Stories on being Jewish set in various parts of the world. In the title story, a sex-starved husband in New York is authorized by his rabbi to visit a prostitute. The story, "In this way we are wise", concerns the nonchalant attitude of the inhabitants of Jerusalem to terrorism while Reb Kringle is a Jew who works as Santa Claus in a department store.

At long last, here are all of Grace Paley's classic stories collected in one volume. From her first book, The Little Disturbances of Man, published in 1959, to Enormous Changes at the Last Minute (1974) and Later the Same Day (1985), Grace Paley's quirky, boisterous characters and rich use of language have won her readers' hearts and secured her place as one of America's most accomplished writers. Grace Paley's stories are united by her signature interweaving of personal and political truths, by her extraordinary capacity for empathy, and by her pointed, funny depiction a the small and large events that make up city life. As her work progresses, we encounter many of the same characters and revisit the same sites, bearing witness to a community as it develops and matures, becoming part ourselves of a dense and vital world that is singular yet achingly familiar.

From the Publisher: A Short History of the Jews is the story of the Jewish people told in a sweeping and powerful historical narrative. Michael Brenner chronicles the Jewish experience from Biblical times to today, tracing what is at heart a drama of migration and change, yet one that is also deeply rooted in tradition. He surveys the latest scholarly perspectives in Jewish history, making this short history the most learned yet broadly accessible book available on the subject. Brenner takes readers from the mythic wanderings of Moses to the unspeakable atrocities of the Holocaust; from the Babylonian exile to the founding of the modern state of Israel; and from the Sephardic communities under medieval Islam to the shtetls of eastern Europe and the Hasidic enclaves of modern-day Brooklyn. This richly illustrated book is full of fascinating and often personal stories of exodus and return, from that told about Abraham, who brought his newfound faith into the land of Canaan, to that of Holocaust survivor Esther Barkai, who lived on a kibbutz established on a German estate seized from the Nazi Julius Streicher as she awaited resettlement in Israel. Brenner traces the major events, developments, and personalities that have shaped Jewish history down through the centuries, and highlights the important contributions Jews have made to the arts, politics, religion, and science. Breathtaking in scope, A Short History of the Jews is a compelling blend of storytelling and scholarship that brings the history of the Jewish people marvelously to life.

Dramatizations of aspects of American life seen through the comic or tragic predicament of American Jews.

A collection of short stories follows a Russian Jewish family living in Toronto, covering twenty-three years in the life of Mark, from arguments with neighbors to his first sexual encounter with a cousin and the death of his grandfather.

Masterly collection of short stories by an American novelist at the height of her powers. It is the stories upon which Cynthia Ozick's literary reputation rests. She writes about bitterness, cruelty and compulsion with brutal acuity and tenderness. She has created a timeless collection in which Greek mythology, superstition and the religious and cultural experience of the Jewish diaspora in America collide. The Pagan Rabbi is seduced by a tree sprite after seeing his daughter rescued from drowning by a water sprite. Such ecstasy is not permitted to mortals and so the scholar must die. He hangs himself with his prayer shawl as he watches the strangely beautiful nymph decay. In Envy, a Yiddish poet who watches the success of a contemporary, becomes very like a character in an I.B. Singer story entrapped by his anguish and haunted by the memory of a child. In the Doctor's Wife, the most gentle of the stories, a poor doctor not unlike Chekhov endures family life in which he is adored by his three sisters and oppressed by his family obligations. In these stories, we see Ozick defining herself and her literary territory. The stories may be read purely as evocations of Jewish experience, where time seems to have by-passed these characters. In the Butterfly and the Traffic Light, Jerusalem is seen upon a hill as only it can be in legend, and America is said not to have cities scarred by battles. This is a dazzling collection of short stories by an internationally celebrated novelist.

'Everyone makes mistakes, even God.' In the original Odessa Stories collection published in 1931, Babel describes the life of the fictional Jewish mob boss Benya Krik - one of the great anti-heroes of Russian literature - and his gang in the ghetto of Moldavanka, around the time of the October Revolution. Praised by Maxim Gorky and considered one of the great masterpieces of twentieth-century Russian literature, this is the first ever stand-alone collection of all Babel's narratives set in the city, and includes the original stories as well as later tales.

A short story and a novella which, together, tell an exquisitely powerful and moving tale of the Holocaust. Both The Shawl and Rosa won first prize in the O. Henry Prize Stories and were chosen for Best American Short Stories.

Through his distinctive fusion of modernist daring and traditional storytelling, Bernard Malamud became one of postwar America's most important writers, his work an inspiration for and lasting influence on novelists who have come after him, Cynthia Ozick and Philip Roth most notably among them. The second volume of the Library of America's Malamud edition brings together three novels of the 1960s: A New Life (1961), a satiric campus novel set in the Pacific Northwest (based on the author's experiences at Oregon State), in which native New Yorker Seymour Levin finds himself confronted not only with a new landscape but with erotic intrigue, university politics, and an appointment that isn't quite what he had expected it to be. The Fixer (1966) is the gripping saga of a Jew imprisoned in pre-Revolutionary Russia after being falsely accused of the ritual murder of a twelve-year-old boy. The novel-in-stories Pictures of Fidelman: An Exhibition (1969) follows the comic misadventures, sexual and otherwise, of a failed American painter in Italy. In the ten unforgettable stories concluding the collection, Malamud shows himself to be an heir to the tradition of Hawthorne, Chekhov, and Kafka, and at his best--"Idiots First," "The Jewbird," "The German Refugee"--their equal--

Of all the characters in modern Jewish fiction, the most beloved is Tevye, the compassionate, irrepressible, Bible-quoting dairyman from Anatevka, who has been immortalized in the writings of Sholem Aleichem and in acclaimed and award-winning theatrical and film adaptations. And no Yiddish writer was more beloved than Tevye’s creator, Sholem Rabinovich (1859–1916), the “Jewish Mark Twain,” who wrote under the pen name of Sholem Aleichem. Beautifully translated by Hillel Halkin, here is Sholem Aleichem’s heartwarming and poignant account of Tevye and his daughters, together with the “Railroad Stories,” twenty-one tales that examine human nature and modernity as they are perceived by men and women riding the trains from shtetl to shtetl.

The five short novellas which comprise this anthology were written between 1890 and World War I. All share a common setting-the Eastern European Jewish town or shtetl, and all deal in different ways with a single topic-the Jewish confrontation with modernity. The authors of these novellas are among the greatest masters of Yiddish prose. In their work, today's reader will discover a literary tradition of considerable scope, energy, and variety and will come face to face with an exceptionally memorable cast of characters and with a human community now irrevocably lost.In her general introduction, Professor Wisse traces the development of modern Yiddish literature in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and describes the many shifts that took place between the Yiddish writers and the world about which they wrote. She also furnishes a brief introduction for each novella, giving the historical and biographical background and offering a critical interpretation of the work.

Stories abound of immigrant Jews on the outside looking in, clambering up the ladder of social mobility, successfully assimilating and integrating into their new worlds. But this book is not about the success stories. It's a paean to the bunglers, the blockheads, and the just plain weird—Jews who were flung from small, impoverished eastern European towns into the urban shtetls of New York and Warsaw, where, as they say in Yiddish, their bread landed butter side down in the dirt. These marginal Jews may have found their way into the history books far less frequently than their more socially upstanding neighbors, but there's one place you can find them in force: in the Yiddish newspapers that had their heyday from the 1880s to the 1930s. Disaster, misery, and misfortune: you will find no better chronicle of the daily ignominies of urban Jewish life than in the pages of the Yiddish press. An underground history of downwardly mobile Jews, Bad Rabbi exposes the seamy underbelly of pre-WWII New York and Warsaw, the two major centers of Yiddish culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. With true stories plucked from the pages of the Yiddish papers, Eddy Portnoy introduces us to the drunks, thieves, murderers, wrestlers, poets, and beauty queens whose misadventures were immortalized in print. There's the Polish rabbi blackmailed by an American widow, mass brawls at weddings and funerals, a psychic who specialized in locating missing husbands, and violent gangs of Jewish mothers on the prowl—in short, not quite the Jews you'd expect. One part Isaac Bashevis Singer, one part Jerry Springer, this irreverent, unvarnished, and frequently hilarious compendium of stories provides a window into an unknown Yiddish world that was.

Stories abound of immigrant Jews on the outside looking in, clambering up the ladder of social mobility, successfully assimilating and integrating into their new worlds. But this book is not about the success stories. It's a paean to the bunglers, the blockheads, and the just plain weird—Jews who were flung from small, impoverished eastern European towns into the urban shtetls of New York and Warsaw, where, as they say in Yiddish, their bread landed butter side down in the dirt. These marginal Jews may have found their way into the history books far less frequently than their more socially upstanding neighbors, but there's one place you can find them in force: in the Yiddish newspapers that had their heyday from the 1880s to the 1930s. Disaster, misery, and misfortune: you will find no better chronicle of the daily ignominies of urban Jewish life than in the pages of the Yiddish press. An underground history of downwardly mobile Jews, Bad Rabbi exposes the seamy underbelly of pre-WWII New York and Warsaw, the two major centers of Yiddish culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. With true stories plucked from the pages of the Yiddish papers, Eddy Portnoy introduces us to the drunks, thieves, murderers, wrestlers, poets, and beauty queens whose misadventures were immortalized in print. There's the Polish rabbi blackmailed by an American widow, mass brawls at weddings and funerals, a psychic who specialized in locating missing husbands, and violent gangs of Jewish mothers on the prowl—in short, not quite the Jews you'd expect. One part Isaac Bashevis Singer, one part Jerry Springer, this irreverent, unvarnished, and frequently hilarious compendium of stories provides a window into an unknown Yiddish world that was.

A collection of Yiddish stories that give a keen sense of Jewish culture, history, humor and feeling.

Contents: The snow - Ducky's death - Nina of Ashkelon - (etc).

A collection of essays, poems and short stories by Jewish authors most published between 1994-2000.

From the streets of modern Israel to the barrooms of Brooklyn to a suburban New England synagogue, the characters in these 10 stories search for love and acceptance in a world scarred by loss and loneliness. In "The Madonna of Temple Beth Elohim," an Iraq war veteran sees a vision of the Virgin Mary on the eve of the Jewish high holidays. In "My Darling Sweetheart Baby," a working-class drunk waits on his stoop for his disability check and the courage to proclaim his love to a local prostitute. And in the title story "There Is No Other," a rage-filled Jewish boy, tormented by his African lineage, arrives at a school Purim party dressed as the prophet Mohammed. Magical, erotic, spiritually penetrating and terrifyingly realistic, these provocative tales continue the storytelling tradition of Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, and Nathan Englander.

This anthology presents an ambitious cross-section of Jewish American short fiction. It covers a full century of extraordinary writings, from turn-of-the-century immigrant fiction to stories by some of the finest young contemporary American writers. To read through its pages is to encounter a remarkable?and remarkably diverse?literary tradition. The volume opens with stories by two important immigrant writers from the early twentieth century, Abraham Cahan and Anzia Yezierska. There follows a generous selection of modern Jewish American stories by such celebrated authors as Isaac Bashevis Singer, Saul Bellow, Grace Paley, Tillie Olsen, Bernard Malamud, and Philip Roth. The collection concludes with a rich sampling of stories by contemporary writers whose works illustrate the impressive variety and vitality of recent Jewish American fiction. Equally suited to scholars, students, and general readers, American Jewish Fiction provides an invaluable survey of literary works that have enriched and transformed American?and world?literature.