The roots and origins of Isaac Bashevis Singer's works are illuminated in this comprehensive survey. Biletzky treats his subject from several perspectives, describing Singer's life story and its influence on his work while also critiquing Singer's work and focusing on its realistic and nonrealistic dimensions. The author also explores the relationship between Singer's work and the work of Shalom Aleichem and I.L. Peretz, an analysis which synthesizes the Jewish and the Yiddish in Singer's thought and writing. Contents: Roots; In the Ways of Creativity; The Storyteller; Between the Real and the Unreal; Devils. Satans. Imps. Evil Spirits; Satan in Goraj; The Muskat Family; The Slave; The Miracle Worker of Lublin; The Manor. The Estate; The Dumb Souls of I.L. Peretz and Gimpel Tam; The Painter's Studio and Father's Courtroom.

Joseph Shapiro, a New York businessman, experiences a mid-life crisis. He leaves his wife, his mistress, his business and goes to Israel in search of religious Orthodoxy.

In the little Polish town of Goray, ravaged by a terrible pogrom, expectations of the 'End of Days' foretold by cabalists run high. Grief becomes joy as news arrives from the Holy Land of the second coming of the Messiah. Usurping power from the pious rabbi, the believers listen to the prophetess Rechele and prepare themselves for the Coming of the Lord, when they will wear golden jackets and eat marzipan candy in the heart of Jerusalem. As religious hysteria grips the town, spirits and demons are abroad at night, and the people grow weaker by the day. But perhaps it is not the spirit of the Lord who possesses the body and mind of Rechele, but Satan himself.

A Hebrew legend in which a messenger from God sells himself into slavery in order to help a poor scribe.

Now available in paperback for the first time, Jewish Writers of the Twentieth Century is both a comprehensive reference resource and a springboard for further study. This volume: examines canonical Jewish writers, less well-known authors of Yiddish and Hebrew, and emerging Israeli writers includes entries on figures as diverse as Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, Tristan Tzara, Eugene Ionesco, Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppard, Arthur Miller, Saul Bellow, Nadine Gordimer, and Woody Allen contains introductory essays on Jewish-American writing, Holocaust literature and memoirs, Yiddish writing, and Anglo-Jewish literature provides a chronology of twentieth-century Jewish writers. Compiled by expert contributors, this book contains over 330 entries on individual authors, each consisting of a biography, a list of selected publications, a scholarly essay on their work and suggestions for further reading.

This set treats the whole of American literature, from the European discovery of America to the present, with entries in alphabetical order. Each of the 350 substantive essays is a major interpretive contribution. Well-known critics and scholars provide clear and vividly written essays thatreflect the latest scholarship on a given topic, as well as original thinking on the part of the critic. The Encyclopedia is available in print and as an e-reference text from Oxford's Digital Reference Shelf.At the core of the encyclopedia lie 250 essays on poets, playwrights, essayists, and novelists. The most prominent figures (such as Whitman, Melville, Faulkner, Frost, Morrison, and so forth) are treated at considerable length (10,000 words) by top-flight critics. Less well known figures arediscussed in essays ranging from 2,000 to 5,000 words. Each essay examines the life of the author in the context of his or her times, looking in detail at key works and describing the arc of the writer's career. These essays include an assessment of the writer's current reputation with abibliography of major works by the writer as well as a list of major critical and biographical works about the writer under discussion.A second key element of the project is the critical assessments of major American masterworks, such as Moby-Dick, Song of Myself, Walden, The Great Gatsby, The Waste Land, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Death of a Salesmanr, or Beloved. Each of these essays offers a close reading of the given work,placing that work in its historical context and offering a range of possibilities with regard to critical approach. These fifty essays (ranging from 2,000 to 5,000 words) are simply and clearly enough written that an intelligent high school student should easily understand them, but sophisticatedenough that a college student or general reader in a public library will find the essays both informative and stimulating.The final major element of this encyclopedia consists of fifty-odd essays on literary movements, periods, or themes, pulling together a broad range of information and making interesting connections. These essays treat many of the same authors already discussed, but in a different context; they alsogather into the fold authors who do not have an entire essay on their work (so that Zane Grey, for example, is discussed in an essay on Western literature but does not have an essay to himself). In this way, the project is truly "encyclopedic," in the conventional sense. These essays aim forcomprehensiveness without losing anything of the narrative force that makes them good reading in their own right.In a very real fashion, the literature of the American people reflects their deepest desires, aspirations, fears, and fantasies. The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature gathers a wide range of information that illumines the field itself and clarifies many of its particulars.

From the Upper West Side to Miami's pastel resorts, "Shadows on the Hudson" traces the intertwined destiny of survivors in the aftermath of the Holocaust.