Search results

When Paul Glaser discovered his Aunt Rosie's remarkable wartime diaries, photographs and letters he was shocked: he had been raised as a Catholic, and had no knowledge of his Jewish heritage. But the story he was to uncover and reconstruct was one far larger and more dramatic than he could have ever imagined. Rosie Glaser was a magnetic force - hopeful, exuberant and cunning. An emancipated woman who defied convention, she toured Western Europe teaching ballroom dancing to high acclaim, falling...

What if you uncovered a Nazi paper trail that revealed your father to be a man very different from the quiet, introspective dad you knew . . . or thought you knew? Growing up, author Mel Laytner saw his father as a quintessential Type B: passive and conventional. As he uncovered documents the Nazis didn't burn, however, another man emerged-a black market ringleader and wily camp survivor who made his own luck. The tattered papers also shed light on painful secrets his father took to his grave...

This is the extraordinary story of the author's twenty year quest to find gold coins which his father's family buried in their backyard in Poland just prior to being deported by the Nazis into concentration camps. His father survived the war but died when the author was a teenager, leaving him only with the knowledge that he had buried coins somewhere in Poland, and no information about his family. During his quest, Biederman uncovers many interesting and disturbing facts about his father and mo...

Nini Karpel was a Vienna-born Jew and though she was proud of her heritage, she always considered herself Austrian first, Jewish second. But when the Nazis invaded Austria, the Karpels quickly became foreigners in their own homeland. Marginalized and tormented, Nini realized that their only chance of survival would be to flee. With her ailing mother and young brother, Nini lead the family 7,000 miles across the sea to Shanghai. The Jews living in Shanghai, a city occupied by the Japanese, were r...

This is a story of a young boy s journey from a sleepy provincial town in Hungary during the Second World War to the concentration camp in Bergen-Belsen. After a winter in Bergen-Belsen where his father died, he and his mother were liberated by the Americans outside a small German village, and handed over to the Red Army. They escaped from the Russians, and travelled, hiding on a goods train, through Prague to Budapest. Unlike other books dealing with this period, this is not a Holocaust story,...

The idea of survival is a recurrent theme in discussions both of family and of art. Whether understood in physical, mental, or spiritual terms, it is inextricable from the most basic questions of human existence, encompassing the ways in which individual experience can persist after death. Questions of survival and immortality are thus central for understanding the artistically expansive family at the center of this volume: Alice Lok Cahana, a Holocaust survivor and painter; her son Rabbi Ronn...

Jerzy Kosinski is one of the most important and original writers of our times. Passing By serves as his legacy, a collection of writings that answers many questions about his work and offers a revealing and provocative self-portrait by an author whose life was shrouded in enigma. The man who emerges here has a passion for sport, a quirky sense of fun, an idiosyncratic range of acquaintances stretching from Pope John Paul II to Warren Beatty, and an abiding love of secrets, conundrums, and fantas...

The Secular Rabbi is an intellectual biography of Philip Rahv, co-founder of Partisan Review, which T.S. Eliot called the best American literary periodical. It focuses on the ambivalent ties that Rahv, a Russian immigrant, retained to his Jewish cultural background. Drawing on letters Rahv wrote to her mother from 1928 to 1931, when he was still named Philip Greenberg, Doris Kadish delves into the complex and enigmatic character of a man admired by luminaries as diverse as George Orwell, Mary Mc...

This memoir brings to life Dan Vittorio Segre's childhood as a Jew raised in fascist, pre-World War II Italy.

Osip Mandelstam has become an almost mythical figure of modern Russian poetry, his work treasured all over the world for its lyrical beauty and innovative, revolutionary engagement with the dark times of the Stalinist era. While he was exiled in the city of Voronezh, the black earth region of Russia, his work, as Joseph Brodsky wrote, developed into “a poetry of high velocity and exposed nerves, becoming more a song than ever before, not a bardlike but a birdlike song … something like a goldfinc...

Chil Rajchman, a Polish Jew, was arrested with his younger sister in 1942 and sent to Treblinka, a death camp where more than 750,000 were murdered before it was abandoned by German soldiers. His sister was sent to the gas chambers, but Rajchman escaped execution, working for ten months under incessant threats and beatings as a barber, a clothes-sorter, a corpse-carrier, a puller of teeth from those same bodies. In August 1943, there was an uprising at the camp, and Rajchman was among the handfu...