Thirty years ago, I wrote a preface to The Book of Abraham by Marek Halter, the amazing saga of a Jewish family, his own, across two thousand years of history. Today, with The Jewish Odyssey, the story of that Jewish family has become the history of the Jewish people. A history of four millenniums, which, under the pen of Marek Halter, reads like an intelligent novel. Shimon Peres, president of the State of Israel and recipient of the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize --
In The Odyssey of an Apple Thief, Moishe Rozenbaumas (1922–2016) recounts his fascinating life, from his Lithuanian boyhood, to the fraught experiences that take him across Europe and Central Asia and back again, to his daring escape from Soviet Russia to build a new life in Paris. Along the way, we get a rarely seen portrait of the lives of working-class Jewish youth in Telz/Telsiai, a religious town renowned for its yeshiva. We hear of the games children played, the theft of apples from a Catholic orchard, and Rozenbaumas’s early apprenticeship as a tailor once his father leaves the country. The war breaks out and the teenaged Rozenbaumas flees Lithuania alone, unable to convince his mother and sibling to go with him. We learn of his life as a starved refugee in an Uzbek kolkhoz, his escape into the Red Army, and his unlikely work in the reconnaissance unit of the Soviet Army. After the war, Rozenbaumas is drafted into the Marxist-Leninist university and as a cadre of the Communist Party, ultimately escaping in 1956 with his family to Paris, where he and his wife give an openly Jewish education to their children. In the vast literature of memory written by Jewish witnesses before, during, and after WWII, Rozenbaumas’s account stands out for the singularity of his experience and for his deft narration of events of mythological dimension from a personal perspective. The Odyssey of an Apple Thief offers not only invaluable testimony of this historical moment but also an illuminating and original portrait of Lithuanian Jews in the twentieth century.
A unique saga of the Jewish People in modern times, spanning history, countries, and the spectrum of human emotion. Occasionally one comes across a book, whose impact is unexpected and inspirational. This moving and compelling saga confronts the problems that preoccupied the Jewish People of Europe on the threshold of modern times, recounting one family's fascinating story, told through the eyes of a young boy. With a backdrop of the great changes that shaped the face of the world in the first half of the 20th Century, the events, dates and names of localities and personages are fully authentic, forming an impressive work of literature.
An intimate and profoundly moving Jewish family history—a story of displacement, prejudice, hope, despair, and love. In this luminous memoir, award-winning New York Times columnist Roger Cohen turns a compassionate yet discerning eye on the legacy of his own forebears. As he follows them across continents and decades, mapping individual lives that diverge and intertwine, vital patterns of struggle and resilience, valued heritage and evolving loyalties (religious, ethnic, national), converge into a resonant portrait of cultural identity in the modern age. Beginning in the nineteenth century and continuing through to the present day, Cohen tracks his family’s story of repeated upheaval, from Lithuania to South Africa, and then to England, the United States, and Israel. It is a tale of otherness marked by overt and latent anti-Semitism, but also otherness as a sense of inheritance. We see Cohen’s family members grow roots in each adopted homeland even as they struggle to overcome the loss of what is left behind and to adapt—to the racism his parents witness in apartheid-era South Africa, to the familiar ostracism an uncle from Johannesburg faces after fighting against Hitler across Europe, to the ambivalence an Israeli cousin experiences when tasked with policing the occupied West Bank. At the heart of The Girl from Human Street is the powerful and touching relationship between Cohen and his mother, that “girl.” Tortured by the upheavals in her life yet stoic in her struggle, she embodies her son’s complex inheritance. Graceful, honest, and sweeping, Cohen’s remarkable chronicle of the quest for belonging across generations contributes an important chapter to the ongoing narrative of Jewish life.
An exciting debut cookbook that confirms the arrival of a new guru chef . . . A moving, deeply personal journey of survival and discovery that tells of the evolution of a cuisine and of the transformative power and magic of food and cooking. From the two-time James Beard Award-winning chef whose celebrated New Orleans restaurants have been hailed as the country's most innovative and best by Bon Appétit, Food & Wine, Saveur, GQ, and Esquire. "Alon's journey is as gripping and as seductive as his cooking . . . Lovely stories, terrific food." --Yotam Ottolenghi, author of Jerusalem: A Cookbook "Breathtaking. Bravo." --Joan Nathan, author of King Solomon's Table Alon Shaya's is no ordinary cookbook. It is a memoir of a culinary sensibility that begins in Israel and wends its way from the U.S.A. (Philadelphia) to Italy (Milan and Bergamo), back to Israel (Jerusalem) and comes together in the American South, in the heart of New Orleans. It's a book that tells of how food saved the author's life and how, through a circuitous path of (cooking) twists and (life-affirming) turns the author's celebrated cuisine--food of his native Israel with a creole New Orleans kick came to be, along with his award-winning New Orleans restaurants: Shaya, Domenica, and Pizza Domenica, ranked by Esquire, Bon Appétit, and others as the best new restaurants in the United States. These are stories of place, of people, and of the food that connects them, a memoir of one man's culinary sensibility, with food as the continuum throughout his journey--guiding his personal and professional decisions, punctuating every memory, choice, every turning point in his life. Interspersed with glorious full-color photographs and illustrations that follow the course of all the flavors Shaya has tried, places he's traveled, things he's experienced, lessons he's learned--more than one hundred recipes--from Roasted Chicken with Harissa to Speckled Trout with Tahini and Pine Nuts; Crab Cakes with Preserved Lemon Aioli; Roasted Cast-Iron Ribeye; Marinated Soft Cheese with Herbs and Spices; Buttermilk Biscuits; and Whole Roasted Cauliflower with Whipped Feta.
NAMED A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF THE YEAR BY KIRKUS REVIEWS A riveting study of the intersections between Jewish and Latin American culture, this immigrant family memoir recounts history with psychological insight and the immediacy of a thriller. In Nuestra América, eminent anthropologist and historian Claudio Lomnitz traces his grandparents’ exile from Eastern Europe to South America. At the same time, the book is a pretext to explain and analyze the worldview, culture, and spirit of countries such as Peru, Colombia, and Chile, from the perspective of educated Jewish emigrants imbued with the hope and determination typical of those who escaped Europe in the 1920s. Lomnitz’s grandparents, who were both trained to defy ghetto life with the pioneering spirit of the early Zionist movement, became intensely involved in the Peruvian leftist intellectual milieu and its practice of connecting Peru’s indigenous past to an emancipatory internationalism that included Jewish culture and thought. After being thrown into prison supposedly for their socialist leanings, Lomnitz’s grandparents were exiled to Colombia, where they were subject to its scandals, its class system, its political life. Through this lens, Lomnitz explores the almost negligible attention and esteem that South America holds in US public opinion. The story then continues to Chile during World War II, Israel in the 1950s, and finally to Claudio’s youth, living with his parents in Berkeley, California, and Mexico City.
"The religious and ethical contribution of the Judaism to civilization has been rightly acknowledged. The seminal role the Jews have played in the technological evolution of civilization has been largely overlooked." "This remarkable book uses the history of glassmaking as a foil with which new light is shed on the hidden history of that phenomenally creative people. During his association with the glassmakers of Venice, the author uncovered an intriguing historical symbiosis between the Jews and the art of glassmaking. The revelation impelled him to launch an intensive, eight-year campaign of research which led him across three continents and through 4000 years of human history. He discovered that the vitric arts, conceived in Akkadia among the progenitors of the Jews, was subsequently borne by the Jews into the Diaspora, an enthralling historical odyssey which has never been told in its entirety." "Many myths are shattered in the course of following the adventurous path of the art from its Akkadian roots through Canaan, Egypt, Rome, Persia, China and the West. Drawing upon a wealth of archeological, Biblical, archival and historical material, an intense beam of light is cast into the darker recesses of history in which conquered peoples suffer the indignity of having the record of their accomplishments obliterated by their conquerors, a process the author terms "Institutionalized Obfuscation."" "The peculiar parallelism between the movement of the Jews and the vitric arts bears historical connotations which stretch far beyond glassmaking; the very foundation upon which classic versions of history is based is demolished by the revelations which erupt from the pages of the book."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
From the Pulitzer Prize–winning bestselling author of Alexander Hamilton, the inspiration for the hit Broadway musical, comes this definitive biography of the Warburgs, one of the great German-Jewish banking families of the twentieth century. Bankers, philanthropists, scholars, socialites, artists, and politicians, the Warburgs stood at the pinnacle of German (and, later, of German-American) Jewry. They forged economic dynasties, built mansions and estates, assembled libraries, endowed charities, and advised a German kaiser and two American presidents. But their very success made the Warburgs lightning rods for anti-Semitism, and their sense of patriotism became increasingly dangerous in a Germany that had declared Jews the enemy. Ron Chernow's hugely fascinating history is a group portrait of a clan whose members were renowned for their brilliance, culture, and personal energy yet tragically vulnerable to the dark and irrational currents of the twentieth century.
