Search results

A unique chronicle of the hundred-year period when the Jewish people changed the world - and it changed them Marx, Freud, Proust, Einstein, Bernhardt and Kafka. Between the middle of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries a few dozen men and women changed the way we see the world. But many have vanished from our collective memory despite their enduring importance in our daily lives. Without Karl Landsteiner, for instance, there would be no blood transfusions or major surgery. Without Paul Ehrli...

After a century of critical neglect, poet and writer Amy Levy is gaining recognition as a literary figure of stature. This definitive biography accompanied by her letters, along with the recent publication of her selected writings, provides a critical appreciation of Levy's importance in her own time and in ours. As an educated Jewish woman with homoerotic desires, Levy felt the strain of combating the structures of British society in the 1880s, the decade in which she built her career and mov...

All But My Life is Gerda Weissmann Klein’s memoir of her experiences during World War II. Klein was born on May 8, 1924, in Bielitz (now Bielsko), Poland. She remembers her childhood as being happy, even idyllic. The Weissmanns were a Jewish family, and their town had been part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire before 1919. Like most of the residents in the area, the Weissmann family was bilingual, speaking both Polish and German, and Klein’s older brother, Arthur, studied English as well. Klein’s...

Five years after her return home from Auschwitz, Piera Sonnino found the courage to tell the story of the extermination of her parents, three brothers, and two sisters by the Nazis. Discovered in Italy and never before published in English, this poignant and extraordinarily well-written account is strikingly accurate in bringing to life the methodical and relentless erosion of the freedoms and human dignity of the Italian Jews, from Mussolini's racial laws of 1938 to the institutionalized horror...

'A lyrical, fascinating, important book. More than just a family story, it is an essay on belonging, denying, pretending, self-deception and, at least for the main characters, survival.' Literary Review'Simon May's remarkable How to Be a Refugee is a memoir of family secrets with a ruminative twist, one that's more interested in what we keep from ourselves than the ones we conceal from others.' Irish TimesThe most familiar fate of Jews living in Hitler's Germany is either emigration or deportati...

Eric Rouleau was one of the most celebrated journalists of his generation, a status he owed to his extraordinary career, which began when Hubert Beuve-Mery, director of Le Monde, charged him with covering the Near and Middle East. In 1963, Rouleau was invited by Gamal Abd al-Nasser to interview him in Cairo, a move which was not lost on the young Rouleau-going through him, a young Egyptian Jew who had been exiled from Egypt in late 1951, shortly before the Free Officers coup, was a means to ren...

Shalvi has been a pioneer in advancing the status of women in Israel and in religious girls' education. She has been an active participant in peace dialogues and inter-religious initiatives and has been a social activist all her life.Born in Germany in 1926 to Orthodox parents, Shalvi grew up in London and studied English at Cambridge, before moving to Jerusalem in 1949 where she went on to pursue a PhD at Hebrew University, eventually teaching English Literature.In 1950, Shalvi me...

Israel Meir Lau, one of the youngest survivors of Buchenwald, was just eight years old when the camp was liberated in 1945. Descended from a 1000-year unbroken chain of rabbis, he grew up to become Chief Rabbi of Israel and like many of the great rabbis, Lau is a master storyteller. Out of the Depths is his harrowing, miraculous and inspiring account of life in one of the Nazis' deadliest concentration camps and how he managed to survive against all possible odds. Lau, who lost most of his famil...

Jurek Becker (1937-97) is best known for his novel "Jacob the Liar", which follows the life of a man who, like Becker, lived in the Lodz ghetto during the German occupation of Poland in World War II. Throughout his career, Becker also wrote nonfiction, and the essays, lectures, and interviews collected in My Father, the Germans and I share a common thread in that they each speak to Becker's interactions with and opinions on the social, political, and cultural conditions of twentieth-century Germ...