Bøger udgivet af Mandel Vilar Press

"This book is a Torah conversation-starter for families on Shabbat, for religious school instructors with students of all ages, for individuals who have never found a way to read the entire Torah in bite-size, relatable nuggets, and for young clergy looking for some sermon ideas if they're stuck! Most of all, it is a snapshot of what Torah study is meant to be: a real-time, candid, instructive, challenging exchange of responses to ancient text.For the first time, in a single volume, readers can take a tour of the entire Torah through the medium of one challenging, instructive, irreverent, animated conversation. Rabbi Dov Linzer, an Orthodox rabbi, and Abigail Pogrebin, a Reform journalist talk their way through the Five Books of Moses with candor, humor, emotion, personal revelation, and scholarship."--Provided by publisher.

"Set in 1921, [this novel follows] Harrell Hickman and Willem Redd, [who] have returned home from no man's land and the brutality of war in the trenches in France. Neither has been able to resume what they were or might have been after living through the senselessness of bodies blown up and the crushing deaths from machine gun fire, poisonous gas, and mortars day after day after day. Back in the U.S., Hickman walks away from an overcrowded veteran's hospital where he is being treated for 'shell shock, ' a devastating mental disease that today is benignly called PTSD. Redd, who barely survived shattering wounds, is hospitalized at Walter Reed; on release, he returns to his family and home in Wisdom, Nebraska. Both Hickman and Redd happen to meet in Wisdom, where Hickman ends up after hopping freight trains west. The chance encounter of these damaged young men leads to a number of dramatic clashes that in their unfolding bear the semblance of foreordained Greek tragedy"--

ABOUT THE BOOK Novelist, critic, essayist, screenwriter, teacher, traveler, and art aficionado, Nicholas Delbanco has here compiled a mosaic of his life as he glances backwards and forwards from the vantage point of his eightieth year. Each home relocation with its inevitable remodeling becomes a metaphor for the reconstruction of the self over his lifetime. In episodic riffs, Still Life at Eighty revisits seven houses where Delbanco welcomed a panoply of literati, such as Mary Ruefle, Mary Lee Settle, Mary Robison, John Ashbery, John Cheever, John Irving, and John Updike. Each abode becomes a receptacle of memory, as he recalls his friendships with the likes of James Baldwin, Grace Paley, Frederick Busch, Donald Barthelme, and Russell Banks.  Still Life at Eighty is saturated with artistic appreciation, which colors Delbanco’s life from early childhood to his eightieth year. The grandson of collectors (whose paintings were plundered by the Nazis), nephew of a London gallerist, son of an accomplished painter, and a collector himself, Delbanco summons his reminiscences of art, artifacts, and artists as he pivots from a youthful artistic apprenticeship to become a prolific professional writer, sustained, and inspired by his wife of fifty-three years, Elena; his daughters, Francesca and Andrea; and five granddaughters. Delbanco finds solace in the things of this world: a Biedermeier desk, an Ekoi mask, and an instrument case that held the fabled Countess of Stanlein ex-Paganini Stradivarius Violoncello of 1707—all reminders of a treasured past. Together with these cherished artifacts, former homes, and the myriad writers and artists who slip in and out of this erudite memoir, Still Life at Eighty makes readers privy not only to Delbanco’s rich experiences, but also to the vast aesthetic wealth of his long life.

Beautifully translated by Shelley Frisch, The Number on Your Forearm Is Blue Like Your Eyes is a poignant and riveting memoir that sets a family story in historical context and brings psychological insight to bear on accounts of emotional trauma. Having achieved prominence as a pediatrician, child therapist, and international speaker, Eva finally decided to tell her story. In 2016, at the age of seventy-four, with the assistance of journalist Stefanie Oswalt, Eva Umlauf published Die Nummer auf deinem Unterarm ist blau wie deine Augen: Erinnerungen (Hoffmann und Campe Verlag).As someone who has endured the effects of the Holocaust from infancy, she writes, I wish for all that has happened to be understood and processed from diverse perspectives so that personal suffering, societal ruptures, and brutal transgenerational traumas can be prevented from being passed on to future generations.” This book draws on years of interviews, copious correspondence, archival research in Europe and Israel, trips to labor and concentration camps, and the author’s personal recollections.On November 3, 1944, a toddler named Eva, one month shy of her second birthday, was branded prisoner A-26959 in Auschwitz. She fainted in her mother’s arms but survived the tattooing and countless other shocks. Eva Hecht was born on December 19, 1942, in Novaky, Slovakia, a labor camp for Jews. Eva and her parents, Imrich and Agnes, were imprisoned in this camp until their deportation to Auschwitz. A month prior to their arrival there, several thousand mothers and their children had been gassed. Now that the Red Army was rapidly advancing in Poland, the murders stopped. Agnes, then pregnant with her second daughter, and Eva were still alive when the camp was liberated on January 27, 1945. Her father was transferred to Melk, a subcamp of the Mauthausen concentration camp, and died there in March 1945. In late April, Nora, Eva’s sister, was born. Agnes Hecht remained in the camp infirmary until her two little girls were well enough to travel, then brought them back to her home in Trenčín in western Slovakia. Eva grew up with a mother who had to “survive her survival”—the little family lived with the loss in the Holocaust of the husband/father, the mother’s three siblings, and the grandparents and great-grandparents. Having also lost her family’s fortune, Agnes worked hard to create a normal home life for her daughters. Like many survivors in the post-Holocaust era, Eva’s mother never talked about her experiences. Eva suffered frequent flare-ups of the illnesses she had suffered in Auschwitz. She did well at school and went on to study medicine in Bratislava. In 1966 she married Jakob Sultanik, a fellow Holocaust survivor who had resettled in Munich, Germany. Eva left the communist regime in Czechoslovakia in 1967 to join him in West Germany. There she began her practice as a pediatrician and later as a psychotherapist—and for the first time she had the opportunity to live out her Jewish identity. Unfortunately, Eva's husband, Jakob, died in a tragic accident when their son, Erik, was a small boy. Eva later married a fellow physician, Bernd Umlauf, and they had two sons, Oliver and Julian. Every so often, the horrors of Eva's early years would resurface in nightmares involving dead babies and Auschwitz gas chambers.

A portal into the perseverance of Jewish culture in the face of attempts to destroy it.To answer his son's question: what was it like growing up in Samarkand? Rabbi Hillel Zaltzman wrote and researched this memoir and history about Chassidic Jews who found refuge in Samarkand during the World War II and continued to live there under Soviet rule. This is a personal story for Zaltzman, who was born in Kharkov, Ukraine. When the Nazis invaded Kharkov, Zaltzman’s parents fled with their three young children to Samarkand (Uzbekistan). There they reconnected to other refugee Chassidic families, as well as some famous Chassidic rebbes also in flight. In Uzbekistan they created a thriving Jewish community until its institutions were abruptly shut down by Stalin immediately after the war. Still this Jewish community in Samarkand, Uzbekistan is remembered as shpitz Chabad—the epitome of Chassidic ideals and devotion.Zaltzman’s father kept him out of the Soviet schools, where atheism was promoted and Sabbath observance was impossible, teaching him furtively at home, until a neighbor discovered his existence at the age of 9. Zaltzman had no choice but to attend a public school then, but he still observed the demands of his faith and stayed home from school when necessary. Hillel studied with esteemed Chabad Chassidic rebbes who taught at great personal risk. If discovered, they could be sentenced to harsh labor in Siberia.Zaltzman credits his father’s unswerving commitment to his chinuch—his Jewish education—was beyond any compromise, and it was an exemplary expression of their Chabad brand of Chassidic Judaism: “The Chabad community was infused with a rich inner world of Chassidic vitality,” Zaltzman writes.Meanwhile, the Soviet regime remained obsessed with eliminating a Jewish religious identity; a special division of the NKVD (Soviet secret police) was assigned the task of destroying Jewish schools and yeshivas, and surveilling individuals through synagogue informers. Zaltzman records his experiences and adventures and those of other memorable people he has known and the sacrifices they made to share their love of Torah and Jewish learning in the secret underground yeshivas. He describes their attempts to celebrate Jewish holidays, make matzah, and obtain prayer books, as well as their other colorful escapades. He also tells of their exasperating experiences trying to obtain exit visas to leave the Soviet Union. The largely untold story of Chabad activism and heroism comes through with great immediacy in this first-person account of spiritual resistance to a Communist regime at war with the Jewish devotion to God and Torah. From the age 16, along with several other idealistic young men, Hillel Zaltzman was involved in Chamah, an underground Jewish organization that helped sustain and preserve Jewish life in the Soviet Union through education. Chamah established a network of underground Jewish schools that clandestinely taught more than 1,500 children over the years and provided material and spiritual support to Jews trying to obtain exit visas in the 1960s and 70s. Hillel himself was allowed to immigrate to Israel only in 1971, after years of trying. Now living in New York, he is the director of IChamah, an international organization which is devoted to serving Jews from the Former Soviet Union in Israel, Russia, and the US. Rabbi Zaltzman was honored for his humanitarian and Jewish outreach in the U.S. Senate in May 2016, as part of Jewish American Heritage Month.

By turns somber and funny but above all provocative, Elizabeth Benedict's Rewriting Illness: A View of My Own is a most unconventional memoir. With wisdom, self-effacing wit, and the story-telling skills of a seasoned novelist, she brings to life her cancer diagnosis and committed hypochondria. As she discovers multiplying lumps in her armpit, she describes her initial terror, interspersed with moments of self-mocking levity as she indulges in "natural remedies," among them chanting Tibetan mantras, drinking shots of wheat grass, and finding medicinal properties in chocolate babka. She tracks the progression of her illness from muddled diagnosis to debilitating treatment as she gathers sustenance from her family and an assortment of urbane, ironic friends, including her fearless "cancer guru." In brief, explosive chapters with startling titles - "Was it the Krazy Glue?" and "Not Everything Scares the Shit out of Me" - Benedict investigates existential questions: Is there a cancer personality? Can trauma be passed on generationally? Can cancer be stripped of its warlike metaphors? How do doctors' own fears influence their comments to patients? Is there a gendered response to illness? Why isn't illness one of literature's great subjects? And delving into her own history, she wonders if having had children would have changed her life as a writer and hypochondriac. Post diagnosis, Benedict asks, "Which fear is worse: the fear of knowing or the reality of knowing? (164)"Throughout, Benedict's humor, wisdom, and warmth jacket her fears, which are personal, political, and ultimately global, when the world is pitched into a pandemic. Amid weighty concerns and her all-consuming obsession with illness, her story is filled with suspense, secrets, and even the unexpected solace of silence.

Both a biography and history of Jackie Robinson that reinterprets Brooklyn's place in the Civil Rights Movement.

Mixing fictional and historical characters this haunting story is about Max Baer’s life in and out of the boxing ring.

Will Wootton's personal excursion into the sometimes perilous workings of small colleges is vivified by his evocative and literary writing

This is the first English language anthology of translations of baseball stories by major Latin American and Caribbean writers.

Twelve stories exploring the way of life, culture, customs, and ancestral wisdom of indigenous groups living in Ecuador's Equatorial Amazon.

THE STATE OF ISRAEL may be regarded as the quintessential Sci-Fi Nation - the only country on the planet inspired by not one, but two seminal works of wonder: the Hebrew Bible, and Zionist ideologue Theodor Herzl's early 20th-Century utopian novel, Altneuland (Old-New Land).Only mid-way through its seventh decade, the Jewish State cranks out futuristic inventions with boundless aplomb; wondrous science-fictional products like bio-embeddable Pillcams, wearable electronic diving gills, hummingbird spy drones, vat-grown chicken breasts, micro-copter radiation detectors, texting fruit trees, billion-dollar computer and smartphone apps like Waze and Viber, and last but not least, those supermarket marvels, the cherry tomato and the seedless watermelon.What Israel has yet to generate - and in this it stands virtually alone among the world's developed nations - is an authoritative volume, in any language, of Israeli speculative fiction. Zion's Fiction: A Treasury of Israeli Speculative Literature is intended to remedy this oversight. The book will pry open the lid on a tiny, neglected and seldom-viewed wellspring of Israeli literature, one we hope to be forgiven for referring to as "Zi-Fi."Zi-Fi: We define this term as the speculative literature written by citizens and permanent residents of Israel - Jewish, Arab or otherwise, whether living in Israel proper or abroad, writing in Hebrew, Arabic, English, Russian or any other language spoken in the Holy Land. In the main, however, this volume spotlights a small but growing pool of Israeli writers who have pursued deliberate vocations as purveyors of homegrown Hebrew-, English- and Russian-language science fiction and fantasy (SF/F) and other brands of speculative fiction, aimed at both the local and international markets. We showcase here a wide selection of stories, whose authors range across the entire gamut of the modern Israeli SF/F scene: men and women; young and not-so-young; Israel-born and immigrants; professional writers as well as amateurs; some are living in Israel, some are expatriates. More than a few have already published stories overseas, for others this is their first foray into the international arena. Many are part and parcel of Israel's SF/F fandom (more about which, see below), others are mainstream writers who at some point in their careers decided to use SF/F tropes as the best vehicles for their message and their whimsy. All of them, however, share one thing in common: by adopting the tropes of speculative fiction, they have all bucked, if not kicked in the teeth, a deeply rooted, widely held and long-standing cultural aversion, shared by a preponderance of Israeli readers, writers, critics and scholars, to most manifestations of indigenously produced as well as imported science fiction, fantasy and horror. It is the underlying contradiction between the aforementioned science-fictional roots and this primal aversion that, we believe, renders the very publication of this book a wondrous event.

Winner of 2020 International Latino Book Awards in the category "e; Best Political/Current Affairs Book - English"e;2019 Finalist for INDIES Book of the YearThis book is an insider's history and memoir of the battle for The Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986: its evolution, passage, impact, and its legacies for the future of immigration reform. Charles Kamasaki has spent most of his life working for UnidosUS, formerly the National Council of La Raza (NCLR), the nation's largest Hispanic civil rights and advocacy organization. He was a direct participant in the many meetings, hearings, mark-ups, debates, and other developments that led to the passage of the last major immigration reform legislation, The Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA). He reveals the roles of key lawmakers and a coalition of public interest lobbyists that played a role in opposing, shaping, and then implementing IRCA. His account underscores the centrality of racial issues in the immigration reform debate and why it has become a near-perpetual topic of political debate.

"It is absolutely imperative for this legacy of Elie Wiesel's to continue. It has to, and if it doesn't, it is our loss, and it will be an unfathomable loss." -Sir Ben Kingsley"Wiesel taught us that we must not forget; that there is no greater sin than that of silence and indifference. In doing so he has not just illumined the past, he has illumined the future" -Oprah Winfrey"There was something burning inside of Elie, a flame ignited by injustice and pain. He was willing to share that part of himself. Pain can make people retreat from life, but opened Elie to the world." -Kathleen Kennedy Townsend"He performed the alchemy of converting pain, injustice and horror into love, compassion and tolerance. We remember him not so much because he so often succeeded but because he never stopped trying." -Ted Koppel"I believe there is a risk of Elie Wiesel, the Holocaust, and other genocides being forgotten. Without a real effort to retain their memory, they may simply disappear from history. Elie Wiesel was a light in the night for the whole world, not just the Jewish one." -Father Patrick Desbois

It is 1968, the Cold War is raging, and the United States is bogged down fighting the ¿Communists¿ in Vietnam. The Berlin Wall is the symbol of a world cut in half, a punitive wall, isolating the Soviet republics that then formed the USSR. In the spring of 1968, the Czechoslovakian Communist Party experimented with "socialism with a human face"¿known then as the ¿Prague Spring.¿ Suddenly there was freedom of the Press; an end to arbitrary wiretaps; and citizens regained the right to travel without prior authorizations and visas. The borders opened to the West, consumer goods appeared in the stores---and the winds of freedom blew over the country. That summer, Alexander and Anna boarded their Skoda Felicia, a brand-new convertible, to join their daughter Petra in Bratislava, where she had just completed her brilliant medical studies. Tereza, the daughter of a railway worker who survived the concentration camps and a Pravda editor who had long taken in Hungarian refugees from 1956, stayed in a kibbutz in Israel to reconnect with her Jewish culture. Józef, a pastor defrocked for refusing to denounce parishioners to the Party, delivered his first uncensored sermons on the radio. Then, suddenly, on the nights of August 20-21, Soviet tanks invaded Prague to put an end to this brief liberalization experiment. For a few hours, the border with Austria would remain open. Vienna was an hour's train away. Everyone now must make a choice: leave or stay? Fleeing violence or resisting the oppressor? Faced with the invasion of our country by an overmatched foreign power, what would we do? Viliam Klimacek¿s historical novel looks back at these major events in Czechoslovakian history. Celebrating the identity of a people, its folklore, its beauty, and its vitality, he makes this novel personal and real by focusing on the story of ten people enmeshed in this difficult moment in history. By telling the human stories of the Czech diaspora, Klimacek reveals the impact of these rapidly moving events on his characters and the lives of their families (based on real people whose names have been changed). Through Tereza, Petra, Józef, Sena (Alexander), Anna and Erika, he tells us about the lives of these (extra)ordinary people¿their lives in Czechoslovakia, Their decisions to leave, their flight, their families torn apart and separated, the abandonment of all that they possessed for unknown elsewhere, their perilous journeys, their arrival in a new country, their reception and integration in a new country. The novel describes the vicissitudes and hopes of newcomers, mainly in Canada, the United States, Austria, England, and Israel, who face obstacles¿learning a new language, encountering red tape with registration, validating their diplomas and finding a job and housing. They quickly realize¿depending on their own situation that many will never see or visit the families they left behind in Czechoslovakia. The experiences that Klimacek¿s characters face, endure and overcome we all know will be repeated for untold millions again and again as people around the world flee intolerance, war, calamities in weather and other disaster in our contemporary age. Constructing his stories on very real testimonies, Klimacek¿s novel is simultaneously a hymn to tolerance, to acceptance of others, and to the need to support and help the weakest or the poorest. It leads us all to ask ourselves questions, to reflect and perhaps, with a little goodwill, to see certain things differently. While the story is at time dark, it is also full of hope. You may know someone in your own community whose experiences are mirrored in this novel and through your reading you may now appreciate their unbending spirit and desire for freedom and well being for themselves and their families.

Paul Gruhler opened his first studio in 1962 at the age of 21 - a year later he had a solo show at the DeMena Gallery in lower Manhattan. From the beginning, Gruhler, a self-taught artist, was compelled by what came to be known as geometric abstraction, in which the deliberative arrangement of color, line, texture, and scale, in paintings and collage, evoke from these disparate elements a sense of meditative harmony. For sixty years, he has continued to explore the subtle differences that can be made from color and line. Gruhler was fortunate in the early years to have met and become good friends with three older artists who were also important teachers and mentors - first Michael Lekakis, then Harold Weston and Herb Aach. Lekakis, a celebrated sculptor, who already had had exhibitions at the Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Museum of Modern Art's exhibition Americans 1963, took Gruhler under his wing, navigating him through New York's thriving avant-garde art scene. As Carolyn Bauer writes, "Michael Lekakis was instrumental in encouraging Gruhler to attend art events, while taking him to invite-only museum openings." He also introduced him to renowned artists - among them, Alexander Calder, Isamu Noguchi, Louise Nevelson, and Barnett Newman - whose works influenced the young Gruhler, as did such artists as Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still, and Ad Reinhardt. Lekakis was also instrumental in Gruhler's first show, giving titles to his paintings and writing catalog copy that drew upon his own abstract poetics. "These canvases," he wrote, are "multi colored fire densely cascades to suspension hanging a counterpoint of rhythmic patterns in space covering it like a shroud united by a golden fragmentation." Over these years Gruhler has had numerous solo and group shows in the U.S. in New York and Vermont, in Mexico, and abroad in Finland, Germany, Sweden, and The Netherlands. HARMONICS is both a retrospective and a current view of Paul Gruhler's intensive art. "My work," he says, "has been a meditative exploration of vertical and horizontal relationships in space, in order to achieve both harmony and tension within color, line and form."

PRAISE FOR WICKED WEEDSWicked Weeds named to top ten forthcoming books in science fiction, fantasy and horrorby Publishers Weekly, in the Spring 2016 Announcements"[A] Caribbean zombie novel navigates the uncertain pathways of the human heart in this cerebral take on the undead. ...Isadore is one of three complicated women in our protagonist’s life, one of a triptych that includes the passionate and visceral Patricia Cáceres and the naïve and open-hearted Mathilde Álverez. If you asked for a Caribbean version of Shakespeare’s Weird Sisters, you’d get a portrait of these three characters…. "[A] culturally resonant tale of zombie woe"" Kirkus Reviews“Threats of a zombie apocalypse seem to be around every corner, but what’s rare is an intelligent, thoughtful, funny, sentimental, socially conscious, and, yes, gross at times zombie tale infused with Caribbean culture, piques, prejudices, and passions. Pedro Cabiya delivers all of this and more in Wicked Weeds, one gentleman zombie’s quest to recapture his lost qualia, that indefinable, internal, sensory perception of self…Whether you consider yourself a lover of zombie fantasies or not, devour Wicked Weeds for its unique perspective, cultural insights, and charged humor.” Foreword Reviews“You know what’s been missing in your life? A work of Caribbean noir and science fiction! in Wicked Weeks, a smart and successful zombie desperately searches for the formula that would reverse his “zombie-hood” and turn him into a “real person.” Rachel Cordasco, Tor.com, Speculative Fiction in Translation: 15 Works to Watch Out For in 2016Combining his expertise in fiction, graphic novels and film, Pedro Cabiya has created a memorable literary zombie novel of a dead man's search for his lost humanity. The end result is a novel that can take its place alongside other heady, high-brow zombie novels like Colson Whitehead’s Zone One, Daryl Gregory's Raising Stony Mayhall, and California by Edan Lepucki. As for the novel's immersion in orality and Caribbean folk traditions, it can very well align with Wade Davis' The Serpent and the Rainbow, Patrick Chamoiseau’s Texaco, and Max Brooks’ World War Z.

This historical novel plunges its fictional characters into the thrilling, dangerous and often absurd world of Miami in the 1970s.

In Pillar of Salt, Anna Salmon Eisen's father breaks a lifetime of silence about the Holocaust as they journey together to the small Polish town he lived in during Nazi occupation, visit his childhood home, return to the ghetto where he experienced his first selection and said his final farewell to his parents before they were sent in a boxcar to a death camp. They then travel across the Polish countryside checkered with concentration camps and Holocaust memorials.This book differs from other second-generation memoirs because the author was able, at her father's side, to understand her legacy and help him heal from the traumatic past, including saying the Jewish prayer of Kaddish with him the place where his parents were killed in a gas chamber. Anna then returns to her life with a new understanding of her identity shaped under the shadow of the Holocaust.

Twenty years since its first publication, this new anniversary edition of the Holocaust memoir of George Salton (then Lucjan Salzman), gives readers a personal and powerful account of his survival through one of the darkest periods in human history. With heartbreaking and honest reflection, the author shares a gripping first-person narrative of his transformation from a Jewish eleven-year-old boy living happily in Tyczyn, Poland with his brother and parents, to his experiences as a teenage victim of growing persecution, brutality and imprisonment as the Nazis pursued the Final Solution. The author takes the reader back in time as he reveals in vivid and engrossing details the painful memories of life in his childhood town during Nazi occupation, the forced march before his jeering and cold-eyed former friends and neighbors as they are driven from their homes into the crowded and terrible conditions in the Rzeszow ghetto, and the heart-wrenching memory of his final farewell as he is separated from his parents who would be sent in boxcars to the Belzec extermination camp. Alone at age 14, George begins a three-year horror filled odyssey as part of a Daimler-Benz slave labor group that will take him through ten concentration camps in Poland, Germany, and France. In Plaszów he digs up graves with his bare hands, in Flossenbürg he labors in a stone quarry and in France he works as a prisoner in a secret tunnel the Nazis have converted into an armaments factory. In every concentration camp including Sachsenhausen, Braunschweig, Ravensbrück and others, George recounts the agonizing and excruciating details of what it was like to barely survive the rollcalls, selections, beatings, hunger, and despair he both endured and witnessed. Of the 465 Jewish prisoners with him in the labor group in the Rzeszów ghetto in 1942, less than fifty were alive three years later when the U.S. Army 82nd Airborne Division liberated the Wobbelin concentration camp on the afternoon of May 2, 1945. George recalls not only the painful details of his survival, but also the tales of his fellow prisoners, a small group who became more than friends as they shared their meager rations, their fragile strength, and their waning hope. The memoir moves us as we behold the life sustaining powers of friendship among this band of young prisoners. With gratitude for his courageous liberators, Salton expresses his powerful emotions as he acknowledges his miraculous freedom: "I felt something stir deep within my soul. It was my true self, the one who had stayed deep within and had not forgotten how to love and how to cry, the one who had chosen life and was still standing when the last roll call ended."

How much do we really know about the lives of our parents and the secrets lodged in their past? Judy Bolton-Fasman's fascinating saga, "e;Asylum: A Memoir of Family Secrets,"e; recounts the search for answers to the mysteries embedded in the lives of her Cuban-born mother, Matilde Alboukrek Bolton and her elusive, Yale-educated father, K. Harold Bolton. In the prefatory chapter, "e;Burn This,"e; Judy receives a thick letter from her father and conjectures that the contents will reveal the long hidden explanations, confessions, and secrets that will unlock her father's cryptic past. Just as she is about to open the portal to her father's "e;transtiendas,"e; his dark hidden secrets, Harold Bolton phones Judy and instructs her to burn the still unopened letter. With the flick of a match, Judy ignites her father's unread documents, effectively destroying the answers to long held questions that surround her parents' improbable marriage and their even more secretive lives. Judy Bolton, girl detective, embarks on the life-long exploration of her bifurcated ancestry; Judy inherits a Sephardic, Spanish/Ladino-speaking culture from her mother and an Ashkenazi, English-only, old-fashioned American patriotism from her father. Amid the Bolton household's cultural, political, and psychological confusion, Judy is mystified by her father's impenetrable silence; and, similarly confounded by her mother's fabrications, not the least of which involve rumors of a dowry pay-off and multiple wedding ceremonies for the oddly mismatched 40-year-old groom and the 24-year-old bride. Contacting former associates, relatives, and friends; accessing records through the Freedom of Information Act; traveling to Cuba to search for clues, and even reciting the Mourner's Kaddish for a year to gain spiritual insight into her father; these decades-long endeavors do not always yield the answers Judy wanted and sometimes the answers themselves lead her to ask new questions. Among Asylum's most astonishing, unsolved mysteries is Ana Hernandez's appearance at the family home on Asylum Avenue in West Hartford, Connecticut. Ana is an exchange student from Guatemala whom Judy comes to presume to be her paternal half-sister. In seeking information about Ana, Judy's investigations prove to be much like her entire enterprise--both enticing and frustrating. Was Ana just a misconstrued memory, or is she a still living piece of the puzzle that Judy has spent her adult life trying to solve? Readers will relish every step and stage of Judy's investigations and will begin toshare in her obsession to obtain answers to the mysteries that have haunted her life. The suspense, the clairvoyant prophecies, the discoveries, the new leads, the dead-ends, the paths not taken-all capture our attention in this absorbing and fascinating memoir.

This powerful and moving historical novel is inspired by the written recollections and the memories that haunted the author's father, Nicias Aridjis,a captain in the Greek army, who returned from the fields of battle to Smyrna, 50 miles northwest of his hometown of Tire, in 1922 just as Turkish forces captured this cosmopolitan port city. Smyrna in Flames , by the internationally acclaimed Mexican writer and poet Homero Aridjis, lays bare the unimaginable events and horrors that took place for nine days between September 13 and 22known as the Smyrna Catastrophe. After capturing Smyrna, Turkish forces went on a rampage, torturing and massacring tens of thousands of Greeks and Armenians and devastating the cityin particular, the Greek and Armenian quartersby deliberately setting disastrous fires.After years of fighting in World War I and the Greco-Turkish War, Nicias enters a Smyrna under siege. He desperately moves through the city in search of Eurydice, the love of his life whom he left behind. Wandering the streets, the sounds of hopelessness commingle in his mind with echoes of the ancient Greek poets who sang of the city's past glories. Images and voices, suggestive of Homeric ghosts adrift in a catastrophic scenario, conjure up a mythological, historical, geographical quest that, in the manner of classical epic, hovers between the heroic and the horrible, illustrating the depths and depravity of the human soul.Making his way from district to district, evading capture, Nicias observes the last vestiges of normal life and witnesses unspeakable horrors committed by roaming Turkish forces and irregulars who are randomly abusing and raping Greek and Armenian women and torturing and murdering their men. What he experiences is literally a living hell unfolding before his eyes. As Nicias passes familiar buildings, cafes, and churches, his mind and soul fill with nostalgia for his earlier life and the promise of love.Fortunately for the reader, the brutal and bloodthirsty scenes of the Smyrna Catastrophe are leavened by the voice of this ';visionary poet of lyrical bliss, crystalline concentrations and infinite spaces,' as Kenneth Rexroth has described Aridjis. His portrayal of a genocide-in-progress floods our senses, turning these chaotic scenes into a poignant drama.At the very end, aboard one of the last ships to take refugees out of Smyrna before its final fall, Nicias scours the throng of thousands of desperate Greeks and Armenians pressing forward to escape on already overcrowded ships. Suddenly Turkish forces move in to shoot and stab, and, overwhelmed by the all-pervasive tragedy, Nicias abandons Smyrna and Asia Minor forever.