Böcker i Judaic Traditions in LIterature, Music, and Art-serien

Moishe Rozenbaumas (1922-2016) recounts his fascinating life, from his Lithuanian boyhood, to the fraught experiences that take him across Europe and Central Asia and back again, to his daring escape from Soviet Russia to build a new life in Paris.

In his short life (1865-1921), Mikhah Yosef Berdichevsky was a versatile and influential man of letters: an innovative Hebrew prose stylist; a collector of Jewish folklore; a scholar of ancient Jewish and Christian history. He was at once a peer of Friedrich Nietzsche, the Brothers Grimm, and a diverse circle of Jewish writers in the Russian Empire and German-speaking countries. As a Yiddish writer, however, he remains unknown to gen-eral readers. Written in 1902-1906, but not published in full until the 1920s, his stories were dismissed by prominent critics and viewed as out of step with the literary taste of his own time. Yet these vivid portraits of a small Jewish town (shtetl) in the southern Russian Empire can speak powerfully to new audiences today.With enchanting humor, social satire, and verbal dexterity, From a Distant Relation captures the world of the shtetl in a sharp realist prose style. Themes of repressed desire, poverty, relations with non-Jews, and historic upheavals echo in a cast of memorable characters. Many of the stories and monologues feature strong female protago-nists, while others shed light on misogyny in the culture of the shtetl. At the border between fiction and reportage, with a gritty underbelly and a deceptive naivete, Berdichevsky's stories explore dynamics of wealth, power, and gender in an intimate setting that resonates profoundly with contemporary Jewish life.

New to Jerusalem and to adulthood, Rutha serves Cafe Shira's devoted customers with a quiet compassion and a sensitive gaze, collecting their stories and absorbing them at her peril. Avigdor, the melancholy and somewhat weary cafe owner, philosophizes about love as he attends to the needs of his patrons while ignoring his own. Christian, a young religious pilgrim, has come to Jerusalem to find God but stumbles upon a much different revelation. These characters form the heart of this wry, often poignant novel narrated through a series of vignettes. They are joined by a colorful cast of characters who frequent the literary cafe-long-married couples, young lovers, an eccentric poet, and a traumatized veteran-all finding refuge and occasionally wisdom among their motley urban community.Closely based on Ehrlich's own experiences over the twenty-five years he devoted to running a cafe that became an important Jerusalem cultural venue and landmark, Cafe Shira is a work of disarming tenderness and bittersweet love.