Rafael, a young Jewish boy living in Spain during the Inquisition, wants to have a Bar Mitzvah and when his father opposes it, Rafael leaves, meets and falls in love with Miriam, and journeys with her toward Safed, Israel, the spiritual home of mystical Jews.

Book jacket/back: In this beloved novel of immigrant life in Brooklyn, David Fuchs speaks to us in a distinctive, affecting voice. He evokes the special, marvelous qualities of the Jewish-American experience by creating characters and conflicts whose idiom and flavor he catches with uncanny precision. This is an exceptional novel about ordinary people. Each of the central characters lives in the same tenemant building in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. This single building is a miniature of the teeming, dynamic community of which it is a part. It is inhabited by solitary souls and families. These people are students, idlers, shopkeepers, mothers, hustlers, lovers and husbands. Fuch's vivid, sharply observed prose folds these separate lives into a full-blooded human comedy. The story he tells reveals people living their lives with all the twists and dodges, the puzzles, the contradictions, the idiocies and the wonderful moments. In short, the busines of living, the banquet of life.

Edith Bruck recreates the hardships of her existence as a Jewish child in Hungary before the Holocaust, the horrors of her time in the camps and the protracted pain and disorientation of her lonely return to normal life after the war.

The latter part of the thirteenth century is regarded as a key period in the history of Italian Jewry. During that time many Jewish communities sprang up in the regions of central and northern Italy. Their appearance marked a turning-point in the history of Jews in the Italian peninsula as the Jewish presence had previously been focused on Rome and the south. In this much-acclaimed study, originally published in Italian, Ariel Toaff captures all the intricacies of everyday life in the medieval Jewish communities of Umbria. A thorough examination of Hebrew and Italian archival sources enables him to characterize in detail the defining features of Jewish life in the region at that time and to show clearly how the common stereotype of a single, undifferentiated Jewish community does not reflect the reality. Instead, he presents a picture of a complex society that--far from being a 'mere' minority and somewhat isolated--actually contributed greatly to contemporary society and played a significant role in shaping it, while at the same time also being influenced by the surrounding Christian society. Professor Toaff elaborates contemporary Jewish traditions and practices associated with love, marriage, food, work, sickness, and death in the context of everyday social relations between Christians and Jews. In so doing he presents a full and fascinating reconstruction of the Jewish life of the period that faithfully reflects the links and divides between the two communities. Engagingly written, Love, Work, and Death: Jewish Life in Medieval Umbria will be of interest to the general reader, while its detailed references to archival documentation make it a particularly valuable source for students of medieval Jewish history and specialists in the social history of medieval and Renaissance Italy.

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?

Thea: To Alexandria, Jerusalem and Freedom - is a movng and exciting story of life in Egypt during the tumultuous thirties and forties. The kaleidoscope of human events described, over sixty years of our century, gives the reader a sense of having lived and witnessed important moments of history. It is a book which makes a strong protest against war. But most of all it is the story of ordinary people performing extraordinary feats of love for their fellowmen. This is a sincere, well-written and poignant book with universal appeal.

Born in the United States, Shirley Kaufman has lived for the past 20 years in Jerusalem, a city split by cultural and religious fault lines. In direct, sensitive language, Kaufman's poems occupy the shifting border between ordinary life and violence, Palestinian and Jew, young love and aging companionship. They grapple with the meaning of routine, of family, and of life among a daily existence punctured with bombs. Sometimes I need to be nowhere. A place without history. "Kaufman's poems flourish in the spaces between what is familiar and unfamiliar, between life in Israel and life in the U.S., and in those moments when the differences between Palestinians and Jews, mothers and daughters, history and the immediate moment play themselves out." -- American Book Review "Kaufman is adept at revealing the human face behind politics, carefully accumulating familiar details to make a large portrait." -- Publishers Weekly Shirley Kaufman is the author of seven books of poetry and several translations from the Hebrew. Her awards include the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America and the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award. A native of Seattle, Kaufman now lives in Jerusalem.

Rachel has been making people laugh since the moment she could speak. She can even see the funny side when her husband leaves her for a cosmetics demonstrator. Called Greg. Rachel becomes a professional stand-up comedian, but has yet to break into the big time. And with a ten-year-old child and a mortgage, she needs a day job to make ends meet. So Rachel spends her mornings cleaning the houses of the rich and famous, much to the chagrin of her Jewish mother Stella (main ambition: to see Rachel safely re-married) and her Jewish dentist boyfriend Adam (main ambition: to share a scoured and swabbed, germ-free home in the suburbs with Rachel). Life for Rachel couldn't be sweeter. Yet somehow it lacks a certain spark. But there are sparks a-plenty when the washing machine breaks down a repair man called Matt arrives ... and sends her life into a spin.

Review An expert weaver, Stollman brings together themes of religion, science, and love into an emotional whole. -- Kirkus Reviews, January 1, 2003 Stollman's weightier fictions - elegantly written and wise - returns literature to its rightful role. -- Miami Herald, March 2, 2003 Product Description A collection of short stories by the author of The Far Euphrates and The Illuminated Soul represents his earlier works as published in such literary magazines as American Short Fiction, the Yale Review, and Tikkun and explores such themes as the impact of the past on the present and of one person on another. 12,500 first pirnting. From Library Journal A story collection from the author of two celebrated novels: The Far Euphrates and The Illuminated Soul. Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. About the Author Aryehlev Stollman is a neuroradiologist and the author of two books, The Illuminated Soul and The Far Euphrates, which is an American Library Association Notable Book, a Los Angeles Times Book Review Recommended Book of the Year, and the winner of a Wilbur Award and Lambda Award.

Edgar Morin, one of France's greatest living intellectuals, tells the story of his father, Vidal Nahoum, but also the story of Sephardic Jews, and of Europe. In this 'holographic history' Vidal's story, and that of his family, carries within it the flowering, decline, and death of Jewish culture in Spain, the passage from Empires to Nation States, the complex relations between Jews and Gentiles, between East and West, and, ultimately, the history of the twentieth century itself. Morin's work ranges from the great sweep of global historical events to the everyday details of individual lives, letters, feelings, reflections, and experiences. Vidal was born in 1894 in the Ottoman Empire's great Macedonian port. His great-grandfather came from Tuscany and spoke Italian. His mother tongue was fifteenth-century Spanish. He learned French and German as a child. When he was an adolescent, he dreamed of living in France; he was deported there as a prisoner, and then liberated by the French Prime Minister. He lived through the Balkan wars, the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, and two World Wars. Vidal cannot be isolated from his family. And as Edgar Morin explains, "this book also tells the stories of the men and women in his immediate family When, as his son, I inevitably come into his story... I describe him as objectively as possible. The reverence that inspired me did not call for a work of edification; it implied that I should attempt to write a truthful book. For this reason, the book is not in the least respectful, or at least not in the usual sense of the word. Vidal felt that loving someone meant being able to tease him. The author of these lines, who has inherited something of this trait, does not think it disrespectful to tease or make fun of the people he loves."