Turn the pages of your family scrapbook or picture album and faces and memories leap out at you. Even if you never knew or don't remember some of your relatives, the snapshots and keepsakes make them familiar, and the old family stories never fail to bring a laugh and a warm memory. Now turn through the albums of other families--many other families--and see their grandfathers' and great-grandmothers' faces and read their stories. Why did they leave the old country? How did they get to America? What did they do when they got here? Why did they live the way they did? What did they think of the new homeland? What did other people think about them? How did they get along? The family album holds some of the answers. The American Family Albums tell the multicolored and often heroic stories of American immigrant groups, largely through their own words and pictures. Like any family album or scrapbook, the pages contain many period photographs and other memorabilia. These join with original documents--including selections from diaries, letters, memoirs, and newspapers--to bring the immigrant experience vividly to life. Each book is a pictorial and written record of the "old country" left behind, the journey to America, the life that the newcomers made for themselves in their adopted country, and the group's contributions to the brilliant diversity of these United States.
From Nates and Leon's deli to Hutzler's department store, a columnist for Baltimore's "Jewish Times" and the "Baltimore Sun" tells of neighborhoods and landmarks that have been important to the city's Jewish population from 1850 to today. More than 100 nostalgic photos help bring the memories to life.
"A superlative, riveting history" (BookPage) of Mary Shelley's creation of Frankenstein and the personal and poetic background behind the story. One murky night in 1816, on the shores of Lake Geneva, Lord Byron, famed English poet, challenged his friends to a contest--to write a ghost story. The assembled group included the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley; his lover (and future wife) Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin; Mary's stepsister Claire Claremont; and Byron's physician, John William Polidori. The famous result was Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, a work that has retained its hold on the popular imagination for almost two centuries. Less well-known was the curious Polidori's contribution: the first vampire novel. And the evening begat a curse, too: Within a few years of Frankenstein's publication, nearly all of those involved met untimely deaths. Drawing upon letters, rarely tapped archives, and their own magisterial rereading of Frankenstein itself, Dorothy and Thomas Hoobler have crafted a rip-roaring tale of obsession and creation.
In Manhattan and Brooklyn, New York, two Jewish girls learn about their heritage from their grandmother, who was born in Lithuania, escaped during World War II, and lived for a while in Israel.
This book is an examination of the use of the family album in contemporary Spanish culture. Through the analysis of films, narratives, painting, and a photographic exhibition produced from the end of Franco's dictatorship to the present, Kim interrogates how the family album serves as a critical instrument to reflect on the treatment of the past in contemporary Spain, the recuperation of repressed identities, nostalgia for collective memory symptomatic of the cultural discontent with the erosion of a national boundary due to globalization and the increasing claim of diversity, and ethical concerns for immigration. This study explores a broad range of works by canonical as well as less studied writers and artists, including Juan Goytisolo, Carlos Saura, and Marta Balletbo-Coll. Yeon-Soo Kim is Assistant Professor of Spanish at Rutgers University.
