Isaac Bashevis Singer. The Slave. Shosha

Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904–1991) was one of the most famous representatives of Yiddish literature and a laureate of the 1978 Nobel Prize in Literature. In his works, he touched upon various periods of life of Eastern European Jewry yet some topics interested him constantly since they stemmed from the experiences of the twentieth century. Those were obsession with ideologies and demons; the justification of God who allows the unchangeable to happen; ethical co-existence with others, animals in particular; and a choice not to cause harm. (more…)

Bella Shaier. Children’s Mate: Two Novelettes and a Short Story

The book by Bella Shaier, an Israeli writer born in Chernivtsi, consists of two novelettes and a short story. The first novelette is dedicated to the Chernivtsi streetlife of the 1960s. Its characters are children yet this delicate psychological work full of precise observations is not for children. The second piece tells about the twenty years of life of two Tel Avivians, Galit and Gordon, touching upon the topics of love, family relations, and unrealizable dreams. The storyline of the short and dramatic story Fortwo revolves around the issues of loneliness, emigration, and family relations and also takes place in Israel.

The book Children’s Mate was shortlisted for the prestigious Israeli Sapir Prize and awarded the prize of the city of Ramat Gan. This is the first complete translation of the book.

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Osip Mandelstam. Prose

This book is the first collection of Ukrainian translations of prose by Osip Mandelstam (1891–1938). The volume contains his main prose writings (The Egypt Stamp, The Noise of the Time, Feodosia, and others), critical essays on literature (The Morning of Acmeism, The Talk about Dante, and others) and culture, especially on Ukrainian topics (essays about Kyiv and the Berezil Theatre, and The Spy film review) as well as texts inspired by Crimea and Mandelstam’s only prose piece published in Ukraine during his lifetime: the film review Shop of Cheap Dolls. (more…)

American Jewish Fiction: A Century of Stories

This anthology contains texts of American Jewish short prose. The book includes a whole century of unique works, beginning with the immigrant fictional literature of the early twentieth century and finishing with the stories of some modern writers. Reading these pages implies getting familiar with the marvellous and diverse literary tradition. The edition begins with the short stories by two profound immigrant writers of the early the twentieth century, Abraham Cahan and Anzia Yezierska. After that, the edition contains selected works of Jewish American authors of recent history such as Isaac Bashevis Singer, Saul Bellow, Grace Paley, Tillie Olsen, Bernard Malamud, and Philip Roth. The anthology ends with the short stories of contemporary writers, whose works illustrate the fascinating variety and life power of the modern Jewish American fictional literature. (more…)

The Redwood Box: Jewish Prose of the Eastern Europe of the Second Half of the 19–20th Centuries

The edition contains the translations of works of eleven Jewish writers from the Eastern Europe of the second half of the neneteenth and twentieth centuries, such as Isaac Leib Peretz, Sholom Aleichem, Janusz Korczak, Shmuel Yosef Agnon, Bruno Schulz, Isaac Babel, Itzik Kipnis, Itzik Manger, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Debora Vogel, and Abraham Sutzkever. The Jewish prose in the book is rather diverse in its nature in terms of genre and style characteristics. That is since it ranges from traditional educational plots that include distinctive parable features, to the examples of the European literature of the ‘stream of consciousness’ based on lavish metaphors, and alliterations that combine the history with modernity, the old with the new, as well as undermine the rigidity of canonical topics and masterfully lead readers to themselves, which is the most fascinating destination. (more…)