A story about a young girl abducted by extra-terrestrials and given medications that induced mental illness behaviors in her.

The biographical plays in this book portray eight modern Jewish people, each of whom embodies the idea of Tikkun olam, that we must all be in partership with God to improve the world.

‘PICK OF THE WEEK’: “Sara Rena Vidal's imaginative story of her parents' war …” - Steven Carroll in Spectrum (The Age (Melbourne) & Sydney Morning Herald) 9/12/2017 “... the author has used the power of multiple sources of words to conjure the immediacy of a vanished world. I haven’t read anything quite like it before.” - Lisa Hill ANZLitLovers. “Wonderful book; deeply researched, scholarly, heartfelt and well written.” - Emeritus Professor Roger Fay, University of Tasmania ‘.. what an intrinsic and fascinating … ultimately beautiful dedication to family to faith and to life. So thoroughly researched too. A life's work for sure …’ - Stella Kinsella, Williamstown. “This memoir ... refuses to defer to hate and yearns to inspire a more humane future.” - Emeritus Professor Richard Freadman, LaTrobe University. “… a beautiful way to end, so full of a sense of our common humanity and our connection to everything on this planet if we are open to it.” - India Bell, Sydney In which my longing for that which is lost as well as for that which might yet be as told from memory fragments, journal jottings, and delving into history past and present, intertwining with my parents’ stories of more than survival, traverses despair to find transformation, home, and gratitude. So the generations will know, and choose life – after all it is a commandment. For Bella and Chaim. And for those to come. Encompassing this true story of Bella and Chaim, the author’s parents, with the intergenerational trauma of being a child of survivors, this memoir of love, loss and gratitude, is a testament to the human spirit as well as a call to rise above: ashes, victimhood, and generalizations. Bella and Chaim met and fell in love in the Warsaw Ghetto where they witnessed the destruction of a way of life; sole survivors of both their families, they were in the ghetto until its last days then endured entombment for eighteen months before rescue, liberation, and immigration to begin anew in Australia. A flowing collage embracing and mingling survivor-memory, recorded and analyzed historical context, and memory-fragments of Melbourne in the 1950s, with real-time musings on the light, dark and potential of being alive. Honoring the murdered and the righteous, reminding us that our choices matter, ever present are the dilemma’s and challenges facing us today. Augmented with photos, maps, a chapter on sources, bibliography, endnotes and an index, this book can be read as an inspirational story and/or utilized as a well-researched resource for in-depth study.

Yiddish Empire tells the story of how a group of itinerant Jewish performers became the interwar equivalent of a viral sensation, providing a missing chapter in the history of the modern stage. During World War I, a motley group of teenaged amateurs, impoverished war refugees, and out- of- work Russian actors banded together to revolutionize the Yiddish stage. Achieving a most unlikely success through their productions, the Vilna Troupe (1915– 36) would eventually go on to earn the attention of theatergoers around the world. Advancements in modern transportation allowed Yiddish theater artists to reach global audiences, traversing not only cities and districts but also countries and continents. The Vilna Troupe routinely performed in major venues that had never before allowed Jews, let alone Yiddish, upon their stages, and operated across a vast territory, a strategy that enabled them to attract unusually diverse audiences to the Yiddish stage and a precursor to the organizational structures and travel patterns that we see now in contemporary theater. Debra Caplan’s history of the Troupe is rigorously researched, employing primary and secondary sources in multiple languages, and is engagingly written.

This fictionalized history of the author’s maternal ancestors in Siberia provides the focus of this wide ranging book. From unjustly exiled Russians to Polish immigrants, the cavalcade of characters comes together in far eastern Siberia. They were part of the diverse group of people who settled there before 1885, known as Old Settlers or Siberiaks. Part Two, subtitled The Immigrants, introduces Michael Gladstein, a farmer and cattleman living in a village near Warsaw, whose lifelong desire is to escape the Pale of Settlement where all Jews in Russia must reside. The story of The Exiles continues in alternate chapters. But the main thread of Part Two shows how Michael and his two youngest sons manage to lawfully break out of the Pale and head for their dreamed of ranch in Siberia.