"The love and peace poems by international poet Ada Aharoni, are among the best in modern literature." (Saul Bellow, Nobel Laureate in Literature) "Rare Flower" by Ada Aharoni is a collection of moving, powerful and well-crafted poems, which has been compared to Jubran Khalil's "The Prophet." In brilliant poem after poem, Ada unfolds before our eyes new depths of human relations, the complexities and intricacies of love, and the joys and pains of life. Several of her poems have been put to music in a delightful manner. Influenced by the British Peace Poet, Wilfred Owen, whom she greatly admires, she powerfully denounces the whole concept and practice of War. As a woman and a mother, she condemns the killing of soldier-sons by involving them in war situations, and she clearly demonstrates that in our nuclear age, the continuation of the practice of war can dangerously lead to the end of humanity. Her beautiful, hopeful poems shed light and a deep comprehension of the possibilities of peace between Israelis and Palestinians, and the creation of "A Global Village Beyond War."

The Jewish, Odesa-born poet, Semyon Izrailevich Lipkin (1911-2003), was a central figure in modern Russian literature, although until recently, he was best known in the West for his role in preserving the manuscript of Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate from the KGB. As a Soviet journalist in WW2, he witnessed and wrote about the horrors of Stalingrad, which led the Nobel Laureate Josef Brodsky to refer to him as 'Russia's war poet'. Later, during the years of Stalin's deportation of ethnic groups, Lipkin translated and preserved the language and writings of Tajiks, Uzbeks, and Tatars and, in doing so, became a living repository of their culture for which he risked censure and arrest from the Soviet authorities. In this memoir, Lipkin's humanity, civic courage, and friendship with many important Russian writers - Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetaeva, Andrei Platonov, and of course, Grossman himself - shine through the reports of terror and oppression that characterized this most turbulent period of Russian history.