All Whom I Have Loved is the haunting story of a Jewish family in Eastern Europe in the 1930s as seen through the eyes of an unforgettable nine-year-old boy. The beloved only child of divorced parents, Paul watches helplessly as his family and his world dissolve around him. At first he lives with his mother—a secular, assimilated schoolteacher, whom he adores until she “betrays” him by marrying a gentile. He’s then sent to live with his father—once an admired avant-garde artist, but now reviled by the critics as a “decadent Jew,” who drowns his anger, pain, and humiliation in drink. Paul searches in vain for a life of stability and meaning. The earthy peasant girl who briefly takes care of him, the pull he feels toward the Jews praying in the local synagogue, and his fascination with Eastern Orthodox church rituals give him only tantalizing glimpses into worlds of which he can never be a part. The fates that Paul’s parents will meet with Paul as terrified witness, and his own fate as an orphaned Jewish child alone in Europe in 1938, are rendered by Aharon Appelfeld with extraordinary subtlety and power, as they foreshadow, in the heart-wrenching story of three individuals, the cataclysm that is about to engulf all of European Jewry.

'Feinstein's triumph is to write so well that she makes Lena's predicament not only moving, in a perfunctory dismissive way, but also painful ... [she has] an accurate and acute feeling for language, and pauses, and silence.' Guardian Lena's seemingly contented family life is coming apart at the seams. Her husband Ben has been having an affair with the au pair, and as their relationship slides he retreats more and more into his work in a science lab. Sons Alan and Michael may appear happy enough, but this is far from the case - both are responding to a physical world which they alone inhabit. And Lena - desperately lost and seeking an identity of her own, both inside and outside of her family unit - increasingly finds solace at the bottom of a bottle. An exploration of just how lonely - and how magic - a marriage can be, The Circle is a poignant, poetic and incredibly assured debut novel.

Now available as a New Directions paperbook, Love and Terror, William Herrick's second novel with ND, both reflects and anticipates today's headlines. Terrorist kidnappings, hijackings, and dramatic rescues all form a part of the plot, but Herrick's interest lies less in tension-filled heroics than in the human cost of flawed idealism. Through the notebook of the principal terrorist, Viktor X, the complex characters of Viktor and Gabriele, for whom love and terrorism are intertwined and inseparable, are revealed. And in a series of interviews with a nameless reporter, the lives of three disillusioned revolutionaries--"the old ones," now hostages to a new brand of revolution--gradually and movingly unfold. In his earlier Shadows and Wolves (New Directions, 1980), Herrick showed us the possibility of human solutions that transcend politics. In Love and Terror he shows us why any ideology, inflexibly adhered to, makes such solutions necessary.

This gripping novel of adventure, love, and religious persecution follows the life and flight of a Jew under the Spanish Inquisition.

Myron Brinig's debut novel, Singermann, originally published in 1929, tells the story of a Jewish family, the Singermanns who immigrate to the mining city of (Silver Bow) Butte, Montana during the early heydays of the west. Follow Moses, his wife Rebecca, and their six children as they navigate the complexities of their rapidly changing world. From the eldest son's unexpected journey into Christian Science to the youngest's fascination with writing, each member of the Singermann clan embarks on a unique path that challenges the family's tightly held beliefs. Themes of the immigrant experience, religion, labor unrest, childhood, and homosexuality, are all told in an honest and captivating voice (the book is largely based on the author's own life). Singermann is groundbreaking and compelling and worthy of being available again!

“A moving act of absolution . . . . This strong novel about a girl who is debased but never destroyed pushes the reader to a new level of understanding of the things people do—and the things that are done to them.”— Washington Post Book World She has hair of ginger and lovely green eyes, and she has just been transported with her family from Terezín to Auschwitz. In short order, her father commits suicide, and her mother and younger brother are dispatched to the gas chambers, but fifteen-year-old Hanka Kauderzová is still alive. Faced with the choice of certain death in the camp or working in a German military brothel, she chooses a chance at life. Passing for an Aryan, Hanka spends her days in the brothel cold, hungry, fearful, and ashamed. She is sustained only by her loathing of the men who visit her and by a fierce, indomitable will to live. This devastatingly beautiful novel explores and delineates the impossible choices one sometimes has to make in life, when the fabric of the world is rent asunder. Soaring beyond the nightmare, it leaves the reader with a transcendent sense of hope. Skyhorse Publishing, as well as our Arcade, Yucca, and Good Books imprints, are proud to publish a broad range of books for readers interested in fiction—novels, novellas, political and medical thrillers, comedy, satire, historical fiction, romance, erotic and love stories, mystery, classic literature, folklore and mythology, literary classics including Shakespeare, Dumas, Wilde, Cather, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.

Anzia Yezierska's "Children of Loneliness" explores the complex experiences of Jewish immigrants in New York City. This literary work delves into the challenges of social alienation and the struggles inherent in cultural assimilation. Through compelling prose, Yezierska examines the conflicts that arise between generations as they navigate new identities in a rapidly changing world. A poignant portrayal of the immigrant experience, "Children of Loneliness" offers a powerful glimpse into the lives of those seeking a new home while grappling with the loss of their traditions. The novel masterfully portrays the universal themes of identity, belonging, and the search for connection in an unfamiliar land, ensuring its enduring relevance. This carefully prepared print republication makes this important historical fiction accessible to all. This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

This subtle, unusual book explores the many, often overlapping ways in which the Russian Jewish past has been remembered in history, in literature, and in popular culture. Drawing on a wide range of sources?including novels, plays, and archival material? Imagining Russian Jewry is a reflection on reading, collective memory, and the often uneasy, and also uncomfortably intimate, relationships that exist between seemingly incompatible ways of seeing the past. The book also explores what it means to produce scholarship on topics that are deeply personal: its anxieties, its evasions, and its pleasures. Zipperstein, a leading expert in modern Jewish history, explores the imprint left by the Russian Jewish past on American Jews starting from the turn of the twentieth century, considering literature ranging from immigrant novels to Fiddler on the Roof . In Russia, he finds nostalgia in turn-of-the-century East European Jewry itself, in novels contrasting Jewish life in acculturated Odessa with the more traditional shtetls. The book closes with a provocative call for a greater awareness regarding how the Holocaust has influenced scholarship produced since the Shoah.

Ghetto Tragedies (1899) is a collection of stories by Israel Zangwill. Raised in London by parents from Latvia and Poland, Zangwill understood the plight of the city's Jewish community firsthand. Having risen through poverty to become an educator and author, he dedicated his career to the voiceless, the oppressed, and the needy, advocating for their rights and bearing witness to their suffering in some of the most powerful novels and stories of the Victorian era. "People who have been living in a Ghetto for a couple of centuries, are not able to step outside merely because the gates are thrown down, nor to efface the brands on their souls by putting off the yellow badges. The isolation imposed from without will have come to seem the law of their being." As a Jewish immigrant who grew up in poverty in London, Israel Zangwill knows that the condition of life in the ghetto changes not just lives, but mentalities. In the fourth installment of his Ghetto series, Zangwill imagines the lives of everyday Jewish people. Zillah and Jossel, successful boot makers; Daniel Peyser, a father of seven daughters; Isaac Levinsky, the son of a pious Rabbi. These are the lives so lovingly shaped in the author's skillful hands, people whose experiences with love, loss, doubt, and faith are not so different from our own. The tales of Jewish life in Ghetto Tragedies earned Zangwill comparisons to Dickens upon publication and helped to establish him as an author with a gift for intensive character study and a passion for political themes. This edition of Israel Zangwill's Ghetto Tragedies is a classic of British literature reimagined for modern readers. Since our inception in 2020, Mint Editions has kept sustainability and innovation at the forefront of our mission. Each and every Mint Edition title gets a fresh, professionally typeset manuscript and a dazzling new cover, all while maintaining the integrity of the original book. With thousands of titles in our collection, we aim to spotlight diverse public domain works to help them find modern audiences. Mint Editions celebrates a breadth of literary works, curated from both canonical and overlooked classics from writers around the globe.

Ghetto Comedies (1907) is a collection of stories by Israel Zangwill. Raised in London by parents from Latvia and Poland, Zangwill understood the plight of the city's Jewish community firsthand. Having risen through poverty to become an educator and author, he dedicated his career to the voiceless, the oppressed, and the needy, advocating for their rights and bearing witness to their suffering in some of the most powerful novels and stories of the Victorian era. "People who have been living in a Ghetto for a couple of centuries, are not able to step outside merely because the gates are thrown down, nor to efface the brands on their souls by putting off the yellow badges. The isolation imposed from without will have come to seem the law of their being." As a Jewish immigrant who grew up in poverty in London, Israel Zangwill knows that the condition of life in the ghetto changes not just lives, but mentalities. In the fifth and final installment of his Ghetto series, Zangwill imagines the lives of everyday Jewish people. A German painter searches for a Jewish model for his painting of Jesus Christ; Solomon Cohen, or S. Cohn, rises to prominence as a Town Councillor in Sudminster while suppressing his Jewish heritage; Bloomah Beckenstein, a young Jewish girl, is blamed for spreading smallpox at her school in London. These are the lives that take shape in the author's skillful hands, people whose experiences with love, loss, doubt, and faith are not so different from our own. The tales of Jewish life in Ghetto Comedies earned Zangwill comparisons to Dickens upon publication and helped to establish him as an author with a gift for intensive character study and a passion for political themes. This edition of Israel Zangwill's Ghetto Comedies is a classic of British literature reimagined for modern readers. Since our inception in 2020, Mint Editions has kept sustainability and innovation at the forefront of our mission. Each and every Mint Edition title gets a fresh, professionally typeset manuscript and a dazzling new cover, all while maintaining the integrity of the original book. With thousands of titles in our collection, we aim to spotlight diverse public domain works to help them find modern audiences. Mint Editions celebrates a breadth of literary works, curated from both canonical and overlooked classics from writers around the globe.

In turn of the century Eastern Europe, a brother and sister have been chosen to guard an ancient cemetery of Jewish martyrs situated on an isolated mountain. The endless snows protect them from the pogroms and plagues that rage in the world below, but that same protective blanket cuts them off from their people and tradition. Escape--from loneliness, from wavering piety, and from the burgeoning desire they feel for one another--becomes impossible. A parable for our times, by the writer whom Irving Howe called "one of the best novelists alive," Unto the Soul lays bare the deepest stirrings of religious feeling and despair within the human soul. From the Trade Paperback edition.

Seven queer fantasy shorts set in the tropical Jewish world of the Mangoverse novels. "Your Name is Love" An energetic royal guard takes her artist wife on a scavenger hunt around the city so she can stop having artist's block about the lesbian graphic novel she's supposed to make for the queen. "No Whining" Trans woman Chef Yael dithers over whether to switch wine sellers, at the urging of her husband Aaron, when her regular vendor is incompetent but the delivery girl is a trusted ally. "Every Us" A prince with anxiety is comforted in the arms of his partner when he wakes up from a nightmare. "Take Time to Stop and Eat the Roses" A trans teenager and his girlfriend go on a midnight quest for flowers for her sister's wedding. "The Generous Princess" A royal family with two moms and two dads puts their own special twist on celebrating Purim. And now, bundled with Tales from Outer Lands, two contrasting stories of heroic Jewish womanhood: "Rivka in Port Saltspray" Trapped in a seedy port town because an innkeeper is holding her shapeshifting dragon-horse hostage until she can pay all the charges he invented, nomadic warrior Rivka finally has a chance at some decent money when a wealthy but weak man hires her to rescue his fiancée. But she has to think on her feet when she learns there may be more at stake. "Aviva and the Aliens" On the night before the royal Passover seder, Aviva has to outsmart the aliens who abducted her to cook for them because they had grown sick of their spaceship's food replicators. Will she get home before Queen Shulamit wakes up and panics from her absence?

The Spanish Ballad (originally published as "Die Jüdin von Toledo") is a 1955 novel by German-Jewish writer Lion Feuchtwanger. The story focuses on the "Golden Age" of learning in medieval Spain, and also describes the affair of Alfonso VIII with the Jewish Raquel in Toledo. In Lion Feuchtwanger's prologue to the story, he mentions that the ballad was originally written by Alfonso X of Castile in regards of his Great-Grandfather (Alfonso VIII).

When Edith Hofmann sat down to write this book, she was a 19-year-old coming to terms with the fact of her own survival. It is a story which describes a struggle; the struggle to come to terms with a haunting past, the struggle to survive, and the struggle to unburden a broken heart. It also embodies a struggle to form, in language, that which at times all but defies linguistic form. When Hofmann started writing this book she had only been speaking English for two years, and yet she wanted to convey her experiences, in English, to those with whom she had made her home. The cruel reality was that no one really wanted to hear. She poured out her soul, only to be told that 'no one was interested in the war any more'. This was 1950. Some fifty years later she revisited the manuscript, wondering whether such a text would have any value. For fifty years her text had lain in her drawer, waiting to be read. Her story is a novel, but it certainly is not a fiction. Scared for her own safety, Hofmann chose to write in the third person rather than pen a memoir. Every page is bound up with the intricate details of her life, those whom she loved, and those whom she lost; the echoes of those terrible years, and the memory they imposed. In compiling this text, she decided neither to change it, by removing discrepancies or updating anything, which Hofmann wrote in the late 1940s, nor to improve her English, but rather to leave it as a raw and indelible testimony not only to her survival but to her bid to survive survival. You will be moved; not only by what she has written, but by the fact that she wrote at all.

“I am Sonya Vronsky, professor of mathematics at Tel Aviv University, and this is the story of a day in late August. On this remarkable day I kissed a student, pursued a lover, found my father, and left my brother.” So begins A Wall of Light , a novel which chronicles a single day in the life of Sonya, a thirty-two-year-old deaf woman about to break out of her predictable routine. Sonya lives in Tel Aviv with her protective half-brother, Kostya; their household has dwindled from five to two. Anna, their mother, is now in a nursing home and Noah, Kostya’s son, is living in Berlin. Kostya, wracked with guilt for the tragedies that have befallen Sonya, also grapples with the memory of his wife, Iris, a lawyer murdered in the course of a dangerous investigation seventeen years earlier. As we move through Sonya’s day, Noah and Anna narrate their stories as well. Noah’s journal entries cover the years 1980-1993, and Anna’s letters to Andrei, her married lover in Russia, are written in 1957, after Anna has emigrated to Israel to build a new life for herself and her son, Kostya. While Sonya’s story moves rapidly through the events of a single day, Noah and Anna’s voices take the reader back in time, filling in the circumstances that have led Sonya to this pivotal moment. We learn that Sonya has already endured two catastrophes. At age twelve, a medical mishap leaves her deaf, and at eighteen, while studying at university in Beersheba, Sonya is assaulted by two hoodlums. Throughout the novel, Sonya’s experiences, instigated by both human error and human evil, are echoed by the larger, political violence that haunts modern Israel. While Noah’s and Anna’s voices shed light on Sonya’s journey, they also provide insights into the political and cultural fabric of Israel from the mid 1950s to the present. Noah’s journal entries, starting with his tenth birthday and ending shortly after his army service, map his coming of age. We see him wrestling with his sexual identity and first sexual encounters, the fallout from his mother’s leftist politics, and his own conscription to the army. Anna’s secret letters to Andrei offer an outsider’s perspective on the new Israeli state. The remarkable events of Sonya’s day are set in motion when her brother gives her an antihistamine. Overcome with sleepiness, she dismisses her morning class early, asking only one student, Matar, to stay behind. She wants to understand what lies behind his unusual expression. He answers that he has been involved in war crimes, and surprises Sonya by kissing her. Sonya feels that she has been roused from a long slumber and as the novel progresses we see the ways in which her awakened desire shapes her choices. She decides to take a taxi home from the university and impulsively invites the taxi driver inside and seduces him. He complies, but when she tells him she’s deaf, he flees in confusion. Sonya is convinced that she has fallen in love with him, and decides to pursue him. She solicits her brother’s help and sets out to find her lover. Sonya’s search gains in intensity and purpose as she travels to East Jerusalem. There she encounters the walls that prevent Palestinians from moving freely through the West Bank. After an Alice in Wonderland -like journey past numerous obstacles, Sonya finally makes it to her lover’s house. This second encounter leads Sonya to a central revelation: the identity of her father. As this day of awakened desire and dispelled secrets closes, Sonya is able to step out from under the protective wing of her brother into a life that reflects both the ambiguity and uncertainty of contemporary Israel and her own personal possibilities.

This award-winning novel is "a delightful, inventive tale" about the pursuit of love and literary fame from "a compassionate and witty satirist" ( Kirkus Reviews ). It's the opportunity of a lifetime for middle-aged Ezra Shultish--a chance to the meet his literary hero, Nobel Laureate Bar Nun, a writer Ezra has worshipped for most of his career as a teacher and translator. Hoping to get a recording of the author reading his story, The Yemenite Girl , Shultish travels to Israel, where he finds himself pursuing his own Yemenite girl, as well as the elusive author. But will Ezra get the girl--or his own glimpse of literary fame? Winner of the Edward Lewis Wallant Book Award, The Yemenite Girl is Curt Leviant's comic novel on the nature of celebrity and the relationship between life and art. "Shultish is a man with a life of his own. . . . And the celebrity, too, is remarkably drawn. . . . [The book] is done with great tact, feeling, and skill." --Saul Bellow, Pulitzer Prize- and Nobel Prize for Literature-winning author "A passionate story . . . The charm of the text and the intensity of the subtext is what keeps the pages turning." -- The New York Times Book Review "Good comic writing and satire on the Hebrew literary scene with its jealous politicking for literary prizes." -- The Washington Post

Joseph Roth paints a vivid portrait of Emperor Napoleon's last grab at glory, the hundred days spanning his escape from Elba to his final defeat at Waterloo. This particularly poignant work, set in the first half of 1815 and largely in Paris, is told from two perspectives, that of Napoleon himself and that of the lowly, devoted palace laundress Angelica--an unlucky creature who deeply loves him. In The Hundred Days, Roth refracts the deep sorrow of their intertwined fates. Roth's signature lyrical elegance and haunting atmospheric details sing in The Hundred Days. "There may be," as James Wood has stated, "no modern writer more able to combine the novelistic and the poetic, to blend lusty, undamaged realism with sparkling powers of metaphor and simile."

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.

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.