The Last Survivor And Other Modern Jewish Plays

Author : Eleanor Reissa
Publisher : Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
ISBN 13 : 9781511543514
Total Pages : 366 pages
Book Rating : 4.15/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Last Survivor and Other Modern Jewish Plays written by Eleanor Reissa and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2016-09-05 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This anthology by Tony Award nominated, Eleanor Reissa, encompasses six decades of modern Jewish life in the United States. These family plays explore the subtle and not-so-subtle effects on a modern woman in a post-Holocaust world. They are bound together by a unique slant toward life, death, God and love. They explore what is humanly and inhumanly possible. The plays go straight to the heart. The characters are brave and funny and tragic and mighty. These plays dispatch sentimental stereotypes, come to grips with life's disappointments and losses, and finally find the joy in knowing them. The Chicago Tribune says "profoundly, beautifully moving...a life affirming dance."

Author : Laura Alexander
Publisher : Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1527591638
Total Pages : 170 pages
Book Rating : 4.39/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Transformations of Trauma in Women's Writing written by Laura Alexander and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2023-01-10 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume examines the ways in which trauma alters women’s identities. While some of the chapters look deeply at individual experiences, many of the contributions look to national traumas and the consequences of political abuses, including colonial subjugation and genocide for women. The book shows that language has a transformative power to change us, to give us a great capacity for inner and outer dialogues and for healing and self-love. As shown here, women have historically employed autobiography and memoir to free themselves and others; rather than seeing the limit of form, they reinvent the parameters to offer a new relationship with language.

Author :
Publisher : State University of New York Press
ISBN 13 : 1438481918
Total Pages : 394 pages
Book Rating : 4.13/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Yiddish Plays for Reading and Performance written by and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2021-02-01 with total page 394 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Yiddish theater was first and foremost fine theater, with varied repertory and actors of high quality. The three stage-ready plays and nine individual scenes collected here, most of them well-known in Yiddish repertory but never before translated, offer an introduction to the full range of Yiddish theater. Fresh, lively, and accurate, these translations have been prepared for reading or performance by award-winning playwright and scholar Nahma Sandrow. They come with useful stage directions, notes, and playing histories, as well as comments by directors who have worked in both English and Yiddish theater. In the three full-length plays, a matriarch battles for control of her business and her family (Mirele Efros; or, The Jewish Queen Lear); two desperate women struggle over a man, who himself is struggling to change his life (Yankl the Blacksmith); and, in a charming fantasy village, a poetic village fiddler gambles on romance (Yoshke the Musician). The nine scenes from selected other plays are shaped to stand alone and range in genre from symbolist to naturalist, operetta to vaudeville, domestic to romantic to avant-garde. In her preface, Sandrow contextualizes the plays in modern Western theater history from the nineteenth century to the present. Yiddish Plays for Reading and Performance is not nostalgia—just a collection of good plays that also serves as an informed introduction to Yiddish theater at its liveliest.

Author : Eleanor Reissa
Publisher : Post Hill Press
ISBN 13 : 1637582560
Total Pages : 477 pages
Book Rating : 4.65/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Letters Project written by Eleanor Reissa and published by Post Hill Press. This book was released on 2022-01-18 with total page 477 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1986, when her mother died at the age of sixty-four, Eleanor Reissa went through all of her belongings. In the back of her mother’s lingerie drawer, she found an old leather purse. Inside that purse was a large wad of folded papers. They were letters. Fifty-six of them. In German. Written in 1949. Letters from her father to her mother, when they were courting. Just four years earlier, he had fought to stay alive in Auschwitz and on the Death March while she had spent the war years suffering in Uzbekistan. Thirty years later, Eleanor—a theatre artist who has been on the forefront of keeping Yiddish alive—finally had the letters translated. The particulars of those letters send her off on an unimaginable adventure into the past, forever changing her and anyone who reads this book. “‘The Holocaust,’ Eleanor Reissa writes in this unforgettable and courageous book, ‘is attached to me like my skin and I would be formless without it.’ A very personal story that is also a fundamental one of a woman trying to make sense of her life and family and of the shadows that go back before she was born. There is plenty of feeling and sentiment but it never feels sentimental. Her inimitable wit leavens the sadder scenes. This journey of discovery is riveting, told with tender insight, at times heartbreaking and at times heartwarming just like the Yiddish songs that have delighted Ms. Reissa’s audiences.” —Joseph Berger is a New York Times reporter and author of Displaced Persons: Growing Up American After the Holocaust “Among the great number of personal takes on the Holocaust, Eleanor Reissa’s book really stands out, both for its intelligence and courage and for the unique way she braids the inter-generational stories together. In this brutal, poignant, and searingly honest book, Reissa simultaneously pieces together the unfathomable story of her Holocaust survivor father, reckons with the guilt she came to feel as his uncomprehending American daughter, and manages somehow to find insight and purpose in the ashes. This extraordinary account of two parallel journeys will stick with anyone privileged enough to read it.” —David Margolick, a former reporter for The New York Times, author of several books, including, most recently, The Promise and the Dream: The Untold Story of Martin Luther King, Jr. And Robert F. Kennedy “The Letters Project is a wonderful book—funny, heartbreaking, and ultimately transcendent. Eleanor Reissa’s journey back into her family’s past makes for a gripping—and very human—international mystery. I highly recommend it.” —Tony Phelan, TV Showrunner for: Grey’s Anatomy, Doubt, and Council of Dads “Eleanor Reissa has written a gritty, fearless yet funny memoir about herself, her family, and the Holocaust. Once I began reading it, I was completely swept away until the journey ended. I was moved by the power of this uniquely personal yet universal story.” —Julian Schlossberg is an American motion pictures, theatre, and television producer

Author : Rachel Rojanski
Publisher : Indiana University Press
ISBN 13 : 0253045185
Total Pages : 338 pages
Book Rating : 4.88/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Yiddish in Israel written by Rachel Rojanski and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2020-01-07 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Yiddish in Israel: A History challenges the commonly held view that Yiddish was suppressed or even banned by Israeli authorities for ideological reasons, offering instead a radical new interpretation of the interaction between Yiddish and Israeli Hebrew cultures. Author Rachel Rojanski tells the compelling and yet unknown story of how Yiddish, the most widely used Jewish language in the pre-Holocaust world, fared in Zionist Israel, the land of Hebrew. Following Yiddish in Israel from the proclamation of the State until today, Rojanski reveals that although Israeli leadership made promoting Hebrew a high priority, it did not have a definite policy on Yiddish. The language's varying fortune through the years was shaped by social and political developments, and the cultural atmosphere in Israel. Public perception of the language and its culture, the rise of identity politics, and political and financial interests all played a part. Using a wide range of archival sources, newspapers, and Yiddish literature, Rojanski follows the Israeli Yiddish scene through the history of the Yiddish press, Yiddish theater, early Israeli Yiddish literature, and high Yiddish culture. With compassion, she explores the tensions during Israel's early years between Yiddish writers and activists and Israel's leaders, most of whom were themselves Eastern European Jews balancing their love of Yiddish with their desire to promote Hebrew. Finally Rojanski follows Yiddish into the 21st century, telling the story of the revived interest in Yiddish among Israeli-born children of Holocaust survivors as they return to the language of their parents.

Author : Glenda Abramson
Publisher : Hebrew Union College Press
ISBN 13 : 0878204741
Total Pages : 213 pages
Book Rating : 4.48/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Modern Jewish Mythologies written by Glenda Abramson and published by Hebrew Union College Press. This book was released on 2000-04-01 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based on the Mason Lectures delivered at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies in the winter of 1995, the ten essays in this volume demonstrate the function and dynamic effect Jewish mythologies in social, political, and psychological life. Eli Yassif's introduction illustrates the complex relationship between myth and ritual in modern Jewish culture. In a separate essay, he focuses on the ancient Jewish tale of the Golem, a myth that presents an exemplary test case for the exploration of cultural continuity. Using the testimonies of Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe to Britain and the battle on the plain of Latrun in the Israeli War of Independence, David Cesarani and Anita Shapira demonstrate that the process of creating myth is related in one way or another to attempts by specific social and ethnic groups to shape their collective memory. Along these lines, Milton Shain and Sally Frankental interrogate the view that during the apartheid period in South African history, South African Jewry operated on a higher moral plane than most other white South Africans. And while Nurith Gertz examines the male superhero that dominated the early national Zionist cinema and reflected the center of gravity in the Zionist myth, Dan Urian analyzes two Israeli plays produced in the 1990s that examine the myth of the biblical Sarah, rewritten from a feminist perspective. Other essays examine widely held cultural beliefs of contemporary Western Jewry. Jonathan Webber questions whether memory is an essentially Jewish value and remembrance a Jewish moral duty. Tudor Parfitt explores Western and Israeli perceptions of the Yemenite Jews, and Sylvie Anne Goldberg, in examining the evolving role of the chevrah kaddisha in Prague, discusses changes in perceptions of communal institutions and traditional and modern Jewish attitudes with regard to death. Finally, Matthew Olshan offers an analysis of Kafka's animal fables as parables for the Jewish response to tradition.

Author : David Brauner
Publisher : Edinburgh University Press
ISBN 13 : 0748646167
Total Pages : 456 pages
Book Rating : 4.66/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Edinburgh Companion to Modern Jewish Fiction written by David Brauner and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2015-06-07 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a critical overviews of the main writers and key themes of Anglophone Jewish fiction; highlighting the rich diversity of the field, identifying key themes, analysing the main trends in Anglophone Jewish fiction and situating them in a historical context.

Author : Selma Leydesdorff
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
ISBN 13 : 1351627198
Total Pages : 252 pages
Book Rating : 4.91/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Sasha Pechersky written by Selma Leydesdorff and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2017-06-19 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On October 14, 1943, Aleksandr "Sasha" Pechersky led a mass escape of inmates from Sobibor, a Nazi death camp in Poland. Despite leading the only successful prisoner revolt at a World War II death camp, Pechersky never received the public recognition he deserved in his home country of Russia. This story of a forgotten hero reveals the tremendous difference in memorial cultures between societies in the West and societies in the former Communist world. Pechersky, along with other Russian and Jewish inmates who had been prisoners of the Nazis, was considered suspect by the Russian government simply because he had been imprisoned. In this volume, Selma Leydesdorff describes the official silence in the Eastern Bloc about Pechersky’s role in the Sobibor escape and how an effort was made to recognize his actions. The narrative is based on eyewitness accounts from people in Pechersky’s life and a discussion of the mechanism of memory, mixing written sources with varied recollections and assessing the collisions of collective memory held by the East and the West. Specifically, this book critiques the ideological refusal of many societies to acknowledge the suffering of Jews at Sobibor. Offering fascinating insights into a crucial period of history, emphasizing that Jews were not passive in the face of German violence, and exploring the history of the Jews who fell victim to Stalinism after surviving Nazism, this is valuable reading for students and scholars of the Holocaust and the position of Jews under Communism.

Author : Ruth R. Wisse
Publisher : University of Washington Press
ISBN 13 : 0295805676
Total Pages : 147 pages
Book Rating : 4.72/5 ( download)

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Download or read book I. L. Peretz and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture written by Ruth R. Wisse and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2015-07-01 with total page 147 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: I. L. Peretz (1852–1915), the father of modern Yiddish literature, was a master storyteller and social critic who advocated a radical shift from religious observance to secular Jewish culture. Wisse explores Peretz’s writings in relation to his ideology, which sought to create a strong Jewish identity separate from the trappings of religion.

Author : Jason Sherman
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 380 pages
Book Rating : 4.69/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Modern Jewish Plays written by Jason Sherman and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Six plays, six playwrights, six takes on Israel.