This is the personal saga of a young Yugoslavian artist who, well aware of the Nazi danger from its earliest days, was drafted into the Yugoslav army and taken prisoner of war. Released from the work camp because of his personal courage, Alcalay returned to Nazi-occupied Belgrade where German reprisals caused the execution of over one hundred Jews. Despite the dangers, he and his family began a journey of escape that led them in various directions until an Italian family saved them. He survived to flourish in postwar Rome as a prominent member of a successor generation to the great Jewish Emotionalist movement that included Soutine, Pascine, Modigliani, Zadkine, and Chagall. Albert Alcalay is retired from Harvard University. - Publisher.
Accounts of significant sites in Hungary, Vichy France, Italy, and other nations, part of the multi-volume reference praised as a “staggering achievement” (Jewish Daily Forward). This third volume in the monumental seven-volume encyclopedia, prepared by the Jack, Joseph, and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, offers a comprehensive account of camps and ghettos in, or run by, Croatia, Hungary, Italy, Romania, Bulgaria, Slovakia, and Vichy France (including North Africa). Each entry discusses key events in the history of the ghetto; living and working conditions; activities of the Jewish Councils; Jewish responses to persecution; demographic changes; and details of the ghetto’s liquidation. Personal testimonies help convey the character of each ghetto, while source citations provide a guide to additional information. Documentation of hundreds of smaller sites—previously unknown or overlooked in the historiography of the Holocaust—make this an indispensable reference work on the destroyed Jewish communities of Eastern Europe.
Kindness for the Damned: A Novella of Intrigue, Love and Redemption in Sicily. This novella takes its readers and characters through ancient mysteries, confrontations with evil forces, along with the foibles of everyday life, in an entertaining yet thought-provoking story. A member of the British royal family in Sicily during the Napoleonic Wars is stabbed at an Ancient Greek Temple. He is saved by an old man and his son, which leads to the discovery of an ancient mystery of great healing powers. Two hundred years later, a U.S. company tries to replicate the mysterious formula brought to them by a doctor from Sicily in the form of a new healing ointment. Unable to re-create the ointment, the Company sends a high-powered corporate executive, Roberta Sax, and an ailing patent lawyer, Patrick Messina, to work with the doctor to de-code the formula in his laboratory in Sicily. In doing so, the Americans’ lives are changed forever by the people and the Island. Ultimately, the Americans and their Sicilian friends are threatened by an evil priest who has learned this ancient secret offers spiritual as well as physical healing powers: This priest wants this power to try to save himself from heinous crimes he has committed in the name of his Church, including the murder of a pope
In the Mountains and On the River chronicles the history of the Slovak Jews between 1848 and 1945. It is based on an in-depth historical investigation by the author Gabriel Groszman, numerous memoirs by members of his extended families and documents obtained from historical institutes in Slovakia, Italy, Israel and the United States. The narrative takes us through the successive periods of the Habsburg Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, democratic Czechoslovakia and the fascist Slovak Republic, culminating in the destruction of Jewish life in Slovakia during the Holocaust. The multi-generational family histories reflect the shared destiny of Slovak Jewry and their achievements in spite of discrimination, followed by open persecution leading to exile, death, or in the case of a fortunate minority, survival. The stories of several families come to life through the written and verbal accounts of the survivors and descendents of people murdered during the Holocaust.
The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Music Studies is the most comprehensive and expansive critical handbook of Jewish music published to date. It is the first endeavor to address the diverse range of sounds, texts, archives, traditions, histories, geographic and political contexts, and critical discourses in the field. The thirty-one experts from thirteen countries who prepared the thirty original and groundbreaking chapters in this handbook are leaders in the disciplines of musicology and Jewish studies as well as adjacent fields. Chapters in the handbook provide a broad coverage of the subject area with considerable expansion of the topics that are normally covered in a resource of this type. Designed around eight distinct sections -- Land, City, Ghetto, Stage, Sacred and Ritual Spaces, Destruction / Remembrance, and Spirit -- the range and scope of The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Music Studies most significantly suggests a new framework for the study of Jewish music centered on spatiality and taking into consideration temporality and collectivity. Within each chapter, authors have selected what they consider to be the most important material relevant to their topic and, drawing on the most authoritative insights from historical and ethnomusicology, Jewish studies, history, anthropology, philology, religious studies, and the visual arts, have taken a genuinely inter- or transdisciplinary approach. Integrated chapter bibliographies provide material for further reading. Together the chapters form a first truly global look at Jewish music, incorporating studies from Central and East Asia, Europe, Australia, the Americas, and the Arab world. Together they span world history, from antiquity until the present day. As such, the Handbook provides a resource that researchers, scholars, and educators will use as the most important and authoritative overview of work within music and Jewish studies.
One woman's discovery-and the incredible, unexpected journey it takes her on-of how her grandparent's small village of Campagna, Italy, helped save Jews during the Holocaust. Take a journey with Elizabeth Bettina as she discovers-much to her surprise-that her grandparent's small village, nestled in the heart of southern Italy, housed an internment camp for Jews during the Holocaust, and that it was far from the only one. Follow her discovery of survivors and their stories of gratitude to Italy and its people. Explore the little known details of how members of the Catholic church assisted and helped shelter Jews in Italy during World War II.
What did Pius XII do to aid Jews during World War II? This is an examination of efforts on behalf of Jews in Italy, the country where the pope was in a position to be most helpful. It finds that despite a persistent myth to the contrary, Pius and his assistants at the Vatican did very little.
"A careful historical account linked to personal narratives."-New York Times Book Review. Eighty-five percent of Italy's Jews survived World War II. Nevertheless, more than six thousand Italian Jews were destroyed in the Holocaust and the lives of countless others were marked by terror. Susan Zuccotti relates hundreds of stories showing the resourcefulness of the Jews, the bravery of those who helped them, and the inhumanity and indifference of others. For Zuccotti, the Holocaust in Italy began when the first "black-shirted thug" poured a bottle of castor oil down the throat of his victim, or when the dignity of a single human being was violated. She writes: "We might examine again how most Italians behaved from the onset of fascism. . . . Did they do as much as they could? Or should they, and the Jews as well, have recognized the danger sooner, with the first denial of liberty and free speech? We might also ask ourselves whether we, as creatures without prejudice, would act as well as most Italians did under similar pressures. Would we risk our lives for persecuted minorities? Would we be more sensitive to the first assaults upon our liberties, when the only ones really hurt in the beginning are Communists, Socialists, democratic anti-Fascists, and trade unionists? And finally, we might be more aware than we are of the horrors that a racist lunatic fringe can commit, even in the best of societies." Susan Zuccotti teaches modern European history at Columbia University. She is also the author of The Holocaust, the French, and the Jews. The introduction by Furio Colombo was translated into English for this Bison Books edition. The author of God in America: Religion and Politics in theUnited States, Colombo is professor of Italian Studies at Columbia.
Recently there has been a seemingly endless stream of books praising the glories of ancient and modern Rome, fretting over Venice's rising tides and moldering galleries, celebrating the Tuscan countryside, wines and cuisine. But there have been curiously few writings that deal directly with Italy as the country of origin for the grand- and great-grandparents of nearly twenty-six million Americans. The greatest majority—more than eight out of ten—of those American descendants of immigrant Italians aren't the progeny of Venetian doges or Tuscan wealth, but are the diaspora of Southern Italians, people from a place very different than Renaissance Florence or the modern political entity of Rome. Southern Italians, mostly from villages and towns sprinkled about the dramatic and remote countryside of Italian provinces even now tourists find only with determination and rental cars. In Under the Southern Sun: Stories of the Real Italy and the Americans It Created, journalist Paul Paolicelli takes us on a grand tour of the Southern Italy of most Italian-American immigrants, including Calabria, Basilicata, Puglia, Sicily, Abruzzo, and Molise, and explores the many fascinating elements of Southern Italian society, history, and culture. Along the way, he explores the concept of heritage and of going back to one's roots, the theory of a cultural subconscious, and most importantly, the idea of a Southern Italian "sensibility" – where it comes from, how it has been cultivated, and how it has been passed on from generation to generation. Amidst the delightful blend of travelogue and journalism are wonderful stories about famous Southern Italian-Americans, most notably Frank Capra and Rudolph Valentino, who were forced to leave their homeland and to adjust, adapt, and survive in America. He tells the story of the only large concentration camp built and run by the Fascists during World War II and of the humanity of the Southerners who ran the place. He visits ancient seaside communities once dominated by castles and watchtowers and now bathed in tanning oil and tourists, muses over Matera—what is probably Europe's oldest and most unknown city – and culminates in a fascinating exploration of how one's familial memory can influence his or her internal value system. This book is a celebration of Southern Italy, its people, and what it has given to its American descendants.
Encyclopedia of the Holocaust is a comprehensive, authoritative one-volume reference that provides reliable information on this ignoble and frightening episode of modern history. It features eight essays on the history of the Holocaust and its antecedents, as well as coverage of such topics as the history of European Jewry, Jewish contributions to European culture, and the rise of anti-semitism and Nazism. The essays are followed by more than 650 entries on significant aspects of the Holocaust, including people, cities and countries, camps, resistance movements, political actions, and outcomes. More than 300 black-and-white photographs from the archives at Yad Vashem bear witness to the horrors of the Nazi regime and at the same time attest to the invincibility of the human spirit. Best Specialist Reference Work of the Year - Reference Reviews UK
