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"In Yemen in 1920 ... Adela Damari's parents desperately seek a future husband for their young daughter. After passage of the Orphan's Decree, any unbetrothed Jewish child left orphaned will be instantly adopted by the local Muslim community. With her parents' health failing, and no spousal prospects in sight, Adela's situation looks dire until her uncle arrives from a faraway city, bringing with him a cousin and aunt who introduce Adela to the powerful rituals of henna tattooing"--Amazon.com.
A beautifully crafted story of a Jewish family, reaching back five generations. Using births, deaths and family legends, here are stories of how people meet and fall in love, of family secrets and tragedies, of sex and marriage. Yochanan and his wife Esther who lived happily despite Esther's long-time affair with the local baker; Avra who has a penchant for stealing (and returning) who marries Shimon, an immigrant from Russia; Miriam, a child of Eastern Europe who sews her family's futures into her cloth. Shyly sexy and funny, always rooted in the domestic and the familiar, this is an enchanting, complex novel which draws on the voices of many generations from far and wide, reaching across the Diaspora - Israel, Europe and America.
In the bestselling tradition of The Red Tent, The Family Orchard is a spellbinding novel of one unforgettable family, the orchard they've tended for generations, and a love story that transcends the ages. Nomi Eve's lavishly imagined account begins in Palestine in 1837, with the tale of the irrepressible family matriach, Esther, who was lured by the smell of baking bread into an affair with the local baker. Esther passes on her passionate nature to her son, Eliezer, whose love for the forbidden Golda threatened to tear the family apart. And to her granddaughter, Avra the thief, a tiny wisp of a girl who thumbed her nose at her elders by swiping precious stones from the local bazaar-and grew to marry a man she met at the scene of a crime. At once epic and intimate, The Family Orchard is a rich historical tapestry of passion and tradition from a storyteller of beguiling power.
Cleave, loss, spell, hand, home: words that have existed in the English language for over a thousand years. In the poems of Thousand-Year-Old Words, Nan Cohen explores such words, revealing both their touching sturdiness through a thousand years of constant use, and the radiant individuality of the experiences they describe.
"Kill class is based on two years of fieldwork the author conducted within combat trainings in simulated Middle Eastern villages erected by the US military across America"--
For more than a decade, the literary quarterly Glimmer Train has sought out and championed the most compelling short fiction written today, by both established luminaries and fresh new voices. This stunning new anthology probes the whole range of human relationships -- lovers, friends, family members, spouses, even one's beliefs and dreams. In "Beneath the Earth of Her," acclaimed writer Karen E. Outen delicately probes the life of a loving, passionate married couple at odds over the prospect of having children. In "Gary Garrison's Wedding Vows," novelist Ron Carlson offers a poignant and delightful tale about a young woman who escapes the rigors of academia and finds love and purpose at a b...
The Golem in Jewish American Literature explores the golem in the fiction of Thane Rosenbaum, Nomi Eve and Steve Stern as well as writers such as Michael Chabon. Nicola Morris sees this clay humanoid, created in Jewish legend for practical and spiritual purposes, as a metaphor for power and powerlessness and for the complexities and responsibilities surrounding the act of creation. Further, she employs the golem figure as a device to examine the problematic Holocaust representation in the second generation, the uncertain boundaries between fiction and historiography, the ethics of intertextuality and the writer's responsibility to literary, folkloric and oral sources. Morris concludes with an impassioned plea for the responsible uses of power, technology and language.
This collection includes groundbreaking essays, and interviews with scholars and writers which reveal that despite pressures of assimilation, personal goals, and in some cases, anti-Semitism, they have never been able to divorce their lives or literature from their heritage.
A commonly encountered experience of both analyst and analysand is that of the void. It is spoken about at different stages of therapy and refers to experiences that have different origins. Sometimes the experience of the void is around a relatively limited aspect of the psyche but at other times the void seems much more global and threatens to engulf the entire personality; the whole individual psyche then seems threatened by the possibility of dissolution into nothingness.