You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Past Continuous is a brilliant tour de force, a Joycean panorama of the lives of three men, their families, their lovers, and their friends in the quintessentially modern city of Tel Aviv. It is as much a novel about Tel Aviv-its landscape, its idiosyncratic atmosphere, and its history-as it is about the human condition.
None
Five essays explore facets of what Mintz calls the complexity of cultural reverberations in Israeli fiction of the past two decades.
The Blossom Which We Are traces the emergence of a distinctly modern form of human vulnerability—our intimate dependence on the fragile and time-bound cultural frameworks that we inhabit—as it manifests in the realm of the novel. Nir Evron juxtaposes seminal works from diverse national literatures to demonstrate that the trope of cultural extinction offers key insights into the emotional and ideological work performed by the realist novel. With an analysis that ranges from the works of Maria Edgeworth and Walter Scott, Edith Wharton's Age of Innocence and Joseph Roth's Radetzky March and Yaakov Shabtai's Past Continuous, and finally to the current state of the humanities, this book seeks to recover literary criticism's humanistic mission, bringing the best that has been thought and said to bear on urgent contemporary concerns.
Works by six of Israel 's most important contemporary authors. Included are Ahron Appelfeld's In the Isles of St George, in which a fugitive black marketeer is forced to take refuge on a desolate Italian island where his past, his nationality, and his very sense of identity are resolved.
This collection brings together political, personal and literary essays by Israel s most celebrated living writer. Lively and undogmatic, Oz s compelling insight makes for consistently stimulating reading, while his commentary on Israel s cultural and political situation seems more relevant than ever in the light of recent events. These essays, which offer a unique perspective on the author s own experience and development, will win for Oz new readers, while delighting those already familiar with his writings.
In 1756, Jacob Frank, an Ottoman Jew who had returned to the Poland of his birth, was discovered leading a group of fellow travelers in a suspect religious service. At the request of the local rabbis, Polish authorities arrested the participants. Jewish authorities contacted the bishop in whose diocese the service had taken place and argued that since the rites of Frank's followers involved the practice of magic and immoral conduct, both Jews and Christians should condemn them and burn them at the stake. The scheme backfired, as the Frankists took the opportunity to ally themselves with the Church, presenting themselves as Contra-Talmudists who believed in a triune God. As a Turkish subject,...
An Israeli girl’s coming of age is told through a diary addressed to Anne Frank in this powerful novel—“a temple of love to the imaginary” (Time Out Israel). Love is both the question and the answer in this lyrical novel by one of Israel’s bestselling authors. Returning to her hometown as an adult, Rivi Shenhar discovers a collection of her old diaries—impassioned, plaintive journals she addressed to Anne Frank while growing up in Israel in the 1970s. Reading them takes her back to the isolated, lonely girl she was, living alone with a distant mother, but also to the love affair that changed her life. When her young literature teacher provides an outlet for Rivi’s frustrations, she never imagines that she will fall in love—or that such a turbulent, forbidden relationship could last so long, or become so intimate and erotically charged. Rivi’s transformation from awkward child to confident woman—and writer—is deftly handled, in “metaphoric language that is amazingly sensuous and precise” (Globes).
What makes a great Jewish book? What makes a book "Jewish" in the first place? Ruth R. Wisse, one of the leading scholars in the field of Jewish literature, sets out to answer these questions in The Modern Jewish Canon. Wisse takes us on an exhilarating journey through language and culture, penetrating the complexities of Jewish life as they are expressed in the greatest Jewish novels of the twentieth century, from Isaac Babel to Isaac Bashevis Singer, from Elie Wiesel to Cynthia Ozick. The modern Jewish canon Wisse proposes comprises those books that convey an experience of Jewish actuality, those in which "the authors or characters know and let the reader know that they are Jews," for bett...
“A layered, sweeping panorama of 20th Century Jewish life and identity.” —Publishers Weekly Yoram Kaniuk has been hailed as “one of the most innovative, brilliant novelists in the Western World,” and The Last Jew is his exhilarating masterwork (The New York Times). Like Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, The Last Jew is a sweeping saga that captures the troubled history and culture of an entire people through the prism of one family. From the chilling opening scene of a soldier returning home in a fog of battle trauma, the novel moves backward through time and across continents until Kaniuk has succeeded in bringing to life the twentieth century’s most unsettling legacy: the anxieties of modern Europe, which begat the Holocaust, and in turn the birth of Israel and the swirling cauldron that is the Middle East. With the unforgettable character of Ebenezer Schneerson—the eponymous last Jew—at its center, Kaniuk weaves an ingenious tapestry of Jewish identity that is alternately tragic, absurd, enigmatic, and heartbreaking. “A true work of art, free from emotional manipulations.” —The Washington Post