Sarka is only thirteen when her mother suddenly tells her one day, I dreamed that you got married . . . to the rabbi. These words inform the young girl that she will marry a sixty-five-year-old widower and her fate will be determined by her mothers dream. Sarkas parents remain adamant that she will marry the rabbi whereupon all her youthful dreams of eventually marrying for love are quashed. Little Shaime is only ten when both his parents die, leaving him and his four siblings not only orphaned but penniless. While homes are found for his younger brothers and sisters, there is no family ready to adopt an older boy, and his grandparents have no room for him. So he is sent away to earn his keep as a saddlers apprentice in Lublin. The Krakowski family treat the orphan heartlessly, feeding him leftover scraps and making him sleep alone in a mouldy basement. Yet Shaime clings to his dream of one day having a childhood like any normal boy. The Second World War arrives, and when the carnage is over at last, very few survive. But both Sheindel, Sarkas daughter, and Shaime are among them, and their paths cross. Will fate prove kinder to them than the nightmares of the tragic losses that haunt their sleepless nights? Even before their fate was sealed by the Nazi invasion, the Jews in the little Polish town of Belzitz faced great adversity. Yet there were always dreams, some bringing consolation and others shaping their destinies. In this sweeping historical novel, Admoni traces a riveting family saga through three generations. The personal stories of Sheindel and the orphaned Shaime are interwoven into a rich tapestry of a Jewish shtetlbreathing life into an entire world of language, culture, and customsa world of which hardly a trace has survived. It is often said that reality surpasses imagination; hard as it may be to believe, everything described in Dreams really did take place. None of the names of the main characters have been changed, and their descendants are among us today. Raaya Admonia veteran radio editor and presenter at Kol Israel, Israels Broadcasting Authorityhas written many radio plays and stories which have garnered considerable success. In Dreams, written after extensive research, Admonis vivid characters are lovingly infused with the breath of life. Raaya Admonis book for children, Mother Says Its Late was published in 2001.

Sarka is only thirteen when her mother suddenly tells her one day, "I dreamed that you got married . . . to the rabbi." These words inform the young girl that she will marry a sixty-five-year-old widower and her fate will be determined by her mother's dream. Sarka's parents remain adamant that she will marry the rabbi whereupon all her youthful dreams of eventually marrying for love are quashed. Little Shaime is only ten when both his parents die, leaving him and his four siblings not only orphaned but penniless. While homes are found for his younger brothers and sisters, there is no family ready to adopt an older boy, and his grandparents have no room for him. So he is sent away to earn his keep as a saddler's apprentice in Lublin. The Krakowski family treat the orphan heartlessly, feeding him leftover scraps and making him sleep alone in a mouldy basement. Yet Shaime clings to his dream of one day having a childhood like any normal boy. The Second World War arrives, and when the carnage is over at last, very few survive. But both Sheindel, Sarka's daughter, and Shaime are among them, and their paths cross. Will fate prove kinder to them than the nightmares of the tragic losses that haunt their sleepless nights? Even before their fate was sealed by the Nazi invasion, the Jews in the little Polish town of Belzitz faced great adversity. Yet there were always dreams, some bringing consolation and others shaping their destinies. In this sweeping historical novel, Admoni traces a riveting family saga through three generations. The personal stories of Sheindel and the orphaned Shaime are interwoven into a rich tapestry of a Jewish shtetl-breathing life into an entire world of language, culture, and customs-a world of which hardly a trace has survived. It is often said that reality surpasses imagination; hard as it may be to believe, everything described in Dreams really did take place. None of the names of the main characters have been changed, and their descendants are among us today. Raaya Admoni-a veteran radio editor and presenter at Kol Israel, Israel's Broadcasting Authority-has written many radio plays and stories which have garnered considerable success. In Dreams, written after extensive research, Admoni's vivid characters are lovingly infused with the breath of life. Raaya Admoni's book for children, Mother Says It's Late was published in 2001.

In A Question of Tradition, Kathryn Hellerstein explores the roles that women poets played in forming a modern Yiddish literary tradition. Women who wrote in Yiddish go largely unrecognized outside a rapidly diminishing Yiddish readership. Even in the heyday of Yiddish literature, they were regarded as marginal. But for over four centuries, women wrote and published Yiddish poems that addressed the crises of Jewish history—from the plague to the Holocaust—as well as the challenges and pleasures of daily life: prayer, art, friendship, nature, family, and love. Through close readings and translations of poems of eighteen writers, Hellerstein argues for a new perspective on a tradition of women Yiddish poets. Framed by a consideration of Ezra Korman's 1928 anthology of women poets, Hellerstein develops a discussion of poetry that extends from the sixteenth century through the twentieth, from early modern Prague and Krakow to high modernist Warsaw, New York, and California. The poems range from early conventional devotions, such as a printer's preface and verse prayers, to experimental, transgressive lyrics that confront a modern ambivalence toward Judaism. In an integrated study of literary and cultural history, Hellerstein shows the immensely important contribution made by women poets to Jewish literary tradition.

A mischief maker with sticky fingers, a rabbi who has prophetic visions, a healer, peddlers, revolutionaries, and travelers all live in the stories of Shtetl In My Mind. They will make you laugh, make you dance, and sometimes make you cry.

Childhood education and psychology.

In a series of evocative, groundbreaking articles, the author analyzes the Biblical and Rabbinic basis for what surely are now some of the most hotly debated topics in Jewish religious thought today. These include how the traditional interpretation of the Binding of Isaac has been misapplied in both Christian theology and Jewish martyrology, and how the centuries-long, and newly resurgent belief in mysticism and messianism, in kabbalah and Hasidism, has distorted classical Judaism and thwarted its national and cultural development. The author counters the arguments of those who see Judaism's – and the world's – newfound obsession with mysticism and kabbalah as a natural outgrowth of a progressive trend within rabbinic Judaism, and warns of the impending danger of rejecting the very core of Jewish thought and opinion as it was expounded in the Torah and classical Jewish tradition (the Oral Law). Each section of this magnificent work will give the reader new insights into how different aspects of Judaism have evolved and why they have often been in contention with each other. Nor is he afraid to deal with some of the supercharged issues within Judaism, such as, what are the underlying premises of Jewry's claim to the Divinely Promised Land? And has this claim been affected by its failure to pursue an active program of nationalism? These highly acclaimed articles have been gleaned from today's leading Jewish journals and have stood the test of time. They contain valuable source material and are a ready reference to the many historical and religious topics that are the focus of discussion across all main Jewish denominations.

WINNER OF THE NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARD AND THE JEWISH FICTION AWARD FROM THE ASSOCIATION OF JEWISH LIBRARIES GOOD MORNING AMERICA MUST READ NEW BOOKS * NEW YORK POST BUZZ BOOKS * THE MILLIONS MOST ANTICIPATED A remarkable debut novel—written with the fearless imagination of Michael Chabon and the piercing humor of Gary Shteyngart—about a small Jewish village in the Polish forest that is so secluded no one knows it exists . . . until now. What if there was a town that history missed? For decades, the tiny Jewish shtetl of Kreskol existed in happy isolation, virtually untouched and unchanged. Spared by the Holocaust and the Cold War, its residents enjoyed remarkable peace. It missed out on cars, and electricity, and the internet, and indoor plumbing. But when a marriage dispute spins out of control, the whole town comes crashing into the twenty-first century. Pesha Lindauer, who has just suffered an ugly, acrimonious divorce, suddenly disappears. A day later, her husband goes after her, setting off a panic among the town elders. They send a woefully unprepared outcast named Yankel Lewinkopf out into the wider world to alert the Polish authorities. Venturing beyond the remote safety of Kreskol, Yankel is confronted by the beauty and the ravages of the modern-day outside world – and his reception is met with a confusing mix of disbelief, condescension, and unexpected kindness. When the truth eventually surfaces, his story and the existence of Kreskol make headlines nationwide. Returning Yankel to Kreskol, the Polish government plans to reintegrate the town that time forgot. Yet in doing so, the devious origins of its disappearance come to the light. And what has become of the mystery of Pesha and her former husband? Divided between those embracing change and those clinging to its old world ways, the people of Kreskol will have to find a way to come together . . . or risk their village disappearing for good.

Marc Chagall (1887-1985) traversed a long route from a boy in the Jewish Pale of Settlement, to a commissar of art in revolutionary Russia, to the position of a world-famous French artist. This book presents for the first time a comprehensive collection of Chagall's public statements on art and culture. The documents and interviews shed light on his rich, versatile, and enigmatic art from within his own mental world. The book raises the problems of a multi-cultural artist with several intersecting identities and the tensions between modernist form and cultural representation in twentieth-century art. It reveals the travails and achievements of his life as a Jew in the twentieth century and his perennial concerns with Jewish identity and destiny, Yiddish literature, and the state of Israel. This collection includes annotations and introductions of the Chagall texts by the renowned scholar Benjamin Harshav that elucidate the texts and convey the changing cultural contexts of Chagall's life. Also featured is the translation by Benjamin and Barbara Harshav of the first book about Chagall's work, the 1918 Russian The Art of Marc Chagall.

The Dream of Social Justice and Bad Moral Luck examines the intertwined lives of five women and three men, Russian Jews in the first half of the twentieth century, as their belief in social transformation unraveled. The book looks at why these eight people bought into the dream, and what they did when things went bad. Under what circumstances did they bow to political pressures antithetical to the ideas they professed, and under what circumstances did they resist, even heroically? Political cowardice is a constant theme, but so is moral resistance that had no point beyond an individual’s conscience.

Pairing the two concepts of diaspora and modernism, Allison Schachter formulates a novel approach to modernist studies and diasporic cultural production. Diasporic Modernisms illuminates how the relationships between migrant writers and dispersed readers were registered in the innovative practices of modernist prose fiction. The Jewish writers discussed-including S. Y. Abramovitsh, Yosef Chaim Brenner, Dovid Bergelson, Leah Goldberg, Gabreil Preil, and Kadia Molodowsky--embraced diaspora as a formal literary strategy to reflect on the historical conditions of Jewish language culture. Spanning from 1894 to 1974, the book traces the development of this diasporic aesthetic in the shifting centers of Hebrew and Yiddish literature, including Odessa, Jerusalem, Berlin, Tel Aviv, and New York. Through an analysis of Jewish writing, Schachter theorizes how modernist literary networks operate outside national borders in minor and non-national languages. Offering the first comparative literary history of Hebrew and Yiddish modernist prose, Diasporic Modernisms argues that these two literary histories can no longer be separated by nationalist and monolingual histories. Instead, the book illuminates how these literary languages continue to animate each other, even after the creation of a Jewish state, with Hebrew as its national language.