A Peddler’s Journey

A Peddler’s Journey
Author: Jeffrey Slater
Publisher: Xlibris Corporation
Total Pages: 237
Release: 2020-03-24
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1796094226

In 1952, 77-year-old Harry Jacobs sat down to document his life story. He felt the desire to share his history with future generations before it was lost. The grandson of a tailor and son of a peddler, Harry’s tales take us to a time long forgotten. The Peddlers Journey begins with Harry’s escape from Czarist Russia at 15 years of age, finding himself in New York City with eight-cents in his pocket and settling in the Wild West. He shares his joys, struggles, love, adventures, and the personal conflict of “Old World” religious values in a New World. During his lifetime, he was fortunate to dine with Presidents and Governors and came to call many people, rich and poor, his good friends. His wealth would rise and fall, each time bringing him back to peddling. This is the story of a simple American immigrant who led a fortunate life during an adventurous time in America, where anything was possible.

Roads Taken

Roads Taken
Author: Hasia R. Diner
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 280
Release: 2015-01-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0300210191

Between the late 1700s and the 1920s, nearly one-third of the world’s Jews emigrated to new lands. Crossing borders and often oceans, they followed paths paved by intrepid peddlers who preceded them. This book is the first to tell the remarkable story of the Jewish men who put packs on their backs and traveled forth, house to house, farm to farm, mining camp to mining camp, to sell their goods to peoples across the world. Persistent and resourceful, these peddlers propelled a mass migration of Jewish families out of central and eastern Europe, north Africa, and the Ottoman Empire to destinations as far-flung as the United States, Great Britain, South Africa, and Latin America. Hasia Diner tells the story of millions of discontented young Jewish men who sought opportunity abroad, leaving parents, wives, and sweethearts behind. Wherever they went, they learned unfamiliar languages and customs, endured loneliness, battled the elements, and proffered goods from the metropolis to people of the hinterlands. In the Irish Midlands, the Adirondacks of New York, the mining camps of New South Wales, and so many other places, these traveling men brought change—to themselves and the families who later followed, to the women whose homes and communities they entered, and ultimately to the geography of Jewish history.

Journey to a Throne

Journey to a Throne
Author: Janet Lee-Degge
Publisher: Covenant Books, Inc.
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2018-11-26
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1643006274

Civilizations of this world rise, and civilizations fall, and the process has repeated many times through history. Even at the height of modern culture as we are now, we are not immune to the possibility. Journey to a Throne is a work of fiction about the human spirit surviving and thriving after such a collapse and a warning to us to avoid the fall in the first place. Journey to a Throne is a romantic suspense novel and takes place more than 1,500 years in the future, long after a global catastrophe. In a new Dark Ages, legends about the ancient people have spread everywhere. Civilization settled into a new normal. Leandra is the heir to the throne of a small country called Indiga. Her royal parents sent her away as a baby for her safety, and her adoptive parents took her far from Indiga and settled in a village called Jabethin. She grew up thinking she was a country girl named Brina. She is happy living a simple country life. Vail, a man from Indiga, travels to the small village of Jabethin on a mission concerning Leandra. He is attacked near his destination by a strange hooded man. Brina finds him in the woods and brings help from Jabethin. Keeping his mission a secret, Vail finds himself falling in love with Brina, not knowing she is Leandra. A man named Kerr is sent to bring Leandra back home because the king is dying. Someone doesn't want him to succeed and sends several men ahead of Kerr to various locations, including the man coerced into the mission against his will. When Kerr arrives in Jabethin, Vail finds out Brina is Leandra. Brina discovers she's heir to the throne in a distant country and is angry. Her life has been a lie, and now Kerr plans to take her away from the only home she's known. Kerr spotted the enemies planted to cause trouble on their return trip and realizes they must go home by a different route. They begin a perilous journey through a hostile land. Brina slowly accepts her destiny. Between his love for Brina and his mission, Vail doesn't know what to do and withdraws. Brina is troubled by the change in him. She thinks she knows what to expect in Indiga but finds danger and surprises.

The Peddler's Road

The Peddler's Road
Author: Matthew Cody
Publisher: Knopf Books for Young Readers
Total Pages: 370
Release: 2015
Genre: Juvenile Fiction
ISBN: 0385755228

While in Germany with their father, who is researching the Pied Piper legend, Max, nearly thirteen, and her brother Carter, ten, are spirited away to the magical land where the stolen children of Hamelin have been hidden since the thirteenth century.

The Syrian Peddler

The Syrian Peddler
Author: Linda Hanna Lloyd
Publisher: Independently Published
Total Pages: 170
Release: 2017-03-02
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9781793242518

As a reader, I love historical fiction. Among my favorites is The Shoemaker's Wife by Adriana Trigiani. Although captivated by Trigiani's characters, Enza and Ciro, my thoughts never veered far from my grandfather's story as I read and reread the book. My Gidu had a similar story to tell and I only heard bits and pieces of what I believe was a fascinating life.My father's father, Sam, arrived in the New York harbor and Ellis Island about the year 1905 from Damascus, Syria. This marked the beginning of the remarkable success of a young man who was 17 at the time. Sam began work as a peddler in the coal mining settlements during the era when men became millionaires from investments in coal, coke, and steel. He eventually becomes the proprietor of Hanna's Department Store where he embodied the Syrian values of hard work, honesty, and trust. The central setting for The Syrian Peddler is in Southwestern Pennsylvania including Pittsburgh, Uniontown, New Salem, and Masontown; spanning the years between 1905 and 1958. The story is historical fiction as not all facts were available. As much as possible, the writing is factual. My research included visits to Ellis Island, The Hotel Wolcott, New York City, The Family History Museum, Salt Lake City, Utah. I went back to places in Pennsylvania that were familiar to me: Masontown, where I went to kindergarten and St. Ellien of Homs, Syrian Orthodox Church in Brownsville.I have met several people who have emigrated from Syria. One young man came six years ago and settled in Austin Texas where I now live. He is saddened by the destruction of majestic buildings and the war itself. So many lives lost. I cannot begin to imagine what Sam would think today.

Lose Your Mother

Lose Your Mother
Author: Saidiya Hartman
Publisher: Macmillan
Total Pages: 292
Release: 2008-01-22
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780374531157

An original, thought-provoking meditation on the corrosive legacy of slavery from the 16th century to the present.--Elizabeth Schmidt, "The New York Times."

Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America

Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America
Author: Vivek Bald
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 317
Release: 2013-01-07
Genre: History
ISBN: 0674070402

Winner of the Theodore Saloutos Memorial Book Award Winner of the Association for Asian American Studies Book Award for History A Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year A Saveur “Essential Food Books That Define New York City” Selection In the final years of the nineteenth century, small groups of Muslim peddlers arrived at Ellis Island every summer, bags heavy with embroidered silks from their home villages in Bengal. The American demand for “Oriental goods” took these migrants on a curious path, from New Jersey’s beach boardwalks into the heart of the segregated South. Two decades later, hundreds of Indian Muslim seamen began jumping ship in New York and Baltimore, escaping the engine rooms of British steamers to find less brutal work onshore. As factory owners sought their labor and anti-Asian immigration laws closed in around them, these men built clandestine networks that stretched from the northeastern waterfront across the industrial Midwest. The stories of these early working-class migrants vividly contrast with our typical understanding of immigration. Vivek Bald’s meticulous reconstruction reveals a lost history of South Asian sojourning and life-making in the United States. At a time when Asian immigrants were vilified and criminalized, Bengali Muslims quietly became part of some of America’s most iconic neighborhoods of color, from Tremé in New Orleans to Detroit’s Black Bottom, from West Baltimore to Harlem. Many started families with Creole, Puerto Rican, and African American women. As steel and auto workers in the Midwest, as traders in the South, and as halal hot dog vendors on 125th Street, these immigrants created lives as remarkable as they are unknown. Their stories of ingenuity and intermixture challenge assumptions about assimilation and reveal cross-racial affinities beneath the surface of early twentieth-century America.

Artifacts and Illuminations

Artifacts and Illuminations
Author: Tom Lynch
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Total Pages: 362
Release: 2012-04-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 080324049X

Loren Eiseley (1907–77) is one of the most important American nature writers of the twentieth century and an admired practitioner of creative nonfiction. A native of Lincoln, Nebraska, Eiseley was a professor of anthropology and a prolific writer and poet who worked to bring an understanding of science to the general public, incorporating religion, philosophy, and science into his explorations of the human mind and the passage of time. As a writer who bridged the sciences and the humanities, Eiseley is a challenge for scholars locked into rigid disciplinary boundaries. Artifacts and Illuminations, the first full-length collection of critical essays on the writing of Eiseley, situates his work in the genres of creative nonfiction and nature writing. The contributing scholars apply a variety of critical approaches, including ecocriticism and place-oriented studies ranging across prairie, urban, and international contexts. Contributors explore such diverse topics as Eiseley’s use of anthropomorphism and Jungian concepts and examine how his work was informed by synecdoche. Long overdue, this collection demonstrates Eiseley’s continuing relevance as both a skilled literary craftsman and a profound thinker about the human place in the natural world.

To the Last Drop of Our Blood

To the Last Drop of Our Blood
Author: Ann Burke
Publisher: TEACH Services, Inc.
Total Pages: 184
Release: 2011-04-11
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1572587091

On a balmy evening in late summer, a thickly wooded area near the shore of Lake Geneva is filling up with men. By the time the moon is high, the woods rustle with the quiet movements of some nine hundred, all armed. Pastor Arnaud addresses the blended group of Waldensian and Huguenot volunteers. If anyone is afraid of the rack and the gallows, he tells them, they should turn back. If they wish to go on, they should swear to fight faithfully to the death... Arnaud and the nine-hundred kneel and pray at the lake's edge. A low voice and the sound of water lapping fill the night. There are muted amen's, a shuffle, footsteps, and the swish of fifteen little boats pushing off from land. In To the Last Drop of Our Blood, Ann Burke sketches excerpts from the story of the Waldenses, a religious minority who for generations lived under the looming shadow of religion in power. This re-telling may very well bring to mind a number of questions: * Where freedom of faith is concerned, does it matter how right the majority is? * How important is a minority? * Is it better, as someone has said, for one man to die than for a whole nation to perish? The answers we give will largely determine our future.