Bøger udgivet af Mandel Vilar Press

FOR LILIANE ATLAN (1932-2012), visionary French writer of plays, poetry, and prose, the creative quest was to "find a language to say the unsayable. . . to [find a way] to integrate within our conscience, without dying in the attempt, the shattering experience of Auschwitz." Having spent the war years as a child in hiding in Auvergne and Lyon, she then studied at the groundbreaking Gilbert Bloch school where she was immersed in Torah, Talmud and Kabbalah, alongside science and contemporary literature. She emerged into a genre-defying writer, a feminist, and a political activist in both France and Israel. Atlan defies easy categorization: she's "a "Jewish writer," "a Holocaust writer," an originator of l'écriture féminine, and a pioneering theatre artist, one of the first (in the early 1980s) to experiment with video, sound, and spatial technology. Her poetry and prose comprise a large, important part of her oeuvre - the texts in Small Bibles for Bad Times are published here in English for the first time, translated by Marguerite Feitlowitz. In poems and prose, dramatic elements abound: scenes and vignettes; scoring for voices; desires, plots and characters engaged in mortal conflict, sometimes within a single mind. Especially in the poems, much depends on cadence, breath, and beat. Ritual is interrogated even as it is performed; conventional wisdoms are discarded, mocked and mutilated; study is sacred, belief suspect - genuine lessons exist to be learned the hard way. The mundane and cosmic, devotional and defiant, lyric and political jostle, subvert, and re-create each other. From murderous history, Atlan wrested a body of work that is radiant with life.

A smart, hip and provocative book for anyone interested in the rich diversity of Jewish thought on contemporary questions.

i For most of her adult life, Dara Kurtz kept a Ziploc bag of letters written by her mother who passed away from cancer when she was twenty-eight years old. The bag also included other letters written by her long-departed grandmothers. These letters gave Dara a glimpse into their lives and personalities at the time the letters were written. They offered her so much wisdom and relevance and taught her so many beautiful, life lessons that Dara decided to share their story, the incredible love between Jewish mothers and daughters, and the wisdom passed on from one generation to the next. As a mother, Dara has passed down these family traditions and wisdom to her two daughters, who now carry on the legacy contained in the Ziploc bag bridging the generations of women in their family. She unexpected discovered that this is best done through the lens of love and through the hand-written word.

This novel is inspired by a true historical event. Before Theodore Herzl there was Mordecai Manuel Noah, an American journalist, diplomat, playwright, and visionary. In September 1825 he bought Grand Island, downriver from Niagara Falls, from the local Native Americans as a place of refuge for the Jewish people and called it Ararat. But no Jews came. What if they had followed Noahs call? In Nava Semels alternate history Jews from throughout the world flee persecution and come to Ararat. Isra Isle becomes the smallest state in the US. Israel does not exist, and there was no Holocaust. In exploring this what-if scenario, Semel stimulates new thinking about memory, Jewish/Israeli identity, attitudes toward minorities, women in top political positions, and the place of cultural heritage.The novel is divided into three parts. Part 1, a detective story, opens in September 2001 when Liam Emanuel, an Israeli descendant of Noah, learns about and inherits this island. He leaves Israel intending to reclaim this Promised Land in America. Shortly after he arrives in America Liam disappears. Simon T. Lenox, a Native American police investigator, tries to recover Israels missing son. Part 2 flashes back to the time and events surrounding Mordecai Noahs purchase of the island from the local Native Americans. Part 3 poses an alternate history: the rise of a successful modern Jewish city-state, Isra Isle, on the northern New York and Canadian bordera metropolis that looks remarkably like New York City both before and after 9/11in which the Jewish female governor campaigns to become president of the United States.Nava Semel has published novels, short stories, poetry, plays, children's books, and a number of TV scripts. Her books have been translated and published in many countries. Her book, Becoming Gershona, received the 1990 National Jewish Book Award in the US.

Pulitzer Prize winner Henry Allen tells nearly five centuries of his family's history through the places they lived.

Winner of the Modern Language Association's Fania & Yaakov Leviant Memorial Prize in Yiddish Studies (2018)Ellen Cassedy and Yermiyahu Ahron Taub (the translators) on encountering Blume Lempel’s stories wrote: "e;When we began reading and translating, we didn’t know we were going to find a mother drawn into an incestuous relationship with her blind son. We didn’t know we’d meet a young woman lying on the table at an abortion clinic. We didn’t know we’d meet a middle-aged woman full of erotic imaginings as she readies herself for a blind date. Buried in this forgotten Yiddish-language material, we found modernist stories and modernist story-telling techniques – imagine reading Gabriel Garcia Marquez with the conversational touch of Grace Paley."e;Lempel (1907–1999) was one of a small number of writers in the United States who wrote in Yiddish into the 1990s. Though many of her stories opened a window on the Old World and the Holocaust, she did not confine herself to these landscapes or themes. She often wrote about the margins of society, and about subjects considered untouchable. her prize-winning fiction is remarkable for its psychological acuity, its unflinching examination of erotic themes and gender relations, and its technical virtuosity. Mirroring the dislocation of mostly women protagonists, her stories move between present and past, Old World and New, dream and reality.While many of her stories opened a window on the Old World and the Holocaust, she also wrote about the margins of society, about subjects considered untouchable, among them abortion, prostitution, women's erotic imaginings, and even incest. She illuminated the inner lives of her characters—mostly women. Her storylines migrate between past and present, Old World and New, dream and reality, modern-day New York and prewar Poland, bedtime story and passionate romance, and old-age dementia and girlhood dreams.Immigrating to New York when Hitler rose to power, Blume Lempel began publishing her short stories in 1945. By the 1970s her work had become known throughout the Yiddish literary world. When she died in 1999, the Yiddish paper Forverts wrote: "e;Yiddish literature has lost one of its most remarkable women writers."e;Ellen Cassedy, translator, is author of the award-winning study "e;We Are Here"e;, about the Lithuanian Holocaust. With her colleague Yermiyahu Ahron Taub, they received the Yiddish Book Center 2012 Translation Prize for translating Blume Lempel. Yermiyahu Ahron Taub is the author of several books of poetry, including "e;Prayers of a Heretic/Tfiles fun an apikoyres"e; (2013),"e;Uncle Feygele"e;(2011), and "e;What Stillness Illuminated/Vos shtilkayt hot baloykhtn (2008)."e;

A Jewish seminary drop-out and nascent Mormon engage in a comedic tale of sibling rivalry, angelic messengers, and the after-life.

An extraordinary compendium of activism and writings about the natural world by Homero Aridjis, Mexico's greatest living writer.