Zalmen

Author : Elie Wiesel
Publisher : Schocken
Page : 176 pages
File Size : 52,9 Mb
Release : 2013-04-10
Category : Drama
ISBN : 9780307833037

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ZALMEN OR THE MADNESS OF GOD by Elie Wiesel Pdf

On Yom Kippur eve in 1965, Elie Wiesel found himself in Russia, “in a synagogue crowded with people. The air was stifling. The cantor was chanting . . . Suddenly a mad thought crossed my mind: Something is about to happen; any moment now the Rabbi will wake up, shake himself, pound the pulpit and cry out, shout his pain, his rage, his truth. I felt the tension building up inside me; the wait became unbearable. But nothing happened . . . It was too late. The Rabbi no longer had the strength to imagine himself free.” In Zalmen, or The Madness of God, Wiesel gives his Rabbi that strength, the courage to voice his oppression and isolation, and the result is a passionate cry. This play illuminates not only the plight of the Soviet Jew, but the anguish of individuals everywhere who must survive—and yet long for something more than mere survival. (Adapted for the stage by Marion Wiesel.)

Author : Leyb Rashkin
Publisher : Syracuse University Press
Page : 507 pages
File Size : 47,9 Mb
Release : 2017-09-27
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9780815654186

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The People of Godlbozhits by Leyb Rashkin Pdf

First published in 1936, The People of Godlbozhits depicts the ordinary yet deeply complex life of a Jewish community, following the fortunes of one family and its many descendants. Set in a shtetl in Poland between the world wars, Rashkin’s satiric novel offers a vivid cross-section not only of the residents’ triumphs and struggles but also of their dense and complicated web of humanity. With biting humor and acerbic wit, Rashkin portrays the stratified society—the petty bourgeoisie, artisans, and proletariat—observing the crookedness at every level. The novel’s brisk and oftentimes lively Yiddish prose and its colorful and irascible cast of characters give readers a Yiddish Yoknapatawpha in all its tragic absurdity.

Author : Hirsz Abramowicz
Publisher : Wayne State University Press
Page : 406 pages
File Size : 53,9 Mb
Release : 1999
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 0814327842

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Profiles of a Lost World by Hirsz Abramowicz Pdf

First published in a Yiddish edition in 1958, Profiles of a Lost World is a source of information about Eastern Europe before World War II as well as an touchstone for understanding a rich and complex cultural environment. Hirsz Abramowicz (1881-1960), a prominent Jewish educator, writer and cultural activist, knew that world and wrote about it, and his writings provide an eyewitness account of Jewish life during the first half of the twentieth century. Abramowicz was a witness to war, revolution and major cultural transformations in the Jewish world. His essays, written and originally published in Yiddish between 1920 and 1955, document the local history of Lithuanian Jewry in rural and small-town settings, and in the city of Vilna-the "Jerusalem of Lithuania"-which was a major center of East European Jewish intellectual and cultural life. They shed light on the daily life of Jews and the flourishing of modern Yiddish culture in Eastern Europe during the early 20th century and offer a personal perspective on the rise of Jewish radical politics. The collection incorporates local history of Lithuanian Jewry, shtetl folklore, observations on rural occupations, Jewish education, and life under German occupation during World War I. It also includes a series of profiles of leading social and intellectual Jewish personalities of the author's day, from traditional scholars to revolutionaries. Together the selections provide a blend of social and personal history and a window on a lost world.

Author : Zalmen Gradowski
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 239 pages
File Size : 47,8 Mb
Release : 2024-05-06
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9780226833231

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The Last Consolation Vanished by Zalmen Gradowski Pdf

A unique and haunting first-person Holocaust account by Zalmen Gradowski, a Sonderkommando prisoner killed in Auschwitz. On October 7, 1944, a group of Jewish prisoners in Auschwitz obtained explosives and rebelled against their Nazi murderers. It was a desperate uprising that was defeated by the end of the day. More than four hundred prisoners were killed. Filling a gap in history, The Last Consolation Vanished is the first complete English translation and critical edition of one prisoner’s powerful account of life and death in Auschwitz, written in Yiddish and buried in the ashes near Crematorium III. Zalmen Gradowski was in the Sonderkommando (special squad) at Auschwitz, a Jewish prisoner given the unthinkable task of ushering Jewish deportees into the gas chambers, removing their bodies, salvaging any valuables, transporting their corpses to the crematoria, and destroying all evidence of their murders. Sonderkommandos were forcibly recruited by SS soldiers; when they discovered the horror of their assignment, some of them committed suicide or tried to induce the SS to kill them. Despite their impossible situation, many Sonderkommandos chose to resist in two interlaced ways: planning an uprising and testifying. Gradowski did both, by helping to lead a rebellion and by documenting his experiences. Within 120 scrawled notebook pages, his accounts describe the process of the Holocaust, the relentless brutality of the Nazi regime, the assassination of Czech Jews, the relationships among the community of men forced to assist in this nightmare, and the unbearable separation and death of entire families, including his own. Amid daily unimaginable atrocities, he somehow wrote pages that were literary, sometimes even lyrical—hidden where and when one would least expect to find them. The October 7th rebellion was completely crushed and Gradowski was killed in the process, but his testimony lives on. His extraordinary and moving account, accompanied by a foreword and afterword by Philippe Mesnard and Arnold I. Davidson, is a voice speaking to us from the past on behalf of millions who were silenced. Their story must be shared.

Author : Abraham Sutzkever
Publisher : McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
Page : 480 pages
File Size : 50,6 Mb
Release : 2021-10-06
Category : History
ISBN : 9780228010449

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From the Vilna Ghetto to Nuremberg by Abraham Sutzkever Pdf

In 1944, the Yiddish poet Abraham Sutzkever was airlifted to Moscow from the forest where he had spent the winter among partisan fighters. There he was encouraged by Ilya Ehrenburg, the most famous Soviet Jewish writer of his day, to write a memoir of his two years in the Vilna Ghetto. Now, seventy-five years after it appeared in Yiddish in 1946, Justin Cammy provides a full English translation of one of the earliest published memoirs of the destruction of the city known throughout the Jewish world as the Jerusalem of Lithuania. Based on his own experiences, his conversations with survivors, and his consultation with materials hidden in the ghetto and recovered after the liberation of his hometown, Sutzkever’s memoir rests at the intersection of postwar Holocaust literature and history. He grappled with the responsibility to produce a document that would indict the perpetrators and provide an account of both the horrors and the resilience of Jewish life under Nazi rule. Cammy bases his translation on the two extant versions of the full text of the memoir and includes Sutzkever’s diary notes and full testimony at the Nuremberg Trials in 1946. Fascinating reminiscences of leading Soviet Yiddish cultural figures Sutzkever encountered during his time in Moscow – Ehrenburg, Yiddish modernist poet Peretz Markish, and director of the State Yiddish Theatre Shloyme Mikhoels – reveal the constraints of the political environment in which the memoir was composed. Both shocking and moving in its intensity, From the Vilna Ghetto to Nuremberg returns readers to a moment when the scale of the Holocaust was first coming into focus, through the eyes of one survivor who attempted to make sense of daily life, resistance, and death in the ghetto. A Yiddish Book Center Translation

Author : Sharon Peters
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
Page : 193 pages
File Size : 41,7 Mb
Release : 2012-12-04
Category : Pets
ISBN : 9780762791644

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Trusting Calvin by Sharon Peters Pdf

Max Edelman was just 17 when the Nazis took him from his Jewish ghetto in Poland to the first of five work camps, where his only hope of survival was to keep quiet and raise an emotional shield. After witnessing a German Shepherd kill a fellow prisoner, he developed a lifelong fear of dogs. Later beaten into blindness by two bored guards, Max survived, buried the past, and moved on to a new life in America, becoming an X-ray technician. But when he retired, he needed help. He needed a guide dog. After a month of training, he received Calvin, a handsome, devoted chocolate Labrador retriever. Calvin guided Max safely through life, but he sensed the distance and reserve of Max’s emotional shield. Calvin grew listless and lost weight. Trainers intervened—but to no avail. A few days before Calvin’s inevitable reassignment, Max went for an afternoon walk. A car cut into the crosswalk, and Calvin leapt forward, saving Max’s life. Max’s emotional shield dissolved. Calvin sensed the change and immediately improved, guiding Max to greater openness, trust, and engagement with the world. Here is the remarkable, touching story of a man who survived history and the dog that unlocked his heart.

Author : David Neal Miller
Publisher : State University of New York Press
Page : 187 pages
File Size : 55,7 Mb
Release : 2012-02-01
Category : History
ISBN : 9781438413150

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Fear of Fiction by David Neal Miller Pdf

David Neal Miller's Fear of Fiction is the first book-length study that begins with the understanding that Singer is truly a Yiddish writer in language and culture. With the exception of a handful of articles, American critical examination of Isaac Bashevis Singer's work has been devoted to Singer's work in English—to those pieces he himself has selected for translation. This American Nobel laureate is part of a long tradition of Yiddish literature, and he still writes in that language. Working exclusively with Singer's Yiddish texts—many of the pieces discussed here are not available in English—Miller examines Singer's narrative strategies, his blurring of the distinctions between fiction and reportage. Fear of Fiction captures an intriguing paradox of Singer's writing: Singer fictionalizes the factual and historicizes the imaginative. Miller demonstrates that Singer is no "inspired innocent," but that this blending of genres is the work of a craftsman who uses genre to mediate between the world and the imagination. The book is enriched by Miller's careful and sensitive translations of many illustrative Yiddish passages. Fear of Fiction is both erudite and entertaining. Miller not only examines Singer's skillful undermining of our expectations of different genres, but also draws the reader into Singer's work as a whole. This book will fascinate both the scholar and the sophisticated reader of Singer.

Author : Luisa Smith
Publisher : iUniverse
Page : 194 pages
File Size : 44,5 Mb
Release : 2000-09
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9780595136698

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A Father's Love by Luisa Smith Pdf

A Father's Love is an autobiographical novel about childhood suffering and endurance. The story opens in 1951, when Leah, age six, a child of Holocaust survivors, arrives with her family in New York from Displaced Person's Camps in Germany. What follows is a classic tale of immigrant struggle and success, as well as its antithesis: family dysfunction and child sexual abuse. Unable to comprehend or process her father's molestation and nighttime sexual attacks, Leah becomes increasingly fearful and dissociated. She begins to live a dual existence. At school she learns English, excels in her studies and adapts to her American environment. At home, where the traumas and losses of war remain her parents' daily reality, life is chaotic and sometimes violent. While Leah absorbs her family's suffering, she must also silently cope with the mysterious assaults of an "unknown" assailant. As she strives for insight and comprehension, she begins to view her parents with a dispassionate eye, and is thus well on her way to forging her own identity.

Author : Ellen Schiff
Publisher : State University of New York Press
Page : 291 pages
File Size : 51,8 Mb
Release : 2012-02-01
Category : History
ISBN : 9781438418940

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From Stereotype to Metaphor by Ellen Schiff Pdf

Who is a Jew? What is a Jew? In this all-encompassing study, Dr. Schiff probes these questions to help explain the prominence of Jewish characters in drama since World War II. The Jew has evolved into one of the most popular personages on the contemporary stage.Dramatists, both Jew and Gentile, in the United States and Europe, have been mining recently introduced concepts of the Jew to create a highly diversified and unfamiliar breed of dramatis personae. From Stereotype to Metaphor tracks the evolution of the Jewish persona on the stage. From the debut of the Jew on the Western stage in the Middle Ages to the present century, Dr. Schiff investigates how the Jew has evolved from the stereotypical figures of biblical patriarchs, moneymen and villains into latter-day everyman. This book traces the line of descent of the stage Jew from church drama, Shakespeare, Milton, and Racine to modern playwrights, including Miller, Gibson, Pinter, Wesker, Anouilh, Grumberg, and Woody Allen, concentrating on the development of the stage Jew since 1945.

Author : S. An-sky
Publisher : Syracuse University Press
Page : 244 pages
File Size : 55,9 Mb
Release : 2017-05-11
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9780815654049

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Pioneers by S. An-sky Pdf

When young Zalmen Itzkowitz steps off the train on a dark, dreary day at the close of the nineteenth century, the residents of Miloslavka have no idea what’s in store for them. Zalmen is a freethinker who has come to the rural town to earn his living as a tutor. Yet, rather than teach Hebrew, he plans to teach his students the Russian language and other secular subjects. Residents of the town quickly become divided, with some regarding Itzkowitz as the devil’s messenger and others supportive of his progressive ideas. Set during the time of the Haskalah, the great Jewish Enlightenment that was sweeping through Europe, Pioneers is a charming tale of one ambivalent young man’s attempt to join the movement and a compassionate portrait of one shtetl on the brink of transformation.

Author : Peninnah Schram
Publisher : Jason Aronson, Incorporated
Page : 479 pages
File Size : 50,6 Mb
Release : 1995-07-01
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9781461627784

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Chosen Tales by Peninnah Schram Pdf

The storytellers represented in Chosen Tales are among the most active and talented Jewish storytellers in the world. This extraordinary collection of 68 stories is, in a way, a Jewish storytelling festival, where storytellers gather to share stories, hear each other's stories, and get to know each other better through the stories that are told. Come and experience the magic of the oral tradition. Read and retell these stories again and again so that you too can shape the destiny of the timeless tradition of Jewish storytelling.

Author : Pinkhes-Dov Goldenshteyn
Publisher : Academic Studies PRess
Page : 609 pages
File Size : 44,8 Mb
Release : 2024-02-20
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9798887193021

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The Shochet by Pinkhes-Dov Goldenshteyn Pdf

Set in Ukraine and Crimea, this unique autobiography offers a fascinating, detailed picture of life in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Tsarist Russia. Goldenshteyn (1848-1930), a traditional Jew who was orphaned as a young boy, is a master storyteller. Folksy, funny, streetwise, and self-confident, he is a keen observer of nineteenth-century Eastern Europe, both Jewish and non-Jewish. His accounts are vivid and readable, sometimes stunning in their intensity. The memoir is brimming with information; his adventures shed light on communal life, persecution, family relationships, religious practices and beliefs, social classes, local politics, interactions between Jews and other religious communities (including Muslims, who formed the majority of Crimea’s populace), epidemics, poverty, competition for resources, migration, war, modernity and secularization, holy men and charlatans, acts of kindness and acts of treachery. In chronicling his own life, Goldenshteyn inadvertently tells a bigger story—the story of how a small, oppressed people, among other minority groups, struggled for survival in the massive Russian Empire. Until now, only a small circle of Yiddish-speaking scholars had access to this extremely significant primary source. This translation is a game-changer, making this treasure trove of information accessible to academics and ordinary readers alike. Informed by research in Ukrainian, Israeli, and American archives and personal interviews with the few surviving individuals who knew Goldenshteyn personally, The Shochet is a magnificent new contribution to Jewish and Eastern European history.

Author : Aviva Ravel
Publisher : Pioneer Drama Service, Inc.
Page : 56 pages
File Size : 45,8 Mb
Release : 1994
Category : Electronic
ISBN : 8210379456XXX

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Tales from the Shtetl by Aviva Ravel Pdf

Author : Ellen S. Fine
Publisher : State University of New York Press
Page : 221 pages
File Size : 42,8 Mb
Release : 2012-02-01
Category : History
ISBN : 9781438402796

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Legacy of Night by Ellen S. Fine Pdf

Ellen Fine's book is full of original insights, beautifully written and structured. I could not put it down. It is a very important study." -- Rosette Lamont, Queens College and Graduate School, City University of New York "By treating Wiesel's novels as literary-spiritual stages in the development of Wiesel's larger experience, as a survivor-witness-writer, Dr. Fine's book takes on an inherently dramatic character which makes it alive and exciting as well as instructive." -- Terrence Des Pres, Colgate University "Fine clarifies Wiesel's intentions, especially illuminating the complex variations on the themes of speech and silence, fathers and sons, escape and return--in short, the ideas around which Wiesel organizes his literary universe. No one has done this before so thoroughly." -- Lawrence Langer, Simmons College

Author : Albert Waldinger
Publisher : Susquehanna University Press
Page : 344 pages
File Size : 50,8 Mb
Release : 2006
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 1575911078

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Shining and Shadow by Albert Waldinger Pdf

Shining and Shadow is a translated anthology of Yiddish short fiction of the Lower East Side, the center of a vibrant Jewish (largely Russian Jewish) life. Waldinger's goal is to present both the past and present of a population forced by poverty and pogrom to leave its homeland, resettle in America, and adopt its ideals (and hopes) as well as its difficult urban realities, all while wrestling with the desire to preserve its cultural identity and system of beliefs and expectations.