Fire And Bread

Prayers, responses, liturgies, songs, poems, reflections, meditations, sermons and stories, covering the weeks from Easter Day to Trinity Sunday, including Ascension Day, Pentecost, Saints' days, Rogation days, environmental days and many more.

“By turns funny, tragic, astute, and enlightening, [Dreams of Bread and Fire] is an engrossing coming-of-age tale.” —Library Journal, starred review Half Jewish, half Armenian Ani is desperately in love with a New England boy with a trust fund as big as his appetites, and the farthest thing possible from the Old World accents and superstitions that filled her childhood home. But after leaving for a year in Paris, she receives a letter from him ending their relationship. Embarking on a series of romantic misadventures, Ani soon reconnects with a childhood friend. Elusive and intriguing, Van Ardavanian is preoccupied with the Armenian heritage they share and provides Ani with a new connection to her identity—even as she begins to suspect that he has a secret, and dangerous, identity himself. The dark shadows of history surrounding Van propel Ani into a profound and passionate series of journeys: a quest for a long-dead father, a search for the clues of a nearly forgotten genocide, and a love threatened by a quietly gathering storm of murder and retribution. “Kricorian does for young women what James Joyce did for middle-aged men: She allows us to scramble safely amid the debris of new love, rejection, sex and identity.” —Susan Salter Reynolds, Los Angeles Times Book Review

Winner of the Quebec Writers' Federation Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction Beena and Sadhana are sisters who share a bond that could only have been shaped by the most unusual of childhoods — and by shared tragedy. Orphaned as teenagers, they have grown up under the exasperated watch of their Sikh uncle, who runs a bagel shop in Montreal's Hasidic community of Mile End. Together, they try to make sense of the rich, confusing brew of values, rituals, and beliefs that form their inheritance. Yet as they grow towards adulthood, their paths begin to diverge. Beena catches the attention of one of the "bagel boys" and finds herself pregnant at sixteen, while Sadhana drives herself to perfectionism and anorexia. When we first meet the adult Beena, she is grappling with a fresh grief: Sadhana has died suddenly and strangely, her body lying undiscovered for a week before anyone realizes what has happened. Beena is left with a burden of guilt and an unsettled feeling about the circumstances of her sister's death, which she sets about to uncover. Her search stirs memories and opens wounds, threatening to undo the safe, orderly existence she has painstakingly created for herself and her son. Saleema Nawaz's characters compel us, intrigue us, and delight us with their raw, complicated humanity, and her sentences sing in the gorgeous cadences of a writer who chooses every word with the utmost care. Heralded across Canada for the power and promise of her debut collection, Mother Superior, Nawaz proves with Bone and Bread that she is one of our most talented and unique storytellers.

A compact and useful guide for Jewish brides and grooms about to embark on the building of a new home.

“Love blooms just as war tears two people apart” in this novel about an Armenian refugee family in Nazi-occupied Paris (The New York Times). All the Light There Was is the story of an Armenian family’s struggle to survive the Nazi occupation of Paris in the 1940s—a lyrical, finely wrought tale of loyalty, love, and the many faces of resistance. On the day the Nazis march down the rue de Belleville, fourteen-year-old Maral Pegorian is living with her family in Paris; like many other Armenians who survived the genocide in their homeland, they have come to Paris to build a new life. The adults immediately set about gathering food and provisions, bracing for the deprivation they know all too well. But the children—Maral, her brother Missak, and their close friend Zaven—are spurred to action of another sort, finding secret and not-so-secret ways to resist their oppressors. Only when Zaven flees with his brother Barkev to avoid conscription does Maral realize that the Occupation is not simply a temporary outrage to be endured. After many fraught months, just one brother returns, changing the contours of Maral’s world completely. Like Tatiana de Rosnay’s Sarah’s Key and Jenna Blum’s Those Who Save Us, All the Light There Was is an unforgettable portrait of lives caught in the crosswinds of history. “Moving . . . With a bittersweet love story, examples of everyday heroism, and a community refusing to give in to tyrants, Kricorian’s work sheds even more light on the German occupation of France.” —Library Journal

An exuberant and magical tale of an Armenian woman that encompasses her vivid life experiences through comic interactions and battles that she wages in her new country--with a domineering mother in-law, a tradition-bound husband, Americanized children, and the man she secretly loves.

Bread and Fire is about the everyday lives of Jewish women and the struggles and aspirations, failings and triumphs of their spiritual endeavors. The women whose writings appear in this book span a wide range of ages, backgrounds, perspectives and professions. In her own way, each one reveals God as an anchoring force in her life. Readers will find themselves laughing, crying and gaining reassurance and strength as they come face-to-face with these women women just like them who are moving forward in the ancient quest to find God in the everyday.