Author: Curt Leviant
Publisher: New York : Ktav Publishing House
ISBN:
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 612

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Book Description

Author: S. Y. Agnon
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691197261
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 691

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Book Description
When Israeli Nobel Laureate S. Y. Agnon published the novel Only Yesterday in 1945, it quickly became recognized as a major work of world literature, not only for its vivid historical reconstruction of Israel's founding society. The book tells a seemingly simple tale about a man who immigrates to Palestine with the Second Aliya--the several hundred idealists who returned between 1904 and 1914 to work the Hebrew soil as in Biblical times and revive Hebrew culture. This epic novel also engages the reader in a fascinating network of meanings, contradictions, and paradoxes all leading to the question, what, if anything, controls human existence? Seduced by Zionist slogans, young Isaac Kumer imagines the Land of Israel filled with the financial, social, and erotic opportunities that were denied him, the son of an impoverished shopkeeper, in Poland. Once there, he cannot find the agricultural work he anticipated. Instead Isaac happens upon house-painting jobs as he moves from secular, Zionist Jaffa, where the ideological fervor and sexual freedom are alien to him, to ultra-orthodox, anti-Zionist Jerusalem. While some of his Zionist friends turn capitalist, becoming successful merchants, his own life remains adrift and impoverished in a land torn between idealism and practicality, a place that is at once homeland and diaspora. Eventually he marries a religious woman in Jerusalem, after his worldly girlfriend in Jaffa rejects him. Led astray by circumstances, Isaac always ends up in the place opposite of where he wants to be, but why? The text soars to Surrealist-Kafkaesque dimensions when, in a playful mode, Isaac drips paint on a stray dog, writing "Crazy Dog" on his back. Causing panic wherever he roams, the dog takes over the story, until, after enduring persecution for so long without "understanding" why, he really does go mad and bites Isaac. The dog has been interpreted as everything from the embodiment of Exile to a daemonic force, and becomes an unforgettable character in a book about the death of God, the deception of discourse, the power of suppressed eroticism, and the destiny of a people depicted in all its darkness and promise.

Author: Jacob Glatstein
Publisher: Open Road Media
ISBN: 1480440760
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 501

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Book Description
In 1934, with World War II on the horizon, writer Jacob Glatstein (1896–1971) traveled from his home in America to his native Poland to visit his dying mother. One of the foremost Yiddish poets of the day, he used his journey as the basis for two highly autobiographical novellas (translated as The Glatstein Chronicles) in which he intertwines childhood memories with observations of growing anti-Semitism in Europe. Glatstein’s accounts “stretch like a tightrope across a chasm,” writes preeminent Yiddish scholar Ruth Wisse in the Introduction. In Book One, Homeward Bound, the narrator, Yash, recounts his voyage to his birthplace in Poland and the array of international travelers he meets along the way. Book Two, Homecoming at Twilight, resumes after his mother’s funeral and ends with Yash’s impending return to the United States, a Jew with an American passport who recognizes the ominous history he is traversing. The Glatstein Chronicles is at once insightful reportage of the year after Hitler came to power, a reflection by a leading intellectual on contemporary culture and events, and the closest thing we have to a memoir by the boy from Lublin, Poland, who became one of the finest poets of the twentieth century.

Author: Dvir Abramovich
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781936235940
Category : Hebrew fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Abramovich brings together a batch of timeless classical Hebrew novels, short stories, and poems, and furnishes readers with commentaries and critical readings of each landmark work.

Author: Judah Leo Landau
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Hebrew literature, Modern
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Author: Israel Abrahams
Publisher: DigiCat
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 108

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Book Description
DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "Chapters on Jewish Literature" by Israel Abrahams. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.

Author: Hillel Halkin
Publisher: Toby Press Limited
ISBN: 9781592645244
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 436

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Book Description
This book contains twelve essays, ten of which appeared in Mosaic magazine in 2015-2018. They introduce English readers to a number of major Hebrew authors of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries whose work forms an important part of the literary response to the modern Jewish experience. These essays also explore the reciprocal relationship in this period between Hebrew literature, the evolution of the modern Hebrew language, and the emergence of Zionism as a historic force in Jewish life.

Author: Melvin Konner
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0142196320
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 529

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Book Description
Far reaching, intellectually rich, and passionately written, Unsettled takes the whole history of Western civilization as its canvas and places onto it the Jewish people and faith. With historical insight and vivid storytelling, renowned anthropologist Melvin Konner charts how the Jews endured largely hostile (but at times accepting) cultures to shape the world around them and make their mark throughout history—from the pastoral tribes of the Bronze Age to enslavement in the Roman Empire, from the darkness of the Holocaust to the creation of Israel and the flourishing of Jews in America. With fresh interpretations of the antecedents of today's pressing conflicts, Unsettled is a work whose modern-day reverberations could not be more relevant or timely.

Author:
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 079148162X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 366

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Book Description
Offering snapshots of a pivotal era in which the Jews of Europe made the transition from a traditional to a more modern world, the Yiddish plays translated and collected here wrestle with issues that continue to concern us today: changing gender roles, generational conflict, class divisions, and religious persecution. In their introduction to the volume, Joel Berkowitz and Jeremy Dauber place the plays in the context of the development of modern drama and Yiddish drama and examine their treatment of social, political, and religious issues. The many ways in which the plays address these issues make them transcend their own time, exciting a new generation of readers and theatergoers.

Author: Marc Caplan
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253051991
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 394

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Book Description
In Yiddish Writers in Weimar Berlin, Marc Caplan explores the reciprocal encounter between Eastern European Jews and German culture in the days following World War I. By concentrating primarily on a small group of avant-garde Yiddish writers—Dovid Bergelson, Der Nister, and Moyshe Kulbak—working in Berlin during the Weimar Republic, Caplan examines how these writers became central to modernist aesthetics. By concentrating on the character of Yiddish literature produced in Weimar Germany, Caplan offers a new method of seeing how artistic creation is constructed and a new understanding of the political resonances that result from it. Yiddish Writers in Weimar Berlin reveals how Yiddish literature participated in the culture of Weimar-era modernism, how active Yiddish writers were in the literary scene, and how German-speaking Jews read descriptions of Yiddish-speaking Jews to uncover the emotional complexity of what they managed to create even in the midst of their confusion and ambivalence in Germany. Caplan's masterful narrative affords new insights into literary form, Jewish culture, and the philosophical and psychological motivations for aesthetic modernism.