a major scandal, derail her career, and maybe even force her to toss the supposedly perfect man out with the bathwater.