Called "the most important critic of his time" by Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin has emerged as one of the most compelling thinkers of our time as well, his work assuming a crucial place in current debates over the interactions of art, culture, and meaning. A "natural and extraordinary talent for letter writing was one of the most captivating facets of his nature", writes Gershom Scholem in his Foreword; and indeed, Benjamin's correspondence reveals the evolution of some of his most powerful ideas. Published here in English for the first time, these letters offer an intimate picture of Benjamin himself and the times in which he lived. Written in a day when letters were an important vehicle for the presentation and development of intellectual matters, Benjamin's correspondence is rich in insight into the circumstances behind his often difficult work. These letters provide a lively view of Benjamin's life and thought from his days as a student to his melancholy experiences as an exile in Paris. As he defends his changing ideas to admiring and skeptical friends – poets, philosophers, and radicals – we witness the restless self-analysis of a creative mind far in advance of his own time. Writing at length to Scholem and Theodor Adorno, and exchanging letters with Rainer Maria Rilke, Hannah Arendt, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Max Horkheimer, Max Brod, Bertolt Brecht, and Kafka's friend Felix Weltsch, Benjamin elaborates his ideas about metaphor and language. He reflects on literary figures from Kafka to Karl Kraus, the "Jewish Question" and anti-Semitism, Marxism and Zionism. And he expounds his personal attitudes toward such subjects as the role of quotations in criticism, history, and tradition; the meaning of being a "collector"; and French culture and the national character. In sum, this magnificent collection is an exceptionally rich source of information and an essential key to understanding one of the preeminent figures of modern culture. --

"Event of the time are a bit like Impressionist paintings . . . which combine into a recognizable whole only when observed from a distance." —Gertrude Kolmar in a letter to her sister, October 22, 1939 So a picture of Gertrud Kolmar, a gifted Jewish writer struggling to sustain her art and family, emerges from these eloquent and allusive letters. Written in the stolen moments before her day as a forced laborer in a munitions factory began, the letters tell of Kolmar's move from the family home in Finkenkrug to a three-room flat in Berlin, which she and her father must soon share with other displaced Jews. They describe her factory work as a learning experience and assert, in the face of ever worsening conditions, that true art, never dependent on comfort or peace, is "capable of triumphing over . . . time and place." These letters are a triumph of art, proclaiming the freedom of the human will amidst oppression. Though prevented by Nazi censorship from saying too much too directly, Kolmar still conveys the intensity and determination of her inner world, as well as the relentlessness of the outer world bent on crushing her. For its insight into the mind and soul of a poet submitting to and denying fate, and for its interior vision of one of history's darkest moments, My Gaze Is Turned Inward is a unique document of literary, historical, and spiritual power.

Letters of Flip (Philip) Slier, written to his parents in 1942 while he was in a forced labor camp during the German occupation of the Netherlands.

Marcus Spiegel, a German Jewish immigrant, served with the 67th and 120th Ohio Volunteer regiments during the Civil War. He saw action in Virginia, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Louisiana, where he was fatally wounded in May 1864. These letters to Caroline, his wife, reveal the traumatizing experience of a soldier and the constant concern of a husband and father. Jean Powers Soman is a great-great-granddaughter of Marcus Spiegel. Her coeditor, Frank L. Byrne, is a professor of history at Kent State University and the editor of several books, including Haskell of Gettysburg: His Life and Civil War Papers.

"In August 1970, David Biale, a 21-year-old American Jewish student, arrived at Kibbutz Kfar Ruppin in Israel's Bet She'an Valley as a volunteer. There, he met Rachel Korati, nine days shy of her eighteenth birthday. They began an intense dialogue about how a secular Jew might be Jewish and what the role of Israel and kibbutz ought to be in modern Jewish life. They also found a common language in the counter-culture of the 1960s to which both were drawn. Upon David's return to university studies in Berkeley and Rachel's first steps into independent adulthood - living in a town near Tel Aviv and working as a youth movement counselor -- the two commenced a correspondence in which they continued their intellectual and ideological discussions from the summer, engaging Jewish sources on the one hand, and contemporary events on the other. Gradually, the letters became more intimate and so began an epistolary romance, which one might associate more with the nineteenth century and which would be inconceivable in today's world of texting and email. Over the next two years, the correspondence continued, often on a daily basis. Twice, David's plans to come to Israel were dashed. The two struggled to hold onto a relationship composed primarily of written words. In the fall of 1971, Rachel was drafted into the Israeli Army and David had his own brush with the American draft in the last phase of the Vietnam War. Aerograms Across the Ocean: A Love Story in Letters opens a rare window into the lives and thoughts of two passionate young people, trying to find their identities and life trajectories in the tumultuous early 1970s. By turns philosophical and playful, poetic and prosaic, idealistic and uncertain, pensive and erotic, this jointly-written memoir is a coming-of-age story in Israel after the Six Day War and in America in the shadow of the Vietnam War. The book is organized around the 258 letters the authors exchanged, a correspondence that takes readers back into a different age, half a century ago." --

Living in Palestine as the wife of the British Attorney-General, Helen Bentwich was immersed in the politics and society of the early years of the British Mandate. Despite her connections she remained in some ways an outsider - a critical observer, writing candid weekly letters to her mother that give insight into the cauldron of races and traditions, the intolerance and the idealism, that lie behind the history of 20th-century Palestine and the foundation of the state of Israel. The selection of her letters in this book mixes political comment with details of personal life and gossip. The gossip reveals a society that has gone, but the political and religious problems are familiar today. Her family were well aware of the situation in Palestine, and she wanted to amuse rather than alarm them, but the frustrations and worries break through the letters' superficial cheerfulness to provide a picture of the period.

Eagle Minds —a selection from the correspondence between the Canadian composer and scholar Istvan Anhalt and his American counterpart George Rochberg—is a splendid chronicle and a penetrating analysis of the swerving socio-cultural movements of a volatile half-century as observed by two highly gifted individuals. Beginning in 1961 and spanning forty-four years, their conversation embraces not only music but other forms of contemporary art, as well as politics, philosophy, religion, and mysticism. The letters chronicle the deepening of their friendship over the years, and the openness, honesty, and genuine warmth between them provide the reader with an intimate look at their personalities. A fascinating intellectual tension emerges between the two men as they record their individual responses to musical modernism, to changing political and social realities, and to their Jewish heritage and sense of place, one as a son of Ukrainian immigrants to the United States, the other as a refugee from war-torn Hungary. Allowing us a privileged glimpse into the private lives and thoughts of these fascinating men, Eagle Minds is a valuable tool for scholars interested in North American composers in the late twentieth century and essential reading for anyone interested in the cultural and social history of that era.

"The title work, "Journey On a Hospital Bed" (1924), a memoir by the Russian writer Lev Lunts, together with articles, letters and stories by the same author. To these are added articles and letters by 20-30 Russian writers with whom Lev Lunts was associated. The total contents consist of 13 articles from 1921-1966, 88 letters from 1923-1924, one long memoir from 1924, and 2 stories from 1921 & 1924, all (with one exception) translated from Russian into English for the first time. Illustrated by approx. 50 photographs of people and 10 reproductions of manuscripts, most from the 1920s. All the articles relate to the group "The Serapion Brothers" and the literary scene in St. Petersburg in the early 1920s. All the correspondence dates from 1923-1924, when Lev Lunts lay dying in a sanatorium and hospital in Germany"--Publisher info.