Primarily memoirs of Holocaust survivors, the Jewish Lives series includes poignant works by Victor Erlich, Ida Fink, Michał Głowiński, Gertrud Kolmar, Arnošt Lustig, Liana Millu, and Jiří Weil, representing an extraordinary range of life experience in the twentieth century in a variety of countries, including Germany, Italy, Poland, and the United States.
According to legend, the Garden of Eden was located in Iraq, and for millennia, Jews resided peacefully in metropolitan Baghdad. Memories of Eden: A Journey Through Jewish Baghdad reconstructs the last years of the oldest Jewish Diaspora community in the world through the recollections of Violette Shamash, a Jewish woman who was born in Baghdad in 1912, sent to her daughter Mira Rocca and son-in-law, the British journalist Tony Rocca. The result is a deeply textured memoir—an intimate portrait of an individual life, yet revealing of the complex dynamics of the Middle East in the twentieth century.
Finalist for 2012 National Jewish Book Award in the Holocaust category
During his time in the Vught concentration camp, the 21-year-old David recorded on an almost daily basis his observations, thoughts, and feelings. He mercilessly probed the abyss that opened around him and, at times, within himself. David's diary covers almost a year, both charting his daily life in Vught as it developed over time and tracing his spiritual evolution as a writer. Until early February 1944, David was able to smuggle some 73,000 words from the camp to his best friend Karel van het Reve, a non-Jew.
Poet Karen Gershon opens A Tempered Wind, the sequel to volume 1 of her autobiography A Lesser Child, in 1943. It begins tragically with the death of Karen’s sister Anne in England, where they had escaped from Nazi Germany with their third sister Lise via the Kindertransport mission. A Tempered Wind proceeds to chart the difficult period from 1939 to 1943 as Karen adapts to a new culture and undertakes the complicated passage from adolescence to adulthood in the British Isles.
Edited by Irene Silverblatt and Helene Silverblatt
A rediscovered poetry collection from a lost voice of the Holocaust Revealing an artist of remarkable talent and enduring hope, this collection of poetry will join Anne Frank's...
Victor Erlich was born in 1914, at the threshold of what the great Russian poet Anna Akhmatova called "the real twentieth century," in Petrograd, a place indelibly marked by that century's violent dislocations and upheavals. His story, begun on the eve of the First World War and taking him through Russia, Poland, Lithuania, Germany, and the U. S. Army, is in many ways a memoir of that "real twentieth century," reflecting its lethal nature and shaped by the "fearful symmetry" of the age of totalitarianism. To read about Erlich's life growing up at the intersection of the century's darkest currents is to experience history firsthand from the Russian Revolution to the end of the Second World War--and to know what it truly is to be a child of the century. Throughout, despite the darkness, even the horror, of much of what he describes, the author maintains the beguiling tone and the warm...
Voices of the Diaspora offers, for the first time, representative works by major Jewish women writers from Austria, England, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, and Russia. These...
Translated by Fay Bussgang, Julian Bussgang and Simon Cygielski
This book serves as a memorial to loved ones who do not even have a grave, as well as a tribute to those who risked their lives and families to save a Jewish child. A wide variety of experiences during the Nazi occupation of Poland are related with wrenching simplicity and candor, experiences that illustrate horrors and deprivation, but also present examples of courage and compassion.
A mosaic of memories from a childhood in the Warsaw Ghetto and a life in hiding on the other side of the wall When six-year-old Michal Glowinski first heard the adults around him speak...
And Yet I Still Have Dreams is a departure from many Holocaust memoirs and biographies. Based on interviews with "Alex," an anonymous survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto and three concentration camps, the story follows him from his assimilated childhood to his coming to terms with his memories of the Holocaust as an older man. Alex is angry, pugnacious, and contemptuous of the stereotypes found in some survivor literature and honest about the shortcomings of other works.
So a picture of Gertrud Kolmar, a gifted Jewish writer struggling to sustain her art and family, emerges from these eloquent and allusive letters. Written in the stolen moments before her day as a forced laborer in a munitions factory began, the letters tell of Kolmar's move from the family home in Finkenkrug to a three-room flat in Berlin, which she and her father must soon share with other displaced Jews. They describe her factory work as a learning experience and assert, in the face of ever worsening conditions, that true art, never dependent on comfort or peace, is "capable of triumphing over . . . time and place."
