The Cross And The Pear Tree

Tracing the dramatic lives, through 500 years, of the old and distinguished Sephardic Jewish family from whom he is descended, Victor Perera brilliantly re-creates the history not only of his own people but of an entire culture. The story he tells begins in Spain in the fifteenth century, when the Sephardim are offered a choice of conversion, exile or death. It is the story of a richly flourishing tradition - intellectual, religious, worldly and spiritual - interrupted by massively cruel events; a story of persecution, escape and renewal, carrying us from the Iberian Peninsula across Europe to the Holy Land and Central America. And the Pere(i)ras whose lives we enter are both fascinating in themselves and emblematic of the Sephardic diaspora created by the Inquisition and the Expulsion - some of them, under threat of torture and execution, capitulating to the Cross or becoming Marranos, crypto-Jews who practiced their ancestral religion in secret; others remaining loyal to the pear tree that became their symbol and crest. Among the Marranos: Ana Pereira, a merchant's daughter, a Sephardic convert in Portugal who, at age fifteen, was sentenced to wear penitential raiment and undergo spiritual penances in prison, where, under torture, she incriminated fifteen of her close relations. Among the reclaimed: the fabulously wealthy magnate and author Abraham Israel Pereira, who participated in the excommunication of philosopher Baruch Spinoza; and the beautiful Maria Nunes, who was abducted to Shakespeare's England, and rejected the marriage proposal of a duke and Queen Elizabeth's entreaties on his behalf, marrying instead a cousin in Amsterdam's first Jewish wedding. In nineteenth-centuryFrance we follow the meteoric rise of the brothers Emile and Isaac Pereire, who founded the French railroads and the Credit Mobilier banking system. Over the centuries, the stories of Pereras in all walks of life - among them rabbis and Kabbalistic scholars in the Holy Land - unfold

Resource added for the Landscape Horticulture Technician program 100014.

Beautifully illustrated - birds, bees, pears, pear blossoms. Family story with Mom, Dad, and two sisters - Anna & Emily. Lightning strikes their pear tree and splits it in half. They learn if the pear tree is cut down, Mrs. Dean will loose her pear tree too, because they cross pollinate. Will they loose their beloved pears and tree? Will Mrs. Dean lose hers too? Can they save the pear tree?

Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We have not used OCR(Optical Character Recognition), as this leads to bad quality books with introduced typos. (2) In books where there are images such as portraits, maps, sketches etc We have endeavoured to keep the quality of these images, so they represent accurately the original artefact. Although occasionally there may be certain imperfections with these old texts, we feel they deserve to be made available for future generations to enjoy.

Winner of the Garden Media Guild Awards Reference Book of the Year 2016, the Guild of Food Writers Food Book of the year 2016, and the BBC Food & Farming Awards 2016 for Outstanding Achievement. Accompanied by a beautiful and comprehensive website of the same name, this wonderfully unique book is an indispensable and one-of-a-kind guide. It tells the story of the pear from its delightful taste and wonderful appearance to breeding and cultivation, following the fruit’s journey through history and around the world. Beautifully illustrated with 40 botanical watercolour paintings by Elisabeth Dowle, The Book of Pears is the most up-to-date and comprehensive guide to the pear. Moving through continents and cultures, Joan Morgan celebrates the pear’s long history as both a fresh and cooking fruit. Revealing the secrets of the pear as a status symbol, some of the most celebrated fruit growers in history, and how the pear came to be so important as an international commodity. The pear directory, which makes up the second half of the book, covers the world’s ancient and modern varieties, each with full tasting notes and historical, geographical and horticultural detail. A fully illustrated version of this directory is shown on the author's website www.thebookofpears.fruitforum.net

An alphabetical reference with more than 1,500 entries that trace symbols to their cultural, religious, or mythological origins, and explain the hidden or encoded meaning that lies concealed beneath objects' and concepts' ordinary, outward appearance.