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Six Memos from the Last Millennium
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 265

Six Memos from the Last Millennium

A thief-turned-saint, killed by an insult. A rabbi burning down his world in order to save it. A man who lost his sanity while trying to fathom the origin of the universe. A beautiful woman battling her brother’s and her husband’s egos to preserve their family. Stories such as these enliven the pages of the Talmud, the great repository of ancient wisdom that is one of the sacred texts of the Jewish people. Comprised of the Mishnah, the oral law of the Torah, and the Gemara, a multigenerational metacommentary on the Mishnah dating from between 3950 and 4235 (190 and 475 CE), the Talmud presents a formidable challenge to understand without scholarly training and study. But what if one appr...

A Blessing on the Moon
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 294

A Blessing on the Moon

  • Type: Book
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  • Published: 2010-09-07
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  • Publisher: Hachette UK

Joseph Skibell’s magical tale about the Holocaust—a fable inspired by fact—received unanimous nationwide acclaim when first published in 1997. At the center of A Blessing on the Moon is Chaim Skibelski. Death is merely the beginning of Chaim’s troubles. In the opening pages, he is shot along with the other Jews of his small Polish village. But instead of resting peacefully in the World to Come, Chaim, for reasons unclear to him, is left to wander the earth, accompanied by his rabbi, who has taken the form of a talking crow. Chaim’s afterlife journey is filled with extraordinary encounters whose consequences are far greater than he realizes. Not since art Spiegelman’s Maus has a work so powerfully evoked one of the darkest moments of the twentieth century with such daring originality.

A Curable Romantic
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 778

A Curable Romantic

  • Type: Book
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  • Published: 2011-11-07
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  • Publisher: Hachette+ORM

I fell in love with Emma Eckstein the moment I saw her from the fourth gallery of the Carl Theater, and this was also the night I met Sigmund Freud.” So goes the life, times, and loves of Dr. Jakob Sammelsohn, a fairly incurable romantic venturing optimistically through modern history. In this inventive and satiric tour de force, Joseph Skibell, award-winning author of A Blessing on the Moon, presents a picaresque novel of exile that could spring only from the imagination of a virtuoso.

My Father's Guitar and Other Imaginary Things
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 157

My Father's Guitar and Other Imaginary Things

  • Type: Book
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  • Published: 2015-10-27
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  • Publisher: Hachette UK

Often comic, sometimes tender, profoundly truthful, the pleasure in these nonfiction pieces by award-winning novelist Joseph Skibell is discovering along with the author that catastrophes, fantasies, and delusions are what give sweetness and shape to our lives. “As a writer,” Skibell has said, “I feel about life the way the people of the Plains felt about the buffalo: I want to use every part of it.” In My Father’s Guitar and Other Imaginary Things, his first nonfiction work, he mines the events of his own life to create a captivating collection of personal essays, a suite of intimate stories that blurs the line between funny and poignant, and between the imaginary and the real. Of...

The English Disease
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 203

The English Disease

  • Type: Book
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  • Published: 2012-09-15
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  • Publisher: Hachette UK

THE ENGLISH DISEASE is a remarkable feat, a story that mixes the Marx brothers and Maimonides, pornographic yoga with Polish paranoia, and the brutality of kindergarten with the beauty of the Kiddush. It's the tale of Charles Belski, an expert in the works of Gustav Mahler, who, like Mahler himself, is talented and neurotic, and a nonpracticing Jew. Belski suffers guilt over his own contribution to the decline of the Jewish religion, especially since he married a gentile and now has a gentile daughter. As if he can't conjure up enough angst on his own, his great-grandfather appears before him in a dream to admonish him for neglecting the obligations of his faith. For Belski, the dilemma is h...

Letters to J. D. Salinger
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 271

Letters to J. D. Salinger

Despite J. D. Salinger’s many silences—from the publication of The Catcher in the Rye to his absence from the public eye after 1965 to his death in 2010—the unforgettable characters of his novel and short stories continue to speak to generations of readers and writers. Letters to J. D. Salinger includes more than 150 personal letters addressed to Salinger from well-known writers, editors, critics, journalists, and other luminaries, as well as from students, teachers, and readers around the world, some of whom had just discovered Salinger for the first time. Their voices testify to the lasting impression Salinger’s ideas and emotions have made on so many diverse lives.

Scenes from Village Life
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 210

Scenes from Village Life

  • Type: Book
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  • Published: 2011-10-18
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  • Publisher: HMH

Linked short stories set in a town in the midst of change: “One of the most powerful books you will read about present-day Israel.” —The Jewish Chronicle “‘Scenes from Village Life’ is like a symphony, its movements more impressive together than in isolation. There is, in each story, a particular chord or strain; but taken together, these chords rise and reverberate, evoking an unease so strong it’s almost a taste in the mouth . . . ‘Scenes from Village Life’ is a brief collection, but its brevity is a testament to its force. You will not soon forget it.” —The New York Times Book Review Strange things are happening in Tel Ilan, a century-old pioneer village. A disgruntl...

The Day I Wasn't There
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 114

The Day I Wasn't There

"Tragedy and comedy intimately and movingly mingle in Helene Cixous's The Day I Wasn't There. Its narrator, who resembles Cixous, recounts the birth and death of her first child, a Dawn's syndrome baby she abandons to the care of her midwife mother in an Algerian maternity hospital. She uses this event to probe her family history and her relationship with her mother, a refugee from Nazi Germany; her dead father, after whom the baby is named; her doctor brother, who takes the infant under his wing; and her grandmother Omi. Cixous's elusive writing bears all the trademarks of her poetic and provocative style, vivid with wordplay, intense feeling, and a stream of consciousness that moves freely over time and place. Informed by psychoanalytical theory and always brutally honest, The Day I Wasn't There is above all an intimate study of a woman's inner landscape."--BOOK JACKET.

Nothing Makes You Free: Writings by Descendants of Jewish Holocaust Survivors
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 397

Nothing Makes You Free: Writings by Descendants of Jewish Holocaust Survivors

A groundbreaking collection of Holocaust literature by the heirs to the greatest evil of our time. History is preserved in the memories of the survivors of the Holocaust and the imaginations of their children, the so-called Second Generation. Nothing Makes You Free considers the heritage of the descendants of those who faced the horrific lie that adorned the gates of many German concentration camps: "Arbeit Macht Frei" ("Work Makes You Free"). In the words of this groundbreaking anthology's introduction: "Other kids' parents didn't have numbers on their arms. Other kids' parents didn't talk about massacres as easily as baseball. Other kids' parents loved them, but never gazed at their offspr...

Traumatic Experience and Repressed Memory in Magical Realist Novels
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 159

Traumatic Experience and Repressed Memory in Magical Realist Novels

This book explores the close association between the literary representation of historical trauma and the alternative narrative form of magical realism, underscoring the role of memory, empathy and imagination. It discusses the potential of magical realism to give a literary representation to individual and collective trauma arising from the Holocaust, slavery, and apartheid, and to turn those unspoken memories into narratives. It also analyses the role of magical realism in depicting trauma suffered by female victims during and following those events. Again, by dealing with the above-mentioned events, their specific historical context and universal meaning for humankind, this book highlights a universal experience of trauma.