24 results for "Jewish Fiction"

Nowhere in Africa: an autobiographical novel

Zweig, Stefanie
Nowhere in Africa is the extraordinary tale of a Jewish family who flees the Nazi regime in 1938 for a remote farm in Kenya. Abandoning their once-comfortable existence in Germany, Walter Redlich, his wife Jettel, and their five-year-old daughter, Regina, each deal with the harsh realities of their new life in different ways. Attorney Walter is resigned to working the farm as a caretaker; pampered Jettel resists adjustment at every turn; while the shy yet curious Regina immediately embraces the country—learning the local language and customs, and finding a friend in Owuor, the farm's cook. As the war rages on the other side of the world, the family’s relationships with their strange environment become increasingly complicated as Jettel grows more self-assured and Walter more haunted by the life they left behind. In 1946, with the war over, Regina's fondest dream comes true when her brother Max is born. Walter's decision, however, to return to his homeland to help rebuild a new Germany puts his family into turmoil again. Visit the Web site for the film at www.nowhereinafrica.com
Terrace Books 2004 291 pages

Intimate lies: F. Scott Fitzgerald and Sheilah Graham : her son's story

Westbrook, Robert
This text provides an account of the turbulent romance of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Sheilah Graham. In July 1937 Scott Fitzgerald was broken in spirit, desperate for money and headed for Hollywood for work as a screenwriter - his one last shot at staying sober and re-establishing himself as a writer. There he met the young Sheilah Graham, a fledgling columnist who had transformed herself from a Jewish orphan from London's East End to a British aristocrat, determined to eradicate all traces of her squalid youth. Scott was fascinated by the gutsy Graham, she instinctively understood him and his demons and, together, they sought refuge from the glittering ferment of late-1930s Hollywood among friends such as Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker and Ogden Nash.
Abacus 1996 502 pages

The English German girl

Simons, Jake Wallis
"This powerful, meticulously researched novel is a moving tale of one girl's struggle against a world in turmoil. In 1930s Berlin, choked by the tightening of Hitler's fist, the Klein family are gradually losing everything that is precious to them. Their fifteen-year-old daughter, Rosa, slips out of Germany on a Kindertransport train to begin a new life in England. Charged with the task of securing a safe passage for her family, she vows that she will not rest until they are safe. But as war breaks out and she loses contact with her parents, Rosa finds herself wondering if there are some vows that can't be kept ...A sweeping tale of love and loss, with the poignant story of the Kindertransport at its heart, this is an exceptional accomplishment from one of Britain's bravest and most vibrant young writers."
Polygon 2011 377 pages

People of the book: (עם הספר) : a decade of Jewish science fiction & fantasy

Rachel Swirsky,Sean Wallace
From Sholom Aleichem to Avram Davidson, Isaac Bashevis Singer to Tony Kushner, the Jewish literary tradition has always been one rich in the supernatural and the fantastic. In these pages, gathered from the best short fiction of the last ten years, twenty authors prove that their heritage is alive and well -- in the spaces between stars that an alphabet can bridge, folklore come to life and histories become stories, and all the places where old worlds and new collide and change.
Prime Books 2010 318 pages

Champion: a German boxer, a Jewish assassin and Hitler's revenge

Deutsch, Stephen
In the cauldron of Germany in the 1930s, two men from different worlds become key actors in the turbulent history of their time. Herschel Grynszpan, an undocumented Jewish adolescent living in Paris, wants to be a champion of his suffering people. Max Schmeling, a world champion boxer, becomes a reluctant symbol of the Third Reich. Their lives intertwine without touching, eventually converging in the concentration camp of Sachsenhausen. Dark haired, slight, and with deep-set, haunted eyes, Herschel receives a postcard from his parents--recently taken from their Hanover flat, put on a train, and dumped, with 12 thousand others, on the Polish border. Enraged, Herschel buys a gun and kills a minor German official in the German Embassy. The repercussions of this act trigger Kristallnacht, the opening curtain to the tragedy of the Holocaust. Meanwhile, Max, as a result of his victory over the then-"invincible" Joe Louis in 1936, has become a poster boy for the Nazis. He and his movie-star wife, Anny Ondra, are feted by the regime--tea with Hitler, a passage on the airship Hindenburg--until his brutal two-minute beating in the rematch with Louis less than two years later. His story reaches a climax during Kristalnacht, where the champion performs an act of quiet heroism. Champion tells a story of tragedy and humanity as World War II unfolds. Set against a backdrop of racism, war, and displacement, it shines a light on those times as it holds a mirror to our own.
Universe 2020-07 367 pages

The Frumkiss family business

Wex, Michael
Thomas Mann meets Mordecai Richler in this outstanding novel of great intellect and humour that already reads like a classic. The Frumkiss family doesn't look much different from any of the others in Toronto's Bathurst Manor. Grandpa survived the Holocaust; Grandma the Second came from Poland at the age of five. Dad's a foot doctor; Mom is dead, and her mother -- Grandma Number One --died while giving birth to her in Kazakhstan. Her three kids -- the oldest is forty-two -- are as frustrated and directionless as most baby boomers with no real financial worries. One's in Toronto, there's one in the suburbs and the third lives in Israel. As far as the Frumkisses know, all that distinguishes them from anybody else is that Grandpa is a famous Yiddish writer who ended up working for the CBC. But Grandpa's death sets off a chain of events that force the Frumkisses to see how different their family is from all the others. The Frumkiss Family Business , Michael Wex's brilliant and hilarious new novel, is a family saga for the twenty-first century, a lovingly accurate portrait of middle-class Canadian life at the turn of the century and of the Toronto neighbourhood that has produced such famous Canadians as Howie Mandel and Wex himself. Imagine Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks without the stodgy Germans or The Brothers Karamazov with only one brother. Finally, a novel that does for Toronto what Mordecai Richler's books did for Montreal.
Alfred A. Knopf Canada 2010 361 pages

The hood

Tidhar, Lavie
God bless you, England, on this glorious Year of Our Lord, 1145. Things are definitely not right in Nottingham. Rebecca, daughter of a Jewish money-lender, has a sense for it. A mad monk schemes to resurrect the Christ from body parts. A bone harpist murders creatures of legend for a price. A fae creature binds its wings and embraces a new God and his son. And don't even mention the Hood. The Man in Green. The Prince of Thieves. The tick-tock taker of the ten-toll tax. What hope have the series of sheriffs sent to hold the peace? It's the forest, you see. Sherwood. Ice Age ancient, impenetrable, hiding a dark and secret heart. But hearts, no matter how black, no matter how hidden, are not immune to change. The old world is dying... and a terrifying new one is waiting to take its place. Rebecca senses an opportunity. But how far is she willing to go, and what price - because there is always a price - will she have to pay? The Hood is Lavie Tidhar's narcotic reweirding of an ancient English myth, a tale stitched together from legends lost to time, a tale told and retold, reworked and renewed for each passing century. A tale, reader, for today. 'A wild, inventive tapestry of myth and magic, with a wry sense of humor. Tidhar's writing is wonderfully vibrant' Silvia Moreno-Garcia, bestselling author of Mexican Gothic
Head of Zeus 2022-06-09 439 pages

The exiles return

De Waal, Elisabeth
"The Exiles Return is set in Occupied Vienna in 1954-5. It describes five people who grew up there before the war and have come back to see if they can re-establish the life they have lost. The novel begins with Professor Kuno Adler, who is Jewish and fled Vienna after the Anschluss (the events of March 1938 when Hitler's troops marched into Austria). He is returning from New York to try and take up his old life as a research scientist. We realise through his confrontation with officialdom and with the changed fabric of the city (the lime trees are there no longer, it is hard to know who behaved well during the war and who was a Nazi sympathiser) that a refugee who goes back has a very difficult time. Next we are introduced to a wealthy Greek named Kanakis..."--Publisher description.
Persephone Books 2013 310 pages

Making good again

Davidson, Lionel
Wieder Gut Machung-making good again-reparations. In London, James Raison, a lawyer, was preparing to take a quick trip to Munich in the interest of his client, Mrs. Wolff, and the estate of her late father, Helmut Bamberger. Bamberger had been a very wealthy and very complex man who had, apparently, died in a Nazi concentration camp. In Tel Aviv, Dr. Grunwald, an elderly lawyer who had been crippled by the Nazis, was planning to go to Munich, too, as the representative of a Jewish organization intensely interested in the fate of Bamberger's fortune. In pre-holocaust Germany, Grunwald had represented Bamberger and had helped him get the bulk of his money safely into a Swiss bank. In Munich, the German lawyer in charge of the Bamberger case, Heinz Haffner (who took pride in not actually having been a Nazi, though his sister still was one), was preparing to meet with his colleagues to discuss some puzzling new elements in the case. Haffner had problems of his own. So did the English and the Israeli lawyers. And even when one means to concentrate on the business at hand, one's mind sometimes strays. Even with three good lawyers at work, the Bamberger question became frustrating, mystifying, and, at last, explosive --
Faber and Faber 2008 298 pages

My one and only love

Atzmon, Gilad
Danny Zilber is a world-acclaimed trumpet player. A constant procession of women traipse through his dressing room, yet none can satisfy his need for love. Until, that is, an encounter with a mysterious woman who leaves just as quickly as she drops her panties ... are just some of the means Danny's manager and his compatriots employ in order to safeguard the security of Israel and propagate German guilt. Meanwhile Danny holds dear the sole memento he has of that fateful meeting - the brassiere his 'one and only' left behind. scathingly comic take on Zionist politics and Israeli espionage.
Saqi 2005 239 pages

The legacy

Phillips, Melanie
"Russell Woolfe, a faded TV producer, is struggling with his father's death. Deeply uncomfortable with his own Jewish identity, he is torn between anger with his father--estranged over Russell's marrying a non-Jewish woman - and grief over their failure to reconcile. At his father's memorial Russell meets Joe Kuchinsky, a Polish survivor who unaccountably latches on to him. Kuchinsky claims to possess an ancient Hebrew manuscript that has been in his family for generations and which he wants to have translated before he dies. Kuchinsky believes fervently that the manuscript contains some important ancient wisdom--perhaps, even, the key to the survival of the Jewish people. Despite his doubts, Russell agrees to inspect the manuscript and tell Kuchinsky what it contains. Thus begins an international mystery that stretches a thousand years in the past, is wrapped in the tragedy of the Holocaust, and which comes to a startling conclusion that has dire personal consequences for everyone caught up in the saga." -- Provided by publisher.
Bombardier Books 2018 391 pages

My mother's house

Tobias, Lily
A remarkable insight into Jewish history in Britain, 'My Mother's House' is a poignant story of belonging, nationhood and identity set in Wales, England and Palestine. The first novel from the acclaimed author of Eunice Fleet - a poignant story of belonging, nationhood and identity set in Wales, England and Palestine. First novel from the acclaimed author of EUNICE FLEET a poignant story of belonging, nationhood and identity set in Wales, England and Palestine Simon is a troubled young manborn in Wales, of Jewish heritage, and in love with Englishness and an English heiress. He determines to reject his Jewish and Welsh identity and the industrial valleys he grew up in and seeks to fulfil his ambition to rise in the Civil Service. His experiences in love and his professional life see him reject Edith on discovering that she is not what he believed her to be, and taking up arms in the fight against Englands enemies in the Great War. Ultimately, he must embrace his family and his heritage before he can experience a sense of wholeness. Simons experience raises questions of belonging, language, nationhood and identity that are as relevant now as they were in 1931 when the novel was first published. Lily Tobiass sensitive individual and communal portraits illuminate some of the most topical personal, social and political issues of the twenty-first century.
Honno 2015 543 pages

Lives of the mind slaves: selected stories

Cohen, Matt
Matt Cohen's stories have been widely anthologized and have appeared in distinguished periodicals and journals in Canada, Britain and the United States. "Lives of the Mind Slaves" features 7 short stories -- one of which (Trotsky's First Confessions') was written especially for this book -- and a brilliant novella. Cohen's novella, Golden Whore of the Heartland, explores the conflict between the spontaneity of passion -- a chance affair -- and the comfort of commitment and belonging. The Sins of Tomas Benares' explores the theme of love over generations. 'Caf? Le Dog' is a celebration of all that remains inexplicable in the attractions between men and women. Racial Memories' is vintage Cohen -- a story about a not-so-classic Jewish family. "Lives of the Mind Slaves" contains the best of Cohen's two previous short story collections, "Caf? Le Dog" and "Living on Water."
Porcupine's Quill 1994 191 pages

Death & Texas

Sinclair, Clive
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.
Halban 2014 282 pages

Farewell, Leicester Square

Miller, Betty
"Betty Miller wrote this, her fourth novel, in 1935. But her publisher, Victor Gollancz, #x91;turned the book down flat,#x92; wrote Neal Ascherson in The New York Review of Books. #x91;It seems most likely that he saw it as terrifyingly provocative, not only an attack on the solid English assimilation of his own family but a tactless outburst against the English at precisely the moment, two years after Hitler's assumption of power, when their tolerance and hospitality were most needed.#x92; In the novel Alec Berman escapes from his restrictive Jewish family in Brighton, and although he has a successful career as a film-maker (perhaps modelled on that of Alexander Korda) and marries the very English Catherine, he always feels a #x91;Dago: Jew: Outsider.#x92; #x91;Yet,' continued Neal Ascherson, #x91;the rejection is not really the refusal of a snobbish Gentile world fully to accept him. The rejecting force comes from within himself.#x92; #x91;A thought-provoking insight into anti-semitism between the wars,' wrote the Guardian, 'not the violent prejudice of Mosley's fascists, but the discreet discrimination of the bourgeoisie.#x92;" -- Provided by publisher.
Persephone Books 2000 309 pages