Shtetl Love Song

Through delicious drawings, yiddish songs along with their English translations, Songs of the Shtetl takes us on a sentimental journey to an small East European Jewish community from long ago. There is a parade of endearing characters: the miracle working rabbi, the rich boss, the poor, hard-working Hasid, the prankish tailor, the wandering musicians, and of course, the matchmaker. The book is filled with affection, tenderness, endearment, charm, and humor.

This is a unique exploration of the experience of children who survived the Holocaust—including Roma and Sinti victims—and the genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, and Bosnia. Children are among the principal victims of armed conflicts and slaughters; nonetheless, they perceive events through the prism of their unique perspective and have a different range of coping techniques than adults. This overview of the writings of ninety-one child survivors bears evidence to a wide range of human ruthlessness. The author presents little-known texts along with famous memoirs and autobiographical fiction, with abundant quotations. Many of these are not only compelling as historical testimony, but poetic, moving and stirring. Yudit Kiss has not written a historical study or literary criticism of the children’s books. She explores, instead, what the authors went through and what they felt and understood about their experience. Accessible and captivating, this volume presents a close-up, human-size dimension of destruction. The books written by child survivors also describe the resources and means that helped them to remain human even in the deepest well of inhumanity, offering precious lessons about resistance and resilience.

This book presents a selection of the newest research on themes amplified by the sixth annual Beyond Camps and Forced Labour conference on the post-Holocaust period, including ‘displaced persons’, reception and resettlement, exiles and refugees, trials and justice, reparation and restitution, and memory and testimony. The chapters highlight new, transnational approaches and findings based on underused and newly opened archives, including compensation files of the British government; on historical actors often on the periphery within English-language historiography, including Romanian and Hungarian survivors; and new approaches such as the spatial history of Drancy, as well as geographies that have undergone less scrutiny, for example, Tehran, Chile, Mexico and Cyprus. This volume represents the vibrant and varied state of research on the aftermath of the Holocaust.

Experience the story of the world's most famous Jewish song, as told by the song herself. In her spare, poetic text, Freda Lewkowicz has personified the song of Hava Nagila and made her the narrator of her own story, known simply as "Hava." Renowned Indian-American Jewish illustrator Siona Benjamin, who is known for her blue characters, draws Hava as a young blue girl in a sari. Follow Hava as she spreads joy and hope throughout the world.

This extraordinary novel is part of Grigory Kanovich’s “Litvak saga,” his tribute to Jewish life before the Holocaust. Set in a small Lithuanian town in the late nineteenth century, the story begins with the arrival of a stranger who sets everyone on edge and seems to know their secrets. Is he a messenger from God, a long-lost son, a saint, or a madman? As the stranger in the velvet yarmulke makes his rounds, we meet an unforgettable cast of characters—Rabbi Uri, the aged rabbi; Itsik Magid, the strapping young woodcutter; Golda, the resourceful widow; Markus Fradkin, the wealthy timber merchant, and his beautiful daughter Zelda; Yeshua Mandel, the tavern keeper, his troubled son Simeon, and Morta, their devoted servant girl. A work of realism as well as a parable, Kanovich’s novel illuminates the most intimate fears, dreams, and longings of the shtetl’s inhabitants.

A pioneering exploration of the Jewish communities across the Asian continent and their dramatic rise and fall in modern times