The Eternal Outcast

This book deals with the political history of Hungary in the mid 20th Century. It focuses on Hungary's Jewish population mass murdered by the Nazis in the 1940's leaving a gnawing emptyness in the center of the nation's fabric. The Nazi regime was followed by the brutality of communism. The story is told through the eyes of Mike - the husband of the author - who was brutalized by these two regimes, losing a part of his family, his personal liberty and every material possession he had. After immigrating to the States the difficulties of his life in the States is told; up until the day he finally found success in America even graduating Magna cum Laude from college at age 52.

Pëtr Filippovich Iakubovich represents the many young people whose opposition to the Russian state turned to extremism during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His conviction and banishment to forced labor and settlement in Siberia was an experience shared by many. But, unlike most, Iakubovich detailed his experiences in a thrilling and insightful roman à clef. Like the better-known accounts by Dostoevskii and Chekhov, Iakubovich’s novel paints a picture of his fellow criminal inmates that is both objective and insightful. “In the World of the Outcasts” proved especially popular, appearing first in serial form between 1895 and 1898, and then as a book which ran through three editions prior to 1917. Along with other exposés of official malfeasance and corruption, it helped to focus popular resentment against the Romanovs. The book reappeared in 1964, in one of the last breaths of fresh air before Khrushchëv was supplanted by Brezhnev’s neo-Stalinism. Laying bare the facts of Russia’s penal system like Dostoevskii’s “Notes from a Dead House” before it, and Solzhenitsyn’s “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” after it, Iakubovich’s “In the World of the Outcasts” is both a valuable historical document and a compelling work of literary fiction. This translation marks the first appearance of Iakubovich’s masterpiece in English.

A new generation of historians today is borrowing from cultural anthropology, post-modern critical theory, and gender studies to understand the social meanings of medieval religious movements, practices, figures, and cults. In this volume Sharon Farmer and Barbara H. Rosenwein bring together essays—all hitherto unpublished—that combine some of the best of these new approaches with rigorous research and traditional scholarship. Some of these essays re-envision the professionals of religion: the monks and nuns who carried out crucial social functions as mediators between living and dead, repositories for social memory, and loci of vicarious piety. In their religious life these people embodied an image of the society that produced them. Other contributions focus on social categories, usually expressed as dichotomies: male/female, insider/outsider, saint/outcast. Monks and Nuns, Saints and Outcasts is the first book to show the interaction of seemingly antithetical groups of medieval people and the ways in which they were defined by, as well as against, each other. All of the essays, taken together, form a tribute to Lester K. Little, pioneer in the study of religion in medieval society.

As a nation, the Philippines has a colonial history with both Spain and the United States. Its links to the Americas are longstanding and complex. Intercolonial Intimacies interrogates the legacy of the Spanish Empire and the cultural hegemony of the United States by analyzing the work of twentieth-century Filipino and Latin/o American writers and diplomats who often read one other and imagined themselves as kin. The relationships between the Philippines and the former colonies of the Spanish Empire in the Americas were strengthened throughout the twentieth century by the consolidation of a discourse of shared, even familiar, identity. This distinct inherited intercolonial bond was already disengaged from their former colonizer and further used to defy new forms of colonialism. By examining the parallels and points of contact between these Filipino and Latin American writers, Paula C. Park elaborates on the “intercolonial intimacies” that shape a transpacific understanding of coloniality and latinidad.

Revision of the author's thesis (Ph. D.)--University of the Philippines.

In his preaching, Dietrich Bonhoeffer‘s strong, personal faith--the foundation for everything he did--shines in the darkness of Hitler‘s Third Reich and in the church struggle against it. Though not overtly political, Bonhoeffer‘s deep concern for the developments in his world is revealed in his sermons as he seeks to draw the listener into conversation with the promises and claims of the gospel-a conversation readers today are invited to join.