Prairie Sonata

Richly textured and lyrically written, Prairie Sonata is the story of Mira Adler and her journey from innocence to experience. Mira grows up in post–World War II Canada, in a close-knit Manitoba community founded by secular Jews from Eastern Europe. At the heart of her journey is the friendship that she develops with her teacher, Chaver B, a recent immigrant from Prague who is mysterious and intriguing and who Mira believes harbours a painful secret. Chaver B becomes deeply intwined in Mira’s life, and their relationship evolves, especially after he offers to teach her to play the violin. Little by little, Mira chips away at Chaver B’s past and soon comes to the shocking realization of what brought him to Manitoba. What she learns about his history both outrages and saddens her, yet she cannot stop herself from uncovering the truth about his life. While Chaver B attempts to reconcile his feelings of guilt, Mira struggles to understand a world that seems to be vastly different from the nurturing and seemingly untroubled one in which she grows up. And despite what she learns about Chaver B, herself, and the world around her, when she is older, Mira yearns for the chance to go back to her childhood. A coming-of-age story about music, love, friendship, community, and religion, Prairie Sonata is a riveting tale that will resonate with and captivate the reader.

Translations of selected poems by the Yiddish writer, covering the entire breadth of his career. Yiddish writer Avrom Sutzkever (1913–2010) was described by the New York Times as “the greatest poet of the Holocaust.” Born in present-day Belarus, Sutzkever spent his childhood as a war refugee in Siberia, returned to Poland to participate in the interwar flourishing of Yiddish culture, was confined to the Vilna ghetto during the Nazi occupation, escaped to join the Jewish partisans, and settled in the new state of Israel after the war. Personal and political, mystical and national, his body of work, including more than two dozen volumes of poetry, several of stories, and a memoir, demonstrated the ways in which Yiddish creativity simultaneously balanced the imperatives of mourning and revival after the Holocaust. In The Full Pomegranate, Richard J. Fein selects and translates some of Sutzkever’s best poems covering the full breadth of his career. Fein’s translations appear alongside the original Yiddish, while an introduction by Justin Cammy situates Sutzkever in both historical and literary context. “Richard Fein is among the best translators of Yiddish poetry into English—the best now, and, for that matter, among the best ever. He has a deep, inward sense of Yiddish poems, both intuitive and analytic, and a patient tenacity in burrowing into them. He also has what is still rarer, a beautifully fine ear for diction and rhythm; the translations are alive on the page, every word is necessary, every cadence has its music. “The poems of Avrom Sutzkever were a challenge to him; he writes, candidly, ‘they wanted me to find new powers in my English.’ There is a special, precious audacity in accepting such a challenge, and Fein has indeed found the new powers the poems demanded.” — Lawrence Rosenwald, Wellesley College PRAISE FOR THE FULL POMEGRANATE “Avrom Sutzkever has no more loving translator than fellow poet Richard Fein. Even those who think they ‘do not understand poetry’ will be inspired by the poet who bore witness to the most dramatic points of modern Jewish experience and could transmit their power. Strength and spirit fuse in Sutzkever, wit and insight, moral confidence and grace. Our thanks to the translator and to Justin Cammy’s introduction for bringing this Jewish cultural landmark to English readers.” — Ruth R. Wisse, author of No Joke: Making Jewish Humor “Richard Fein’s translations strive for the impossible acrobatics of Sutzkever’s writing, from the rare alchemy of his striking metaphors to a postwar longing for poetic redemption in the face of destruction. To capture just an echo of Sutzkever’s singular voice would be an achievement. This collection, simultaneously careful and daring in its choices, amplifies that echo to the maximum that the English language would allow.” — Saul Noam Zaritt, Harvard University “In dialogue with Avrom Sutzkever, Richard Fein offers us a vibrant selection of the poet’s works in a beautiful facing-page translation. Sutzkever’s superbly inventive Yiddish imagery and wordcraft inspired Fein, the poet-translator, to dynamically engage both Yiddish and English, with remarkable and moving results.” — Ellen Kellman, Brandeis University

Longlisted for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection Winner of the Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction, the stories in What Isn't Remembered explore the burden, the power, and the nature of love between people who often feel misplaced and estranged from their deepest selves and the world, where they cannot find a home. The characters yearn not only to redefine themselves and rebuild their relationships but also to recover lost loves--a parent, a child, a friend, a spouse, a partner. A young man longs for his mother's love while grieving the loss of his older brother. A mother's affair sabotages her relationship with her daughter, causing a lifelong feud between the two. A divorced man struggles to come to terms with his failed marriage and his family's genocidal past while trying to persuade his father to start cancer treatments. A high school girl feels responsible for the death of her best friend, and the guilt continues to haunt her decades later. Evocative and lyrical, the tales in What Isn't Remembered uncover complex events and emotions, as well as the unpredictable ways in which people adapt to what happens in their lives, finding solace from the most surprising and unexpected sources.

This book argues that the need for music, and the ability to produce and enjoy it, is an essential element in human nature. Every society in history has produced some characteristic style of music. Music, like the other arts, tells us truths about the world through its impact on our emotional life. There is a structural correspondence between society and music. The emergence of 'modern art music' and its stylistic changes since the rise of capitalist social relations reflect the development of capitalist society since the decline of European feudalism. The leading composers of the different eras expressed in music the aspirations of the dominant or aspiring social classes. Changes in musical style not only reflect but in turn help to shape changes in society. This book analyses the stylistic changes in music from the emergence of ‘tonality’ in the late seventeenth century until the Second World War.

When most people think of the prairies, they picture endless flat plains, miles of farms with grain waving in the wind, gentle, undulating hills, and vast cattle ranches. But to the people who live there, particularly the children, the prairies are much more. A Prairie Alphabet offers the adult and child alike a remarkable tour – from the grain elevators that are an integral part of the landscape, to oil rigs that pop up like “grasshoppers,” to fairs and rodeos, to auctions, barns, combines, and dugouts.

What if there was a ghost in your brother's room? This kid-friendly mystery about three friends who try to help a restless spirit find peace is perfect for fans of Under the Egg and The Book Scavenger. It stinks. Danny's older brother has moved out and gone to college--and Danny doesn't even get his nice big room. But you know what's worse? It seems that he's left behind an angry ghost! With the help of his friends Nat and Gus, Danny interviews everyone his Brooklyn neighborhood to find out about spirits. Is it an Arabian ghoul? A Korean gwishin? A Polish haunting? Maybe the answer lies with Danny's own bubbe and her tales of a dybbuk, a Jewish spirit. In the end, one thing is certain: a good night's rest is hard to get when a ghost is around.

A brilliant, clear-eyed new consideration of the visual representation of violence in our culture--its ubiquity, meanings, and effects Watching the evening news offers constant evidence of atrocity--a daily commonplace in our "society of spectacle." But are viewers inured -or incited--to violence by the daily depiction of cruelty and horror? Is the viewer's perception of reality eroded by the universal availability of imagery intended to shock? In her first full-scale investigation of the role of imagery in our culture since her now-classic book On Photography defined the terms of the debate twenty-five years ago, Susan Sontag cuts through circular arguments about how pictures can inspire dissent or foster violence as she takes a fresh look at the representation of atrocity--from Goya's The Disasters of War to photographs of the American Civil War, lynchings of blacks in the South, and Dachau and Auschwitz to contemporary horrific images of Bosnia, Sierra Leone, Rwanda, and New York City on September 11, 2001. As John Berger wrote when On Photography was first published, "All future discussions or analysis of the role of photography in the affluent mass-media societies is now bound to begin with her book." Sontag's new book, a startling reappraisal of the intersection of "information", "news," "art," and politics in the contemporary depiction of war and disaster, will be equally essential. It will forever alter our thinking about the uses and meanings of images in our world.