immigrant
Trumpet in the Wadi
ISBN: , SKU: , AUTHOR: Michael, Sami / Lotan, Yael, PUBLISHER: Simon & Schuster, Leading Israeli novelist Sami Michael shares his gift for navigating the cultural conflicts in modern Israel with "A Trumpet in the Wadi," a novel that transcends its Middle Eastern setting with an honest and heartbreaking story of impossible love and the strength of family. Set in the months preceding the Israeli-Arab conflict in Lebanon, this beautifully written tale is the coming-of-age story of two fatherless Christian Arab sisters, Huda and Mary, who live in the wadi -- the Arab quarter in the Jewish city of Haifa on the northern coast of Israel. An extraordinary bond of love and mutual respect unites the sisters -- polar opposites from their appearances to their tempers. Huda, the narrator of the story, is thin and withdrawn and, after abandoning her chance at marriage a few years back, has prematurely resigned herself to the monotonous life of an old maid. Her younger sister, Mary, is voluptuous, carnal, and perennially unemployed. Wrapped in the love of their sometimes bitter mother, their iconoclast grandfather, and the cheerful and omnipresent neighbor Jamilla, the sisters' lives change when a peculiar young Russian Jewish immigrant, Alex, moves into the upstairs flat. The melodies of the soulful trumpet player become the intoxicating theme music for Huda's unexpected reawakening -- and for Mary's dangerous foray into a love triangle with the heir of the local Muslim mob and her country cousin. Michael's internationally acclaimed novel is a major achievement, illuminating the vast range of interlocking relationships between Jews and Arabs, Muslims and Christians, men and women. "A Trumpet in the Wadi" is an honest, witty, and ultimately heartbreaking story -- onethat draws on the conflicts in the Middle East, but one whose insights into love and family can cross all cultural and political boundaries.
The Informers
ISBN: , SKU: , AUTHOR: Vasquez, Juan Gabriel / McLean, Anne, PUBLISHER: Riverhead Books, A virtuosic novel about family, history, memory, and betrayal from the brightest new Latin American literary talent working today. When Gabriel Santoro's biography is scathingly reviewed by his own father, a public intellectual and famous BogotA rhetorician, Gabriel could not imagine what had pierced his icy exterior to provoke such a painful reaction. A volume that catalogues the life of Sara Guterman, a longtime family friend and Jewish immigrant, since her arrival in Colombia in the s, "A Life in Exile" seemed a slim, innocent exercise in recording modern history. But as a devastated Gabriel delves, yet again, into Sara's story, searching for clues to his father's anger, he cannot yet see the sinister secret buried in his research that could destroy his father's exalted reputation and redefine his own. After his father's mysterious death in a car accident a few years later, Gabriel sets out anew to navigate half a century of half-truths and hidden meanings. With the help of Sara Guterman and his father's young girlfriend, Angelina, layer after shocking layer of Gabriel's world falls away and a complex portrait of his father emerges from the ruins. From the streets of s BogotA to a stranger's doorstep in s MedellA-n, he unravels the web of doubt, betrayal, and guilt at the core of his father's life and he wades into a dark, longsilenced period of Colombian history after World War II. With a taut, riveting narrative and achingly beautiful prose, Juan Gabriel VAsquez delivers an expansive, powerful exploration of the sins of our fathers, of war's devastating psychological costs, and of the inescapability of the past. A novel that has earned VAsquez comparisons to Sebald, Borges, Roth, and MArquez, "The Informers" heralds the arrival of a major literary talent.
Greek Mind/Jewish Soul: The Conflicted Art of Cynthia Ozick
ISBN: , SKU: , AUTHOR: Strandberg, Victor H., PUBLISHER: University of Wisconsin Press, Since the s, Cynthia Ozick's stories, novels, and essays have gradually earned high critical acclaim. Victor Strandberg's "Greek Mind/Jewish Soul" is a comprehensive study of this exceptionally gifted author, correlating her creative art and her intellectual development. Strandberg devotes considerable attention to Ozick's struggle to maintain her Jewish religion and culture within a society saturated with Christian and secular values. By examining the influence of Western philosophical and literary traditions on Ozick and her particular social circumstances, Strandberg is able to ask larger questions about the merit of Ozick's work and its place within American literature. Strandberg begins by chronicling the cultural dilemmas of Ozick's early life. The daughter of struggling immigrant parents, Ozick sometimes endured anti-Semitic ostracism from classmates in the New York public schools. But even as she deeply immersed herself in her Judaic heritage, avidly learning Hebrew and studying Jewish history, she found the Gentile heritage irresistible, beginning with fairy tales in childhood and graduating to George Eliot, Edith Wharton, and Henry James. Her studies in Latin likewise awakened a love for classical literature that impinged powerfully upon her books, particularly "Trust" and "The Pagan Rabbi." By drawing on a range of sources, including his own ten-year correspondence with Ozick, Strandberg illuminates Ozick's thinking on volatile issues that troubled her during her formative years, including feminism, the Holocaust, and Jewish cultural survival. Strandberg then offers a close reading of her books and poems in chapters on "Trust, The Pagan Rabbi, Bloodshed," and "Levitation" and presents an astute analysis of her later novels, "The Cannibal Galaxy, The Messiah of Stockholm," and "The Shawl." After reviewing all the critical material written to date on Ozick, Strandberg concludes by rendering his own assessment of Ozick's literary achievement. He considers how "Jewish" her work is, how "American" it is, and finally, how major her seat is at the table of the canonized.