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Author: Eileen Pollack Publisher: Delphinium Books ISBN: 1453255796 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 299
Book Description
In an age of minimalists, Eileen Pollack is a writer of rare generosity. The women and men in The Rabbi in the Attic are complex, vivid people to whom something happens. Their stories take place in small towns in the Catskills, a laboratory of mutant mice in nowhere Tennessee, the backwoods of New Hampshire, the “City of Five Smells” in America’s heartland—worlds rendered with such love and intensity that the simplest objects seem magical. Many of the narrators look back on their pasts. But don’t expect to be lulled by nostalgia. Expect to laugh. To be jolted. And to be moved. Like most of us, these characters are struggling to understand what they have gained and lost by abandoning the passions and moral certainties of youth. As the narrator of the first story discovers when “barbarian” rock fans invade her town, it can be terrifying to be knocked from the “tiny fixed orbit” of conventional life. But if a person can stretch her imagination far enough, she might also be able to glimpse an “elsewhere” beyond the boundaries of ordinary human limitations. This battle between the real and ideal is taken to mythic heights in the title novella, in which a novice rabbi must try to evict her Orthodox predecessor from the house provided by her prickly congregation. Only when she tempers her enthusiasm for the new ways with compassion for those who follow the old ways can Rabbi Bloomgarten begin to care for their souls. Eileen Pollack writes from a Jewish point of view, but her subject is the search for principles that we must all undertake in a world in which religious truths are no longer handed down from parent to child. Just as one of her characters decides to become a “value assessor,” the author herself helps us to sort through the jumble of objects, ideas, and memories in our own attics. In doing so, she appeals to our minds and our hearts. Her characters teach us that imagination and empathy are our best hope if we are to understand—and perhaps transcend—the pain in our world. Her language is lyrical, rhythmic, and lush. The images in her stories—a chef’s severed hand, a plummeting air conditioner, a village sunk beneath a reservoir—will stay in your mind long after you have finished her book.
Author: Eileen Pollack Publisher: Delphinium Books ISBN: 1453255796 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 299
Book Description
In an age of minimalists, Eileen Pollack is a writer of rare generosity. The women and men in The Rabbi in the Attic are complex, vivid people to whom something happens. Their stories take place in small towns in the Catskills, a laboratory of mutant mice in nowhere Tennessee, the backwoods of New Hampshire, the “City of Five Smells” in America’s heartland—worlds rendered with such love and intensity that the simplest objects seem magical. Many of the narrators look back on their pasts. But don’t expect to be lulled by nostalgia. Expect to laugh. To be jolted. And to be moved. Like most of us, these characters are struggling to understand what they have gained and lost by abandoning the passions and moral certainties of youth. As the narrator of the first story discovers when “barbarian” rock fans invade her town, it can be terrifying to be knocked from the “tiny fixed orbit” of conventional life. But if a person can stretch her imagination far enough, she might also be able to glimpse an “elsewhere” beyond the boundaries of ordinary human limitations. This battle between the real and ideal is taken to mythic heights in the title novella, in which a novice rabbi must try to evict her Orthodox predecessor from the house provided by her prickly congregation. Only when she tempers her enthusiasm for the new ways with compassion for those who follow the old ways can Rabbi Bloomgarten begin to care for their souls. Eileen Pollack writes from a Jewish point of view, but her subject is the search for principles that we must all undertake in a world in which religious truths are no longer handed down from parent to child. Just as one of her characters decides to become a “value assessor,” the author herself helps us to sort through the jumble of objects, ideas, and memories in our own attics. In doing so, she appeals to our minds and our hearts. Her characters teach us that imagination and empathy are our best hope if we are to understand—and perhaps transcend—the pain in our world. Her language is lyrical, rhythmic, and lush. The images in her stories—a chef’s severed hand, a plummeting air conditioner, a village sunk beneath a reservoir—will stay in your mind long after you have finished her book.
Author: Michal Lemberger Publisher: Prospect Park Books ISBN: 1938849485 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 289
Book Description
“Her knowledge of the Bible is evident and her creativity shines through as she weaves nine thoughtful and layered accounts of distant, complicated times.” —Publisher's Weekly “Reminiscent of Anita Diamant’s The Red Tent. . . . These beautifully written stories feel like meeting Eve, Lot’s wife, and many other compelling characters for the first time.” —LAUREL CORONA, author of The Mapmaker’s Daughter and The Four Seasons: A Novel of Vivaldi’s Venice “Stunning.” —MOLLY ANTOPOL, author of The UnAmericans “Gorgeous and captivating.” —DARA HORN, author of A Guide for the Perplexed and The World to Come “Marvelous.” —MICHELLE HUNEVEN, author of Off Course and Blame “What struck me most about these stories is their clear, assured confidence—as if Michal Lemberger had pulled apart some of the lines in the old story, spied a new story tucked in there way off in a corner, shimmied in a fishhook and pulled it out.” —AIMEE BENDER, author of The Color Master and The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake “Lemberger liberates the voices that are trapped beneath the [biblical] text . . . with artistry and erudition.” —RABBI DAVID WOLPE, Rabbi of Sinai Temple, Los Angeles and author of Why Faith Matters Eve considers motherhood. Miriam tends Moses. Lot’s wife looks back. Vividly reimagined with startling contemporary clarity, Michal Lemberger’s debut collection of short stories gives voice to silent, oft-marginalized biblical women: their ambitions, their love for their children, their values, their tremendous struggles and challenges. Informed by Lemberger’s deep knowledge of the Bible, each of these nine stories story recasts a biblical saga from the perspective of a pivotal woman. Michal Lemberger’s nonfiction and journalism have appeared in Slate, Salon, Tablet, and other publications, and her poetry has been published in a number of print and online journals. A story from After Abel, her first collection of fiction, was featured in Lilith Magazine. Lemberger holds an MA and PhD in English from UCLA and a BA in English and religion from Barnard College. She has taught the Hebrew Bible as Literature at UCLA and the American Jewish University. She was born and raised in New York and now lives in Los Angeles with her husband and two daughters.
Author: Eileen Pollack Publisher: ISBN: Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 264
Book Description
The men and women in these stories are complex, vivid people to whom something happens. Their lives are spent in worlds rendered with such love and intensity that the simplest objects seem magical. Her language is lyrical, rhythmic, lush. And her images--a chef's severed hand, a plummeting air conditioner, a village sunk beneath a reservoir--are unforgettable.
Author: Eddy Portnoy Publisher: Stanford University Press ISBN: 1503603970 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 336
Book Description
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.
Author: Tadeusz Borowski Publisher: Yale University Press ISBN: 0300160208 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 377
Book Description
The most complete English-language collection of the prose of Tadeusz Borowski, the most challenging chronicler of Auschwitz, with a foreword by Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny In 1943, the twenty-year-old Polish poet Tadeusz Borowski was arrested and deported to Auschwitz as a political prisoner. What he experienced in the camp left him convinced that no one who survived Auschwitz was innocent. All were complicit; the camp regime depended on this. Borowski’s tales present the horrors of the camp as reflections of basic human nature and impulse, stripped of the artificial boundaries of culture and custom. Inside the camp, the strongest of the prisoners form uneasy alliances with their captors and one another, watching unflinchingly as the weak scrabble and struggle against their inevitable fate. In the last analysis, suffering is never ennobling and goodness is tantamount to suicide. Bringing together for the first time in English Borowski’s major writings and many previously uncollected works, this is the most complete collection of stories in a new, authoritative translation, with a substantial foreword by Timothy Snyder that speaks to its enduring relevance.
Author: Phil Brown Publisher: Columbia University Press ISBN: 0231123612 Category : Art Languages : en Pages : 436
Book Description
With selections from Isaac Bashevis Singer, Allegra Goodman, Moss Hart, TaniaGrossinger, and many others, this volume is a tribute to the legendary Jewishresort area of the Catskills. 40 halftones. 26 figures.
Author: Eileen Pollack Publisher: Four Way Books ISBN: 1945588152 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 322
Book Description
When Ketzel WeinrachÕs beloved brother Potsie goes missing in Las Vegas, she not only must try to find him, she must confront her familyÕs shady history and their ties to the legendary Jewish mob, Murder, Inc., as well as her troubling relationship to her cousin Perry (who runs a strip club on the outskirts of Vegas), her long and apparently not-so-loving marriage to her recently departed husband Morty Tittelman (a self-styled professor of dirty jokes and erotic folklore), and her own failed career as a stand-up comic.
Author: Eileen Pollack Publisher: Open Road Media ISBN: 1504059662 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 232
Book Description
“A tragicomedy about the paradoxes of trying to be a decent human, and—maybe even trickier—of trying to be a decent mom” by the author of A Perfect Life (Rivka Galchen, author of Little Labors). Professor Maxine Sayers once found her personal and professional life so fulfilling that she founded the Institute for Future Studies, a program dedicated to studying the effects of technology on our culture and finding ways to prolong human life. But when her beloved husband dies, she is so devastated she can barely get out of bed. To make matters worse, her son, Zach, abruptly quit his job in Silicon Valley and has been out of contact for seven months. But Maxine is jolted from her grief by her sudden realization that a favorite former student (and a former close friend of her son) might be a terrorist called the Technobomber and that Zach might either be involved in or has become a victim of this extremist’s bombing. Deserting her teaching responsibilities, her ailing mother, and an appealing suitor, Maxine is compelled to set out in search of her son in order to warn and protect him—even though she knows she should report her suspicions to the FBI to prevent greater carnage. “The Professor of Immortality is intimate and sweeping, funny and terrifying, and most of all dead-on in its observations of what it means to want to know everything about people we love while still being frightened of what we might find out: it’s a detective story, and a story of motherlove. Eileen Pollack is a splendid writer.” —Elizabeth McCracken, author of Bowlaway “In this exceptional novel, Eileen Pollack writes with great immediacy about the impact of grief on a parent’s perception of the world. Tender, wry, full of unexpected revelations, The Professor of Immortality gripped me from the first scene, and the urgent questions it poses have stayed with me.” —Idra Novey, author of Those Who Knew
Author: Blume Lempel Publisher: ISBN: 9781942134251 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
This volume gives English readers the opportunity to enjoy the stories of Blume Lempel, Yiddish literature's most remarkable woman writer
Author: William D. Kaufman Publisher: Syracuse University Press ISBN: 0815651252 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 208
Book Description
The lasting charm of Kaufman’s stories lies in a delightful mix of personal incidents and observations set against an anchoring backdrop of cultural tradition. His new collection is filled with tales from his parents’ homeland in the Ukraine, his own childhood reminiscences, and his adult travels. We watch the young author forced alongside “every Jewish boy on the block” to emulate Yehudi Menuhin on a ten-dollar violin with a moldy bow until the boy is spared by an innate lack of talent and his father’s judgment of his concert: “Enough is enough is more than enough.” Kaufman is carefully attuned to the awkwardness of adulthood as well as to that of early adolescence. In “Interlude in Bangkok,” his narrator scours the city for a synagogue while pursued by a prostitute. Later he and a friend encounter Greta Garbo in a museum café and are too frightened to approach her. Aware of their intrigue, the mysterious movie star intones, “I am not she”; Kaufman, in his own way, says that of himself in these stories through an autobiographical narrator whose memories take on resonant, literary shapes in their retelling.
Author: Eileen Pollack
Author: Eileen Pollack
Author: Michal Lemberger
Author: Eileen Pollack
Author: Eddy Portnoy
Author: Tadeusz Borowski
Author: Phil Brown
Author: Eileen Pollack
Author: Eileen Pollack
Author: Blume Lempel
Author: William D. Kaufman