The Yid

The Yid
Author: Paul Goldberg
Publisher: Picador
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2016-02-02
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1250079047

A DEBUT NOVEL OF DARING ORIGINALITY, THE YID GUARANTEES THAT YOU WILL NEVER THINK OF STALINIST RUSSIA, SHAKESPEARE, THEATER, YIDDISH, OR HISTORY THE SAME WAY AGAIN Moscow, February 1953. A week before Stalin's death, his final pogrom, "one that would forever rid the Motherland of the vermin," is in full swing. Three government goons arrive in the middle of the night to arrest Solomon Shimonovich Levinson, an actor from the defunct State Jewish Theater. But Levinson, though an old man, is a veteran of past wars, and his shocking response to the intruders sets in motion a series of events both zany and deadly as he proceeds to assemble a ragtag group to help him enact a mad-brilliant plot: the assassination of a tyrant. While the setting is Soviet Russia, the backdrop is Shakespeare: A mad king has a diabolical plan to exterminate and deport his country's remaining Jews. Levinson's cast of unlikely heroes includes Aleksandr Kogan, a machine-gunner in Levinson's Red Army band who has since become one of Moscow's premier surgeons; Frederick Lewis, an African American who came to the USSR to build smelters and stayed to work as an engineer, learning Russian, Esperanto, and Yiddish; and Kima Petrova, an enigmatic young woman with a score to settle. And wandering through the narrative, like a crazy Soviet Ragtime, are such historical figures as Paul Robeson, Solomon Mikhoels, and Marc Chagall. As hilarious as it is moving, as intellectual as it is violent, Paul Goldberg's THE YID is a tragicomic masterpiece of historical fiction.

The Yid

The Yid
Author: Paul Goldberg
Publisher: Macmillan
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2016-02-02
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1250079039

"Moscow, February 1953. A week before Stalin's death, his final pogrom, "one that would forever rid the Motherland of the vermin," is in full swing. Three government goons arrive in the middle of the night to arrest Solomon Shimonovich Levinson, an actor from the defunct State Jewish Theater. But Levinson, though an old man, is a veteran of past wars, and his shocking response to the intruders sets in motion a series of events both zany and deadly as he proceeds to assemble a ragtag group to help him enact a mad-brilliant plot: the assassination of a tyrant. Levinson's cast of unlikely heroes includes Aleksandr Kogan, a machine-gunner in Levinson's Red Army band who has since become one of Moscow's premier surgeons; Frederick Lewis, an African American who came to the USSR to build smelters and stayed to work as an engineer, learning Russian, Esperanto, and Yiddish; and Kima Petrova, an enigmatic young woman with a score to settle. While the setting is Soviet Russia, the backdrop is Shakespeare: A mad king has a diabolical plan to exterminate and deport his country's remaining Jews. And wandering through the narrative, like a crazy Soviet Ragtime, are such historical figures as Paul Robeson, Solomon Mikhoels, and Marc Chagall. As hilarious as it is moving, as intellectual as it is violent--with echoes of Inglourious Basterds and Seven Samurai--THE YID is a tragicomic masterpiece of historical fiction"--

From Dust, a Flame

From Dust, a Flame
Author: Rebecca Podos
Publisher: HarperCollins
Total Pages: 356
Release: 2022-03-08
Genre: Young Adult Fiction
ISBN: 0062699075

Rebecca Podos, Lambda Award-winning author of Like Water, returns with a contemporary Jewish fantasy of enduring love, unfathomable loss, and the power of stories to hold us together when it seems that nothing else can. Hannah’s whole life has been spent in motion. Her mother has kept her and her brother, Gabe, on the road for as long as she can remember, leaving a trail of rental homes and faded relationships behind them. No roots, no family but one another, and no explanations. All that changes on Hannah’s seventeenth birthday when she wakes up transformed, a pair of golden eyes with knife-slit pupils blinking back at her from the mirror—the first of many such impossible mutations. Promising that she knows someone who can help, her mother leaves Hannah and Gabe behind to find a cure. But as the days turn to weeks and their mother doesn’t return, they realize it’s up to them to find the truth. What they discover is a family they never knew and a history more tragic and fantastical than Hannah could have dreamed—one that stretches back to her grandmother’s childhood in Prague under the Nazi occupation, and beyond, into the realm of Jewish mysticism and legend. As the past comes crashing into the present, Hannah must hurry to unearth their family’s secrets in order to break the curse and save the people she loves most, as well as herself.

The Château

The Château
Author: Paul Goldberg
Publisher: Picador
Total Pages: 385
Release: 2018-02-13
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1250116104

"We have proverb in Florida...You know why it's good to be on beach?" Bill smiles, but says nothing. He wants the guy to keep talking. "Because on beach you are surrounded by idiots on only three sides." "And on the remaining side you have what?" asks Bill. "Sharks..." Paul Goldberg, the acclaimed author of The Yid, takes us behind the scenes of a Florida condo board election, delivering a wild spin on Miami Beach, petty crime, Jewish identity, and life in Trump's America. It is January 2017 and Bill has hit rock bottom. Yesterday, he was William M. Katzenelenbogen, successful science reporter at The Washington Post. But things have taken a turn. Fired from his job, aimless, with exactly $1,219.37 in his checking account, he learns that his college roommate, a plastic surgeon known far and wide as the “Butt God of Miami Beach,” has fallen to his death under salacious circumstances. With nothing to lose, Bill boards a flight for Florida’s Gold Coast, ready to begin his own investigation—a last ditch attempt to revive his career. There’s just one catch: Bill’s father, Melsor. Melsor Yakovlevich Katzenelenbogen—poet, literary scholar, political dissident, small-time-crook—is angling for control of the condo board at the Château Sedan Neuve, a crumbling high-rise in Hollywood, Florida, populated mostly by Russian Jewish immigrants. The current board is filled with fraudsters levying “special assessments” on residents, and Melsor will use any means necessary to win the board election. And who better to help him than his estranged son? As he did in The Yid, Paul Goldberg has taken something we think we know and turned it on its ear. Featuring a colorful cast of characters, The Château guarantees that you will never look at condo boards, crime, kleptocracy, vodka, Fascism, or Florida the same way again.

The Wicked Son

The Wicked Son
Author: David Mamet
Publisher: Schocken
Total Pages: 210
Release: 2009-09-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 0805211578

David Mamet's interest in anti-Semitism is not limited to the modern face of an ancient hatred but encompasses as well the ways in which many Jews have internalized that hatred. Using the metaphor of the Wicked Son at the Passover seder (the child who asks, "What does this story mean to you?") Mamet confronts what he sees as an insidious predilection among some Jews to exclude themselves from the equation and to seek truth and meaning anywhere--in other religions, political movements, mindless entertainment--but in Judaism itself. He also explores the ways in which the Jewish tradition has long been and still remains the Wicked Son in the eyes of the world. Written with the searing honesty and verbal brilliance that is the hallmark of Mamet's work, The Wicked Son is a powerfully thought-provoking look at one of the most destructive and tenacious forces in contemporary life.

Sharp as a Needle

Sharp as a Needle
Author: Eliyahu Ki Ṭov
Publisher: Feldheim Publishers
Total Pages: 280
Release: 2005
Genre: Hasidic parables
ISBN: 9781583308332

This inspiring collection of stories brings the communities of Peshischa and Kotzk vividly to life. Sharp As A Needle captures the essence of Chassidus--the exalted personalities, the profound wisdom and insight, the unique approach to life-in one uplifting and beautifully crafted work. And don't forget volume 1, In the Lion's Den.

Those Who Knew

Those Who Knew
Author: Idra Novey
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2018-11-06
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0525560440

Named a BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR by * NPR * Esquire * O, The Oprah Magazine * Real Simple * BBC * PopSugar * Bustle * Kirkus Reviews * Lit Hub “A gripping, astute, and deeply humane political thriller.” —The Boston Globe “Mesmerizing [and] uncannily prescient.”—Los Angeles Times A taut, timely novel about what a powerful politician thinks he can get away with and the group of misfits who finally bring him down, from the award-winning author of Ways to Disappear. On an unnamed island country ten years after the collapse of a U.S.-supported regime, Lena suspects the powerful senator she was involved with back in her student activist days is taking advantage of a young woman who's been introducing him at rallies. When the young woman ends up dead, Lena revisits her own fraught history with the senator and the violent incident that ended their relationship. Why didn't Lena speak up then, and will her family's support of the former regime still impact her credibility? What if her hunch about this young woman's death is wrong? What follows is a riveting exploration of the cost of staying silent and the mixed rewards of speaking up in a profoundly divided country. Those Who Knew confirms Novey's place as an essential new voice in American fiction.

Wagner and the Erotic Impulse

Wagner and the Erotic Impulse
Author: Laurence Dreyfus
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 285
Release: 2010-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 0674018818

Though his image is tarnished today by unrepentant anti-Semitism, Richard Wagner (1813–1883) was better known in the nineteenth century for his provocative musical eroticism. In this illuminating study of the composer and his works, Laurence Dreyfus shows how Wagner’s obsession with sexuality prefigured the composition of operas such as Tannhäuser, Die Walküre, Tristan und Isolde, and Parsifal. Daring to represent erotic stimulation, passionate ecstasy, and the torment of sexual desire, Wagner sparked intense reactions from figures like Baudelaire, Clara Schumann, Nietzsche, and Nordau, whose verbal tributes and censures disclose what was transmitted when music represented sex. Wagner himself saw the cultivation of an erotic high style as central to his art, especially after devising an anti-philosophical response to Schopenhauer’s “metaphysics of sexual love.” A reluctant eroticist, Wagner masked his personal compulsion to cross-dress in pink satin and drench himself in rose perfumes while simultaneously incorporating his silk fetish and love of floral scents into his librettos. His affection for dominant females and surprising regard for homosexual love likewise enable some striking portraits in his operas. In the end, Wagner’s achievement was to have fashioned an oeuvre which explored his sexual yearnings as much as it conveyed—as never before—how music could act on erotic impulse.

Holocaust in Rovno: The Massacre at Sosenki Forest, November 1941

Holocaust in Rovno: The Massacre at Sosenki Forest, November 1941
Author: J. Burds
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 199
Release: 2013-12-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1137388404

In November 1941, near the city of Rovno, Ukraine, German death squads murdered over 23,000 Jews in what has been described as "the second Babi Yar." This meticulous and methodologically innovative study reconstructs the events at Rovno, and in the process exemplifies efforts to form a genuinely transnational history of the Holocaust.

The Book of Our Heritage

The Book of Our Heritage
Author: Eliyahu Ki Ṭov
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 1997
Genre: Fasts and feasts
ISBN: 9780873067645

Explores the Jewish year with great depth, sensitivity, and insight. Laws, customs and practices are all noted and explained, along with the words of our Sages in a wealth of Midrashic commentary.