My Yiddish Vacation

Whenever Ruth and Sammy visit their grandparents, they get to brush up on their Yiddish. This Jewish language, a blend of German and Hebrew, is full of words that are fun to say: words like shvitz (sweat), feh! ("It stinks!"), and schmaltz (fat). Ruth and Sammy look forward to spending time with relatives. As Ruth would say, until they arrive at their grandparent's house, they are on shpilkes (pins and needles)! Actress Ione Skye drew upon her childhood experiences in this story of family ties, cultural exploration, and adventures under the sunshine.

"The exile book of...anthology series, number six."

“The finest, most moving and powerful memoir I have ever read.”—MAYIM BIALIK Rising young comedian Moshe Kasher is lucky to be alive. He started using drugs when he was just 12. At that point, he had already been in psychoanlysis for 8 years. By the time he was 15, he had been in and out of several mental institutions, drifting from therapy to rehab to arrest to...you get the picture. But Kasher in the Rye is not an "eye opener" to the horrors of addiction. It's a hilarious memoir about the absurdity of it all. When he was a young boy, Kasher's mother took him on a vacation to the West Coast. Well it was more like an abduction. Only not officially. She stole them away from their father and they moved to Oakland , California. That's where the real fun begins, in the war zone of Oakland Public Schools. He was more than just out of control-his mother walked him around on a leash, which he chewed through and ran away. Brutally honest and laugh-out-loud funny, Kasher's first literary endeavor finds humor in even the most horrifying situations.

An introduction to the ten major holidays of the Jewish people.

A poignant multicultural ode to family and what it means to create a home as one girl helps her Tía move away from her beloved Miami apartment. When Estrella's Tía Fortuna has to say goodbye to her longtime Miami apartment building, The Seaway, to move to an assisted living community, Estrella spends the day with her. Tía explains the significance of her most important possessions from both her Cuban and Jewish culture, as they learn to say goodbye together and explore a new beginning for Tía. A lyrical book about tradition, culture, and togetherness, Tía Fortuna's New Home explores Tía and Estrella's Sephardic Jewish and Cuban heritage. Through Tía's journey, Estrella will learn that as long as you have your family, home is truly where the heart is.

Alan Astro's pioneering collection of Latin American Yiddish writings translated into English includes works of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Uruguay, Colombia, and Cuba. Literature has always served as a refuge for Yiddish speakers, and the Yiddish literature of Latin America reflects the writers' assertions of their political rights. Stories depicting working-class life in Buenos Aires by José Rabinovich and Samuel Rollansky evoke the works of Abraham Cahan and Henry Roth. Rosa Palatnik in Rio de Janeiro, Abraham Weisbaum in Mexico City, José Goldchain in Santiago de Chile, and Salomón Zytner in Montevideo satirize bourgeois aspirations among Jews distancing themselves from their modest backgrounds--one of Philip Roth's major themes. Abraham Josef Dubelman and Aaron Zeitlin in Cuba ponder possible links to the crypto-Jews who came to the New World to escape the Inquisition. Themes of identity permeate Latin American Yiddish writing, and the works featured in this anthology provide a glimpse into Jewish life and culture throughout Latin America. As Ilan Stavans notes in the introduction, "This anthology documents that Yiddish--or, in one of its Spanish spellings, idish--also flourished in Latin America, leaving behind powerfully artistic testaments."

EXCERPTS FOR WEBSITE (Survivor's Odyssey - BID # 112614)As I sit by my window, gazing out over the autumnal park, the turning leaves straining in the gusting west wind, and a suggestion of morning sun stippling a clump of trees in the near distance, my thoughts return to the view from my childhood room on Lutherstrasse, a bourgeois, cobblestone-paved street in Wittenberg lined with neatly spaced lindens.How tranquil it all seemed then. Like other early childhoods contemplated late in life, mine seems idyllic in retrospect. A cozy home, devoted parents, playmates and relatives nearby. Who could have predicted then that Wittenberg, this ancient town, the cradle of the Protestant Reformation, would soon, like the rest of Germany, be swept up in the fanaticism and hysteria of National Socialism? When did I first realize that I was not just another German child, that I was merely tolerated, later reviled, and finally cast out? How strange it seems now that it took so long for me to comprehend that what was happening to me and my fellow Jews was extraordinary. **************Finally, in November 1938, all the accumulated hatred reached critical mass. And the dry tinder was ignited by an assassin's bullet. The son of Polish Jews, enraged by his parents' deportation, shot an attaché at the German Embassy in Paris, and this provided a sufficient pretext for what came to be known as Crystal Night (Kristallnacht), the opening salvo of the Holocaust. The official story was that the assassination so outraged the German people that they could not be restrained from seeking revenge. The truth is that, in a clearly coordinated effort across the entire country, synagogues were set afire, Jewish shops looted and destroyed, and Jewish homes invaded and destroyed. A mob mentality nurtured for years had, at long last, found its focus in action. *********************In the late '40s, hitchhiking was still a viable option. I was now in civilian attire, and I knew that drivers, even those open to hitchhikers, had to decide on a dime whether to stop. Most of those who picked me up whizzed past, screeched to a halt twenty yards further on, and watched me run to catch up. Once I got into the car, they checked me out and asked a few questions before deciding whether I was a keeper. Over the succeeding months, I learned a lot about people. Because I was a stranger whom they would never see again, many shared with me confidences that they could not share with family, friends or people in their communities. They told me of their addictions, their adulteries, their sexual proclivities. It wasn't because of who I was. Out of a deep need, they would have shared these confidences with almost anyone. And at times, it was uncomfortable for me to listen. I wanted them to stop talking, but I needed the ride and kept my mouth shut. *******************Aware that I would have to work part time, I answered an ad and landed a job with the Whelan's chain of drugstores as a "soda jerker." I worked two eight-hour shifts, one on Wednesdays from four to midnight, the other on Saturdays. Since I was low man on the totem pole, my employers felt free to shift me around from store to store as vacancies occurred. Most of my colleagues were unskilled drifters who worked only long enough to save a few bucks; few were college students like me. But I was soon disabused of any idea that this gave me special status. The best I could hope for was the occasional gig at an upscale location, but I was just as likely to be sent to a hellhole like the notorious hangout for pimps and drug dealers at the corner of Eighth Avenue and 42nd Street. The pay was lousy, the tips few and far between, but what I learned about people was a valuable adjunct to what I learned in my college classes. *************************Until about 30 years later. He was by now a gr

Brooklyn Roots is the story of Estelle Breines experience growing up in Borough Park, but it will resonate with anyone who grew up there, or for that matter, in any other urban, ethnic neighborhood. She paints word pictures that take you back in time, evoking the scenes, scents and sensibilities of the old neighborhood. Leslie Werstein Hann, writer/editor, HannWriting Inc. Once stirred, those memories rolled out in bursts, demanding recording. A description of the neighborhood of her youth emerged: her fathers pharmacy, shops along the avenue, and the house with its magnificent purple irises peeking above a stone wall as tall as a four year old. A small garment is remembered in detail: a dolls dress made from an old pillowcase, using a needle encrusted by baked on grease from the stuffed chicken necks her grandmother prepared; this the woman who braided the authors hair so tightly as surrogate parent while her parents worked to provide for them all in an era emerging from the Great Depression. There was the school she attended when the war began, and the celebrations at its end, and the places she and her friends explored as they grew. Her recollections of the neighborhoods artifacts appear as she envisions pickles and egg creams. Each shop along the 13th Avenue of her memory is sustained in its original character, even the corsetiere and milliner of the past, stuck there in time.