As the best-selling author of Exodus, Mila 18, QB VII, and Trinity, Leon Uris blazed a path to celebrity with books that readers could not put down. Uris’s thirteen novels sold millions of copies, spent months on the best-seller lists, appeared in fifty languages, and have been adapted into equally popular movies and TV miniseries. Few other writers equaled Uris’s fame in the mid-twentieth century. His success fueled the rise of mass-market paperbacks, movie tie-ins, and celebrity author tours. Beloved by the public, Uris was, not surprisingly, dismissed by literary critics. Until now, his own life and work—as full of drama as his fiction—have never been the subject of a book. In Leon Uris: Life of a Best Seller, Ira Nadel traces Uris from his disruptive youth to his life-changing experiences as a marine in World War II. These experiences, coupled with Uris’s embrace of his Judaism and desire to write, led to his unprecedented success and the lavish excesses of a career as a best-selling author. Nadel reveals that Uris lived the adventures he described, including his war experiences in the Pacific (Battle Cry), life-threatening travels in Israel (Exodus), visit to Communist Poland (Mila 18), libel trial in Britain (QB VII), and dangerous sojourn in fractious Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic (Trinity). Nadel also demonstrates that Uris’s talent for writing action-packed, yet thoroughly researched, novels meshed perfectly with the public’s desire to revisit and understand the tumultuous events of recent history. This made him far more popular (and wealthy) than more literary authors, while paving the way for writers such as Irving Wallace and Tom Clancy.

"As an orphaned survivor and witness to the horrors of Auschwitz, Elie Wiesel (1928-2016) compelled the world to confront the Holocaust with his searing memoir Night. How did this soft-spoken man from a small Carpathian town become such an influential figure on the world stage. Drawing on Wiesel's prodigious literary output and interviews with his family, friends, scholars, and critics, Joseph Berger seeks to answer this question."--

"Young Lions: How Jewish Authors Reinvented the American War Novel shows how Jews, traditionally castigated as weak and cowardly, for the first time became the popular literary representatives of what it meant to be a soldier and what it meant to be an American. Revisiting best-selling works ranging from Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead to Joseph Heller's Catch-22, and uncovering a range of unknown archival material, Leah Garrett shows how Jewish writers used the theme of World War II to reshape the American public's ideas about war, the Holocaust, and the role of Jews in postwar life. In contrast to most previous war fiction these new Jewish war novels were often ironic, funny, and irreverent and sought to teach the reading public broader lessons about liberalism, masculinity, and pluralism"--Page 4 of cover.

Elie Wiesel (1928-2016) is best known as the author of Night, survivor of Auschwitz and a powerful, enduring voice of the Holocaust. A recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, he was a hero of human rights, professor and author of more than 50 books. Among his accomplishments, Wiesel co-founded Moment Magazine with Leonard Fein in 1975 to be a place of conversation for America's Jews. For editor-in-chief Nadine Epstein, he became a mentor and friend after she took over the magazine in 2004. In this striking volume, Epstein shares her memories of Wiesel and brings together 36 interviews with friends, colleagues and others who knew him - including, his son Elisha, Michael Berenbaum, Wolf Blitzer, Father Patrick Debois, Ronald S. Lauder, Bernard Henri-Levi, Kati Marton, Natan Sharansky, Ben Kingsley, and Oprah Winfrey. The foreword is by British Rabbi Jonathan Sacks and the afterword is by broadcaster Ted Koppel. To celebrate this humanitarian and keep his inspiration alive, Epstein presents readers with a visual history of Wiesel's life and examines the influence of Night. This chilling story of the Holocaust has already gripped the souls of millions of readers. Epstein includes a selection of his speeches and writings, lively conversations with teenagers about Night and discussion questions. The book features more than 100 photos. Says Rabbi Jonathan Sacks: "This book of reflections is a fitting tribute to the legacy of Elie Wiesel. In its pages and through the words of its contributors, you will feel a promise, not just to the souls who perished, but also to Elie and all those who survived Europe's darkest night." From the Inside Flap "It is absolutely imperative for this legacy of Elie Wiesel's to continue. It has to, and if it doesn't, it is our loss, and it will be an unfathomable loss." ―Ben Kingsley "Wiesel taught us that we must not forget; that there is no greater sin than that of silence and indifference. In doing so he has not just illumined the past, he has illumined the future" ―Oprah Winfrey "There was something burning inside of Elie, a flame ignited by injustice and pain. He was willing to share that part of himself. Pain can make people retreat from life, but opened Elie to the world." ―Kathleen Kennedy Townsend "He performed the alchemy of converting pain, injustice and horror into love, compassion and tolerance. We remember him not so much because he so often succeeded but because he never stopped trying." ―Ted Koppel "I believe there is a risk of Elie Wiesel, the Holocaust, and other genocides being forgotten. Without a real effort to retain their memory, they may simply disappear from history. Elie Wiesel was a light in the night for the whole world, not just the Jewish one." ―Father Patrick Desbois About the Author Editor: Nadine Epstein, Editor-in-Chief of Moment Magazine, is the founder and executive director of the Center for Creative Change and founder of the Daniel Pearl Investigative Journalism Initiative. An award-winning journalist and author, she reported for the City News Bureau of Chicago and the Chicago Bureau of the New York Times and covered the U.S.-Mexico border. She was a Knight-Wallace Fellow at the University of Michigan, where she also taught journalism. She is also an artist and the creator of the iShadow Project. Foreword: Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks is the former Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom. He is the author of more than 25 books, most recently Not in God's Name: Confronting Religious Violence. Ted Koppel was the anchor and managing editor of ABC News Nightline for 25 years. He is currently a contributor to CBS News Sunday Morning and author of Lights Out.

In four elegant chapters, Robert Alter explains the prismlike radiance created by the association of three modern masters, Franz Kafka, Walter Benjamin, and Gershom Scholem. The volume pinpoints the intersections of these divergent witnesses to the modern condition of doubt, the no-man's-land between traditional religion and modern secular culture.Scholem, the devoted Zionist and master historian of Jewish mysticism, and Benjamin, the Marxist cultural critic, dedicated much of their thought and correspondence to Kafka, the explorer in fiction of radical alienation. Kafka's sense of spiritual complexities was an inspiration to both thinkers in their resistance to the murderous simplification of totalitarian ideology. In Necessary Angels Alter uncovers a moment when the future of modernism is revealed in its preoccupation with the past. The angel of the title is first Kafka's: on June 25, 1914, the writer recorded in his diary a dream vision of an angel that turned into the painted wooden figurehead of a ship. In 1940, at the end of his life, Walter Benjamin devoted the ninth of his Theses on the Philosophy of History to a meditation on an angel by the artist Paul Klee, first quoting a poem he had written on that painting. In Benjamin's vision, the figure from Klee becomes an angel of history, sucked into the future by the storm of progress, his face looking back to Eden. Benjamin bequeathed the Klee oil painting to Scholem, it hung in the living room of Scholem's home on Abarbanel Streetin Jerusalem until 1989, when his widow placed it in the Israel Museum. Alter's focus on the epiphanic force of memory on these three great modernists shows with sometimes startling, sometimes prophetic clarity that a complete break with tradition is not essential to modernism. Necessary Angels itself continues the necessary discovery of the future in the past. --

"This account of Philip Roth traces the psychological and artistic origins of his creative life. It examines the major events of his career, while identifying a series of personal themes in his writing, from his relationship with Judaism to family, marriage, Eastern Europe and America. It addresses his private challenges from romance and health, to surviving as a writer burdened with success. The book also reflects how living outside the United States, initially in Italy and then England, plus his visits to Eastern Europe and exposure to their oppressed writers affected his writing. In particular, it primed him for a new engagement with American political and social history, resulting in a renewed determination to re-write America through his American trilogy and The Plot Against America. Although chronology is the framework, this is a thematic reading of Roth's life and career with attention to family, self-identity and success. A set of contrasting angles form this approach, beginning with his prolonged sense of discontent, yet public image of success, his search for sustained relationships but then decision to end them, his idealization of his parents but persistent undercurrent of criticism. Three overlapping issues provide the impetus for this reading: the aesthetic, the emotional and the historical. The lasting importance of such themes as anger, betrayal and failure has a vital role in understanding Roth's character and work. So, too, does his sense of performance on and off the page. Location is also significant and there are extensive discussions of Newark, London, Iowa, Prague and rural Connecticut. Particular attention to writers of the Holocaust, notably Primo Levi and Aharon Appelfeld, and contemporaries such as Saul Bellow and Bernard Malamud, also frame the narrative along with discussions of John Updike, Cynthia Ozick, Norman Mailer, Nadine Gordimer and Nicole Krauss. Works receiving special attention are Portnoy's Complaint, The Ghost Writer, Sabbath's Theater and the American trilogy. The shifting patterns of Roth's writing style, often related to changes in his physical and psychological health, are also considered. But more importantly is Roth's character and how early incidents formed later behavior, especially his inability to forget the past, particularly an insult or criticism. Analysis of his life with his two wives, Margaret (Maggie) Williams and Claire Bloom also occurs, as well as his relationships with other women. Further commentary focuses on Roth's illnesses and his life after he publically announced that he had stopped writing"--

"Philip Roth (1933-2018) is one of the most celebrated American writers of his age. Born in Newark, New Jersey -- where his short stories and thirty-one books were often set -- he wrote with immense ambition and drive, along with a keen awareness of what must be done to produce great literature. Yet despite rubbing shoulders with the Kennedys and engaging in a spate of famous and infamous romances, he viewed himself as socially withdrawn, living much like an "unchaste monk" (his words). In this original and lucid biography, Steven J. Zipperstein captures Roth's complex life and the astonishing range of his self-reflective writings-from "Goodbye, Columbus" and "Portnoy's complaint" to the Pulitzer Prize-winning "American pastoral" and "The plot against America." Employing extensive archival research and well over one hundred interviews, including conversations with Roth himself, Zipperstein provides an intimate and probing look at one of the twentieth century's most influential authors, placing his work in the context of Jewishness, freedom, and sexuality in America"-- Provided by publisher.

This companion discusses Jewish American literature in relation to ethnicity, religion, politics, race, gender, ideology, history, and ethics, and places it in the contexts of both Jewish and American writing. With its chronology and guides to further reading, this volume will prove valuable to scholars and students alike. --

Drawing upon his Welsh and Jewish heritage, Dannie Abse presents a rich autobiography that chronicles his life as both a doctor and an author. Humorous and poignant, this new edition not only includes the acclaimed first volume "A Poet in the Family," but also discusses the changes in the political and literary landscape over the last century. With a chapter featuring brand new material by the author, this must-read autobiography will entertain those interested in history, politics, and literature.

What Is Jewish Literature? is a richly thoughtful analysis and comprehensive overview of what defines Jewish literature. It is an international collection, featuring authors and scholars who write in different languages from different literary, spiritual, and personal perspectives.The book explores long-standing What are the criteria for identifying Jewish literature? Are they language, religious affiliation of the author, religious sensibility, a distinctive Jewish imagination, or literary tradition?If the writer is the criterion, do Sholem Aleichem and Nathanael West really inhabit a shared universe? Is a text by S.Y. Agnon part of the same literary tradition as a play by Arthur Miller?Is Yiddish or Hebrew or Ladino the defining element? If so, where do we place Franz Kafka, Primo Levi, Elie Weisel, Saul Bellow, Nellie Sachs?Is tradition the yardstick? Do we then classify Saul Bellow's Mr. Sammler's Planet as a Jewish novel... as Holocaust literature... as American fiction?What Is Jewish Literature? debates all these possibilities. It is a landmark collection that encourages the reader to participate in the quest for answers that defy simple responses.The contributors reflect the multilingual and multicultural nature of any discussion of Jewish literature. Their voices range from polemical to speculative, from scientific to lyrical.What Is Jewish Literature? is an enduring contribution to the literary resource for the scholar, the teacher, and the student and for any individual who strives to appreciate, evaluate, and understand the varied riches of Jewish writing.

In his historic play The Melting Pot, Israel Zangwill (1864–1926) introduced into our discourse a potent metaphor that for nearly a hundred years has served as a key definition of the United States. The play, enthusiastically espoused by President Theodore Roosevelt, to whom it was dedicated, offered a grand vision of America as a dynamic process of ethnic and racial amalgamation. By his own admission, The Melting Pot grew out of Zangwill's intense involvement in issues of Jewish immigration and resettlement and was grounded in his interpretation of Jewish history. Zangwill, Anglo Jewry's most renowned writer, began writing seriously for the stage in the late 1890s. At the time, the negative stereotype of the so-called Stage Jew was still deeply entrenched in the theatrical mainstream, so much so that Jewish playwrights writing for the English-language stage avoided altogether the portrayal of Jewish life. Zangwill shattered this silence in 1899 with the American premiere of Children of the Ghetto―his first full-length drama, and the first English-language play devoted in its entirety to the depiction of Jewish life in an authentic and positive fashion. The play's groundbreaking production drew tremendous attention and generated heated debates, but since the script was never published, the memory of the passions it generated dimmed, and its whereabouts eventually became unknown. After more than a century, theater historian Edna Nahshon has discovered the original manuscript of this milestone text, as well as that of another unpublished Zangwill play, The King of Schnorrers, and the original version of The Melting Pot. Nahshon brings these three works together in print for the first time in From the Ghetto to the Melting Pot. Edna Nahshon's in-depth introduction to this volume includes a biography of Israel Zangwill that especially pertains to these works and situates them within the Anglo-American theater of the time. The essays preceding each play provide rich and hitherto unknown information on the scripts, their stage productions, and their popular and critical reception. While some issues addressed in From the Ghetto to the Melting Pot are uniquely Jewish, others are universal and typical of the negotiation of self-presentation by ethnic and minority groups, particularly within the American experience.

This definitive anthology gathers stories, essays, memoirs, excerpts from novels, and poems by more than 130 Jewish writers of the past two centuries who worked in the Russian language. It features writers of the tsarist, Soviet, and post-Soviet periods, both in Russia and in the great emigrations, representing styles and artistic movements from Romantic to Postmodern. The authors include figures who are not widely known today, as well as writers of world renown. Most of the works appear here for the first time in English or in new translations. The editor of the anthology, Maxim D. Shrayer of Boston College, is a leading authority on Jewish-Russian literature. The selections were chosen not simply on the basis of the author's background, but because each work illuminates questions of Jewish history, status, and identity. Each author is profiled in an essay describing the personal, cultural, and historical circumstances in which the writer worked, and individual works or groups of works are headnoted to provide further context. The anthology not only showcases a wide selection of individual works but also offers an encyclopedic history of Jewish-Russian culture. This handsome two-volume set is organized chronologically. The first volume spans the nineteenth century and the first part of the twentieth century, and includes the editor's extensive introduction to the Jewish-Russian literary canon. The second volume covers the period from the death of Stalin to the present, and each volume includes a corresponding survey of Jewish-Russian history by John D. Klier of University College, London, as well as detailed bibliographies of historical and literary sources.

Examines the effect of the Holocaust on traditional attempts to explain the Jewish people's sufferings while retaining the concept of covenant with God. also examines its influence on the self-image of American Jewry. Analyzes the works of Elie Wiesel, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Saul Bellow, and Cynthia Ozick, among others, and suggests that awareness of a covenantal concept of Judaism is a criterion for authentic Holocaust literature. Adopts the definition of the Holocaust as a unique event - the plan to exterminate an entire nation, and describes various approaches to theological problems raised by the Holocaust.

In drama and in musical comedy, in popular song and in symphonic music, in movies and in literature, Jews have contributed to American culture in the 20th century to a degree out of all proportion to their numbers. But does this vast creative output coalesce into something identifiable as an American Jewish culture? Stephen J. Whitfield answers this question with a resounding "yes!" Whitfield focuses on areas where the specifically Jewish contribution has been little explored. He surveys such fields as popular music, musical theater, and drama, focusing on key figures from Jerome Kern and the Gershwins to Stephen Sondheim and Jerome Robbins; Leonard Bernstein and Aaron Copland to Irving Berlin and Bob Dylan; Arthur Miller and Lillian Hellman to David Mamet and Wendy Wasserstein. At the same time, Whitfield tackles the complex issue of race and American Jewish culture, tracing the extensive interpenetrations of Jewish and African American music. He also offers a stunning examination of Jewish American representations of the Holocaust, focusing on stage and film adaptations of Anne Frank's Diary and on Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List. In a poignant, final chapter, Whitfield ponders the future of American Jewish culture after a century of assimilationist pressure and mainstream success. The distinctive culture that he has traced through the 20th century, Whitfield concludes, may finally become submerged and lost. Only a renewed emphasis on Judaism itself, he believes, offers the hope for American Jews to maintain the dual cultural identities that they have so long succeeded in nurturing --

Call It English identifies the distinctive voice of Jewish American literature by recovering the multilingual Jewish culture that Jews brought to the United States in their creative encounter with English. In transnational readings of works from the late-nineteenth century to the present by both immigrant and postimmigrant generations, Hana Wirth-Nesher traces the evolution of Yiddish and Hebrew in modern Jewish American prose writing through dialect and accent, cross-cultural translations, and bilingual wordplay. Call It English tells a story of preoccupation with pronunciation, diction, translation, the figurality of Hebrew letters, and the linguistic dimension of home and exile in a culture constituted of sacred, secular, familial, and ancestral languages. Through readings of works by Abraham Cahan, Mary Antin, Henry Roth, Delmore Schwartz, Bernard Malamud, Saul Bellow, Cynthia Ozick, Grace Paley, Philip Roth, Aryeh Lev Stollman, and other writers, it demonstrates how inventive literary strategies are sites of loss and gain, evasion and invention. The first part of the book examines immigrant writing that enacts the drama of acquiring and relinquishing language in an America marked by language debates, local color writing, and nativism. The second part addresses multilingual writing by native-born authors in response to Jewish America's postwar social transformation and to the Holocaust. A profound and eloquently written exploration of bilingual aesthetics and cross-cultural translation, Call It English resounds also with pertinence to other minority and ethnic literatures in the United States.

Deepens and enriches our understanding of the Jewish literary tradition and the implications of the Shoah. Challenging the notion that Jewish American and Holocaust literature have exhausted their limits, this volume reexamines these closely linked traditions in light of recent postmodern theory. Composed against the tumultuous background of great cultural transition and unprecedented state-sponsored systematic murder, Jewish American and Holocaust literature both address the concerns of postmodern human existence in extremis. In addition to exploring how various mythic and literary themes are deconstructed in the lurid light of Auschwitz, this book provides critical reassessments of Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, and Philip Roth, as well as contemporary Jewish American writers who are extending this vibrant tradition into the new millennium. These essays deepen and enrich our understanding of the Jewish literary tradition and the implications of the Shoah.

A biography of the Polish-Jewish writer and artist includes an account of the discovery of his last artworks--murals painted on the walls of a villa occuppied by a Nazi officer--sixty years after his death and the complicated political dispute over the ownership of the murals.

Dual language - German original with English translations on facing pages. For much of her lifetime, and for decades after her death, Mascha Kaleko was a forgotten poet. With his publications, Andreas Nolte has played a role in changing this. To him, she personifies an all-too-typical example of a German-Jewish artist who was marginalized, intimidated, expelled into exile, and then forgotten. What adds to her obscurity is that her life's intriguing story is not well known, unless one speaks German and can read her poems, or what little has been written about her. This book provides a significant number of translated poems and biographical information from every stage of Kaleko's remarkable life in Berlin, New York, and Jerusalem to an English-speaking audience. Her story and her powerful poetry need to be heard: they shine a light on the darkest of times in the last century and remind us of the lessons that history teaches us.

"...this definitive anthology of major nineteenth- and twentieth-century fiction, nonfiction and poetry by eighty Jewish-Russian writers explores both timeless themes and specific tribulations of a people's history"--Publisher's info.

"A mix of autobiography and lucid invention, this highly personal work offers a deeply affecting exploration of the meaning of identity and pedigree. With his signature blend of candor, mystery, and bewitching elusiveness, Patrick Modiano weaves together a series of interlocking stories from his family history: his parents' courtship in occupied Paris; a sinister hunting trip with his father; a chance friendship with the deposed King Farouk; a wistful affair with the daughter of a nightclub singer; and the author's life as a new parent. Filled with a coterie of dubious characters - Nazi informants, collaborationist refugees, and black-market hustlers - Modiano's riveting vignettes capture the drama that consumed Paris during World War II and its aftermath. Written in tones ranging from tender nostalgia to the blunt cruelty of youth, this is a personal and revealing book that brings the enduring significance of a complicated past to life."--Publisher.