The Stormy Life Of Lasik Roitschwantz

The first concise history of Russian-Jewish literary prose, this book discusses Russian-Jewish literarature in four periods, analyzing the turning points (1881–82, 1897, 1917) and proposing that the selected epoch (1860–1940) represents a special strand that was unfairly left out of both Russian and Jewish national literatures. Based on theoretical sources on the subject, the book establishes the criteria of dual cultural affiliation, and in a survey of Russian-Jewish literature presents the pitfalls of assimilation and discusses different forms of anti-Semitism. After showing the oeuvre of 18 representative authors as a whole, the book analyzes a number of characteristic novels and short stories in terms of contemporary literary studies. Many texts discussed have not been reprinted since their first publication. The material offers indispensable information not only for comparative and literary studies but for multicultural, historical, ethnographic, Judaist, religious and linguistic investigations as well.

What makes a great Jewish book? In fact, what makes a book "Jewish" in the first place? Ruth R. Wisse eloquently fields these questions in The Modern Jewish Canon, her compassionate, insightful guide to the finest Jewish literature of the twentieth century. From Isaac Babel to Isaac Bashevis Singer, Elie Wiesel to Cynthia Ozick, Wisse's The Modern Jewish Canon is a book that every student of Jewish literature, and every reader of great fiction, will enjoy.

Now available in paperback for the first time, Jewish Writers of the Twentieth Century is both a comprehensive reference resource and a springboard for further study. This volume: examines canonical Jewish writers, less well-known authors of Yiddish and Hebrew, and emerging Israeli writers includes entries on figures as diverse as Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, Tristan Tzara, Eugene Ionesco, Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppard, Arthur Miller, Saul Bellow, Nadine Gordimer, and Woody Allen contains introductory essays on Jewish-American writing, Holocaust literature and memoirs, Yiddish writing, and Anglo-Jewish literature provides a chronology of twentieth-century Jewish writers. Compiled by expert contributors, this book contains over 330 entries on individual authors, each consisting of a biography, a list of selected publications, a scholarly essay on their work and suggestions for further reading.

Bearing Witness offers personal insight into the collective experience of Poles over the last sixty years. One of Poland's leading social scientists combines objective, academic rigor with autobiographical, eyewitness accounts of historic events. Maria Jarosz reflects on the post-World War II world and how Poland and its people have been affected by changes in politics, power, and society. More than a memoir, the book offers keen insights into how history intersects with personal life. That is because Jarosz has spent her entire life studying people. As a reviewer of the original Polish edition noted, it is not possible to understand Polish society, its views and attitudes, and the mechanisms for managing them, without reading this work. This book spans the period from World War II through the communist era in Poland to the present day. It contains a wealth of dramatic detail, including a vivid account of how the author, who has Jewish roots, survived the Holocaust as a child. This English language edition is updated to include descriptions of recent events. The author focuses intensely on her experiences as one of a few surviving witnesses to the horrors of wartime Poland. Her sober reflections are interspersed with light-hearted anecdotes, testifying to Jarosz's resilient sense of humour?a cocktail that makes the book a captivating read.

Leopold Tyrmand, a Polish Jew who survived World War II by working in Germany under a false identity, would go on to live and write under Poland’s Communist regime for twenty years before emigrating to the West, where he continued to express his deeply felt anti-Communist views. Diary 1954—written after the independent weekly paper that employed him was closed for refusing to mourn Stalin’s death—is an account of daily life in Communist Poland. Like Czesław Miłosz, Václav Havel, and other dissidents who described the absurdities of Soviet-backed regimes, Tyrmand exposes the lies—big and small—that the regimes employed to stay in power. Witty and insightful, Tyrmand’s diary is the chronicle of a man who uses seemingly minor modes of resistance—as a provocative journalist, a Warsaw intellectual, the "spiritual father" of Polish hipsters, and a promoter of jazz in Poland—to maintain his freedom of thought.

This book traces the impact on Jewish culture in Western Europe of the migration of Russian Jews following the 1917 Revolution as they enabled the creation of a single sphere of Jewish culture common to all parts of the European diaspora.