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The dramatic story of neighbors in a small Danish fishing village who, during the Holocaust, shelter a Jewish family waiting to be ferried to safety in Sweden - based on a true story. It is 1943 in Nazi-occupied Denmark. Anett and her parents are hiding a Jewish woman and her son, Carl, in their cellar until a fishing boat can take them across the sound to neutral Sweden. The soldiers patrolling their street are growing suspicious, so Carl and his mama must make their way to the harbor despite a cloudy sky with no moon to guide them. Worried about their safety, Anett devises a clever and unusual plan for their safe passage to the harbor.
The protagonist has Egyptian roots going back many generations: on her father’s side, to the expulsion of the Jews of Spain in 1492, when seven brothers of the Kastil family (from Castilla) landed on the Gaza coast after many trials and tribulations. Her mother’s side goes back even further, to the only family that Jewish history has ignored: the ones who said “No” to Moses and stayed in Egypt. After migrating to Israel in the 1950s and settling on a kibbutz—from which they were soon expelled for Stalinism—this storied clan moved to Tel Aviv. In this unconventional family saga, Orly Castel-Bloom blends fact with fiction, history with legend, reimagining the lives of her forebears in unforgettable prose.
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Begun in 1690, this diary of a forty-four-year-old German Jewish widow, mother of fourteen children, tells how she guided the financial and personal destinies of her children, how she engaged in trade, ran her own factory, and promoted the welfare of her large family. Her memoir, a rare account of an ordinary woman, enlightens not just her children, for whom she wrote it, but all posterity about her life and community. Gluckel speaks to us with determination and humor from the seventeenth century. She tells of war, plague, pirates, soldiers, the hysteria of the false messiah Sabbtai Zevi, murder, bankruptcy, wedding feasts, births, deaths, in fact, of all the human events that befell her during her lifetime. She writes in a matter of fact way of the frightening and precarious situation under which the Jews of northern Germany lived. Accepting this situation as given, she boldly and fearlessly promotes her business, her family and her faith. This memoir is a document in the history of women and of life in the seventeenth century.
Originally published: New York: Random House, Ã1976.
A new edition of Martin Buber's many writings on Arab-Jewish relations in Palestine, with updated forewords by two preeminent Palestinian and Jewish scholars. The theologian and philosopher Martin Buber (1878-1965) was committed to radical socioeconomic reconstruction in pursuit of international peace. His voluminous writings on Arab-Jewish relations in Palestine interweave his religious and philosophical teachings with his politics, each essential to Buber's vision of democratic and religious life. A Land of Two Peoples collects the letters, talks, and essays in which Buber advocated for a binationalism that reconciled Arabs and Jews as a solution to the conflict in the Middle East. As relevant today as when it was first published nearly fifty years ago, this edition of A Land of Two Peoples includes two forewords from the preeminent Jewish and Palestinian scholars Paul Mendes-Flohr and Raef Zreik.
Two men are crossing the sea to marry women they have never met, in order to help them escape war-torn Europe for the Jewish homeland. Zeev Feinberg – lover of many women and proud owner of a lustrous moustache yearns to return home, to a girl whose skin is sweet with the smell of oranges. For Yaacov Markovitch, however, who no woman has ever looked at twice, his fake marriage is the beginning of a lifelong obsession. As he vows to make his beautiful bride, Bella, love him – and she determines to break free – their changing fortunes take them through war, upheaval, terrible secrets, tragedy, joy and loss. Vital, funny and tender, One Night, Markovitch brilliantly fuses personal lives and epic history in an unforgettable story of endless, hopeless longing and the desperate search for love. Ayelet Gundar-Goshen was born in Israel in 1982, and studied Psychology, Film and Screenwriting. She has won numerous awards for her work, including 2nd prize at the 2010 IEMed European short story competition, the 2010 Gottlieb Prize for Screenplays and the 2012 Berlin Today Award. This is her first novel.
A landmark history of the antisemitic blood libel myth—how it took root in Europe, spread with the invention of the printing press, and persists today. Accusations that Jews ritually killed Christian children emerged in the mid-twelfth century, following the death of twelve-year-old William of Norwich, England, in 1144. Later, continental Europeans added a destructive twist: Jews murdered Christian children to use their blood. While charges that Jews poisoned wells and desecrated the communion host waned over the years, the blood libel survived. Initially blood libel stories were confined to monastic chronicles and local lore. But the development of the printing press in the mid-fifteenth ...
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 mee...
Why is Prosecco so popular? In the United States, Prosecco is now a household word. Throughout the world, Prosecco bottles sell at twice the rate of Champagne’s, even during a pandemic. Although the comparison with Champagne, the great sparkling wine of northern France often erroneously used as synonym of sparkling wine, is a common one, it is not immediately obvious why it should be. This story of Prosecco Superiore — sparkling Prosecco grown in two small hilly historic zones of the ancient Venetian Republic’s interior lands — shows them as uniquely Italian sparkling wines, tracing them to those hills at the second half of the 19th century, time of uprisings that would oust Napoleon...