How to describe Faigele? A recent immigrant from Russia, the wife of an immigrant fur worker, a mother, a housewife, a greenhorn - and an enchantress of such striking beauty that she had the Bronx at her feet. The local postmaster consoled her with hot tea in his office every morning when she came with "Baby" Jerome, hoping for a letter from her brother in war-torn Russia. An admirer enlisted five-year-old Baby to help him produce a forged letter to ease her worry. But it was her dentist, a blackmarketer on the side, who introduced her to the circle of Bronx politicians who made her the dealer of their weekly poker game. Beautiful, passionate, worlds above words like "naive or sophisticated," Faigele has been blessed by her son, a rarely gifted writer who vividly recaptures this astonishing woman in her turbulent setting.

Conversations with Nadine Gordimer edited by Nancy Topping Bazin and Marilyn Dallman Seymour Nadine Gordimer is one of the contemporary world's most admired writers of novels and short stories. This volume collects three decades of her interviews. In them she presents her attitudes toward her art and its interconnection with the oppressive, volatile politics in her native land. She has traveled extensively to other countries only to discover that no matter how white her skin she is indeed African and the only country she can call home is South Africa. If you write honestly about life in South Africa, apartheid damns itself, she says. She is ruthlessly honest, and her fiction has played the vital role of communicating in detail to the rest of the world the effects of apartheid upon the daily lives of the South African people. To maintain her integrity, she writes as though she were dead, without any thought of how anyone will react to what she has written. She remains heroically undaunted both by the banning of three of her novels by the white government and by the protests of radical blacks who assert that whites cannot write convincingly about blacks.She is concerned neither with the image of blacks nor with the image of whites, only with revealing the complexity, the full truth. This truth condemns the racism upon which apartheid is built. In her nine novels and eight volumes of short stories, Gordimer digs deeper and deeper until she has thematic layers. These include betrayal-political, sexual, every form and power, the way human beings use power in their relationships. Her accounts in these interviews of how she works and of which writers she admires will fascinate readers, scholars, teachers, and students alike. Co-editors Nancy Topping Bazin retired from the faculty of the English and women's studies departments at Old Dominion University, and Marilyn Dallman Seymour retired from the staff of the Government Publications Department of the Old Dominion University Library.

There are almost as many works about intellectuals as there are intellectuals. Perhaps this is because intellectuals are masters of the word and their mastery is often used to write about themselves. Indeed, with the possible exceptions of sports figures and film actors, intellectuals may be the most overpublicized people in America. In this classic study, originally published in 1974, Charles Kadushin examines the attitudes of that class of people known as the American intellectual elite. While most works on intellectuals first establish who should be included under the title "intellectual," and debate their characteristics, Kadushin instead sets forth a sociological history of leading American intellectuals of the late 1960s. The book's concern, however, is primarily with time and place. While The American Intellectual Elite is very much about social circles and the networked "small world" of intellectuals defined by the institutions such as the journals and magazines around which they gathered, the uniqueness of this volume is the recognition that fact must come before theory. Thus, the collective attitude of leading intellectuals of the sixties are presented in a straightforward and dispassionate manner on topics as diverse as the Vietnam War, race relations, foreign and domestic policy, and the place of intellectuals in the resolution of such issues. Now in paperback with a new introduction by the author, The American Intellectual Elite is an influential work that will be valued by students of sociology, members of the intellectual elite, and professionals and students of contemporary American history. "What a boon to sociologists of knowledge, and, in fact, to anyone who cares about the role and future of intellectuals to have THE AMERICAN INTELLECTUAL ELITE back and print and with a thoughtful new essay by the author that places the work in the context of thirty years of social and cultural change that have transpired since its publication. Professor Kadushin not only recognized that intellectuals populate an intellectual field that is, to a far greater extent than others, constituted and sustained by the networks of relationships among them but he pioneered in the application of social network analysis to identify both players and links using concrete social data. In a conversation too frequently dominated by the empirically undisciplined claims of those with the greatest stakes in the debate, THE AMERICAN INTELLECTUAL ELITE stands out as a beacon of careful research and clear thinking. One hopes that social scientists and other interested in modern intellectual life will read it carefully, and even that republication may inspire replication." -Professor Paul DiMaggio, Princeton University Charles Kadushin is professor emeritus of sociology at the Graduate Center of CUNY and Distinguished Scholar at Brandeis University, and has also taught at Columbia University and Yale University's School of Management. He is the author of Why People Go to Psychiatrists.

A Memoir"It was easy to invent a fable.When the letters did come from school, I'd scratch out a note in my father's hand, talk of fatigue, visits to the brain surgeon, etc.The East Bronx was like the Sahara, where a child and all his records could get lost in some infinite sand dune."What does an 11 year-old boy do when his classmates call him "Dumbo" and his parents don't seem to know that he exists?His mother, the beautiful Faigele spends her days pushing her 2 year-old son Marvin around in a stroller and barely hears Jerome's clarinet playing. The answer for Jerome Charyn is to go to the local movie house and hide out for a few hours every day.At the movies, he can escape, not be himself for a little while. One day, while watching Samson and Delilah for the seventh time that week, he is suddenly grabbed from his seat, dragged down a flight of stairs and winds up being introduced to a whole new way of life by three "cellar rats," as Jerome likes to call them.They make him a part of their group and he soon finds himself dressed in a Feuerman & Marx suit collecting money for Farouk, the local gangster. Many of the men remember his mother, The Dark Lady, from her days as dealer of their local poker game.With his distinctive style, a deep and accurate feeling for time and place, and an uncanny ability to communicate the world as seen through the imagination of an unusual boy, Charyn has created another gem of a memoir, a worthy sequel to The Dark Lady from Belorusse.

Winner, 2015 USC Book Award in Literary and Cultural Studies, for outstanding monograph published on Russia, Eastern Europe or Eurasia in the fields of literary and cultural studies The Ethics of Witnessing investigates the reactions of five important Polish diaristswriters—Jaroslaw Iwaszkiewicz, Maria Dabrowska, Aurelia Wylezynska, Zofia Nalkowska, and Stanislaw Rembek—during the period when the Nazis persecuted and murdered Warsaw’s Jewish population. The responses to the Holocaust of these prominent prewar authors extended from insistence on empathic interaction with victims to resentful detachment from Jewish suffering. Whereas some defied the dehumanization of the Jews and endeavored to maintain intersubjective relationships with the victims they attempted to rescue, others selfdeceptively evaded the Jewish plight. The Ethics of Witnessing examines the extent to which ideologies of humanism and nationalism informed the diarists’ perceptions, proposing that the reality of the Final Solution exposed the limits of both orientations and ultimately destroyed the ethical landscape shaped by the Enlightenment tradition, which promised the equality and fellowship of all human beings.

After World War II, the center of gravity for world Jewry moved outside Europe. In the aftermath of the Holocaust, large-scale emigration and postwar assimilation resulted in a disheartening contraction of European Jewry, with the notable exception of France. Today, Europe's Jews number only 17 percent of the world Jewish population. At the beginning of this century, they comprised 83 percent and were the center of the modern Jewish experience. In a radical reversal, former peripheries became the centers, notably American Jewry, the largest and most dynamic of the Diaspora communities, and the State of Israel. An examination of the altered place of Europe and its future role in Jewish history is long overdue.In Jewish Centers and Peripheries, S. Han Troen presents evidence of cultural renewal and community reorganization - both internally driven and supported by Israeli-and American-based Jewish organizations - which promise to assure the continuity and vitality of Jewish life in Europe. This volume presents the contributions of scholars, senior community professionals, lay leaders, and former diplomats from Europe, Israel, and America, including Yosef Gorny, Gabriel Sheffer, Rashid Kaplanov, Barry Kosmin, Ralph Goldman, Jean-Jacques Wahl, Israel Finestein, David Patterson, and Daniel Elazar.These original and thoughtful contributions examine dynamic relationships among European, American, and Israeli communities at times bringing personal knowledge of significant events pertinent to understanding these relationships. Collectively they suggest that present conditions are ripe for the reemergence of European Jewry, though on a scale much diminished from that of the pre-Holocaust period. Moreover, the prospects for the rejuvenation of European Jewry mirror the possibilities for Jewish continuity everywhere. Jewish Centers and Peripheries is a strikingly informative assessment of the condition of world Jewry at the close of the century.

After World War II, the center of gravity for world Jewry moved outside Europe. In the aftermath of the Holocaust, large-scale emigration and postwar assimilation resulted in a disheartening contraction of European Jewry, with the notable exception of France. Today, Europe's Jews number only 17 percent of the world Jewish population. At the beginning of this century, they comprised 83 percent and were the center of the modern Jewish experience. In a radical reversal, former peripheries became the centers, notably American Jewry, the largest and most dynamic of the Diaspora communities, and the State of Israel. An examination of the altered place of Europe and its future role in Jewish history is long overdue. In Jewish Centers and Peripheries, S. Han Troen presents evidence of cultural renewal and community reorganization—both internally driven and supported by Israeli-and American-based Jewish organizations—which promise to assure the continuity and vitality of Jewish life in Europe. This volume presents the contributions of scholars, senior community professionals, lay leaders, and former diplomats from Europe, Israel, and America, including Yosef Gorny, Gabriel Sheffer, Rashid Kaplanov, Barry Kosmin, Ralph Goldman, Jean-Jacques Wahl, Israel Finestein, David Patterson, and Daniel Elazar. These original and thoughtful contributions examine dynamic relationships among European, American, and Israeli communities at times bringing personal knowledge of significant events pertinent to understanding these relationships. Collectively they suggest that present conditions are ripe for the reemergence of European Jewry, though on a scale much diminished from that of the pre-Holocaust period. Moreover, the prospects for the rejuvenation of European Jewry mirror the possibilities for Jewish continuity everywhere. Jewish Centers and Peripheries is a strikingly informative assessment of the condition of world Jewry at the close of the century.