Mandel Vilar Press – serie

For most of her adult life, Dara Kurtz kept a Ziploc bag of letters written by her mother who passed away from cancer when she was twenty-eight years old. The bag also included other letters written by her long-departed grandmothers. These letters gave Dara a glimpse into their lives and personalities at the time the letters were written. They offered her so much wisdom and relevance and taught her so many beautiful, life lessons that Dara decided to share their story, the incredible love between Jewish mothers and daughters, and the wisdom passed on from one generation to the next. As a mother, Dara has passed down these family traditions and wisdom to her two daughters, who now carry on the legacy contained in the Ziploc bag bridging the generations of women in their family. She unexpected discovered that this is best done through the lens of love and through the hand-written word.

A smart, hip and provocative book for anyone interested in the rich diversity of Jewish thought on contemporary questions.Should we edit our children’s genes? Are there things that can’t be forgiven? Are Jews still expecting a messiah? Is Judaism good for women? Should Jews strive to be happy? What does Judaism say about love? Are we commanded to vote? Is democracy a Jewish idea? Does Jewish law forbid racism? Is silence consent? What sins should we atone for in our use of social media? When does life begin? Do Jews believe in an afterlife? Can robots be Jewish?In this book, rabbis spanning the range of modern Jewish thought, from Humanist and Reform to Orthodox and beyond, consider these difficult and provocative questions of our time and many others. Sometimes they agree—but not often.You don’t have to be a scholar to follow these lively, accessible voices. They offer intelligent discussion of topics both timely and timeless, deep interrogation of Jewish text, law and commentary and an unparalleled look at the breadth, creativity and continued relevance of the Jewish tradition.Editor Amy E. Schwartz provides delightful commentary, celebrating the rabbinic impulse to question every assumption and highlighting the many and sometimes surprising ways ancient texts can speak to us today.

FOR LILIANE ATLAN (1932-2012), visionary French writer of plays, poetry, and prose, the creative quest was to “find a language to say the unsayable. . . to [find a way] to integrate within our conscience, without dying in the attempt, the shattering experience of Auschwitz.” Having spent the war years as a child in hiding in Auvergne and Lyon, she then studied at the groundbreaking Gilbert Bloch school where she was immersed in Torah, Talmud and Kabbalah, alongside science and contemporary literature. She emerged into a genre-defying writer, a feminist, and a political activist in both France and Israel.Atlan defies easy categorization: she’s “a “Jewish writer,” “a Holocaust writer,” an originator of l’écriture féminine, and a pioneering theatre artist, one of the first (in the early 1980s) to experiment with video, sound, and spatial technology. Her poetry and prose comprise a large, important part of her oeuvre — the texts in Small Bibles for Bad Times are published here in English for the first time, translated by Marguerite Feitlowitz. In poems and prose, dramatic elements abound: scenes and vignettes; scoring for voices; desires, plots and characters engaged in mortal conflict, sometimes within a single mind. Especially in the poems, much depends on cadence, breath, and beat. Ritual is interrogated even as it is performed; conventional wisdoms are discarded, mocked and mutilated; study is sacred, belief suspect — genuine lessons exist to be learned the hard way. The mundane and cosmic, devotional and defiant, lyric and political jostle, subvert, and re-create each other. From murderous history, Atlan wrested a body of work that is radiant with life.

Dr. Alla Shapiro was a first physician-responder to the worst nuclear disaster in history: the explosion at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station in Ukraine on April 26, 1986. Information about the explosion was withheld from first responders, who were not given basic supplies, detailed instructions, or protective clothing. Amid an eerie and pervasive silence, Dr. Shapiro treated traumatized children as she tried to protect her family. No protocols were in place because no one had anticipated the consequences of a nuclear accident. From the outset of the disaster, the Soviet government worsened matters by spreading misinformation; and first responders, including Alla, were ordered to partake in the deception of the public.After years of persistent professional hostility and personal discrimination that she and her family experienced as Jewish citizens of the USSR, four generations of the Shapiro family fled the Soviet Union in the late 1980s. As émigrés, they were each allowed to take no more than 40 pounds of possessions and $90 in cash. Their escape route took them first to Vienna and then to Italy, where they were stranded as stateless persons for six months. Eventually the family received permission to enter the United States.Motivated by her Chernobyl experiences, Alla Shapiro ultimately became one of the world’s leading experts in the development of medical countermeasures against radiation exposure. From 2003 to 2019, she worked for the FDA on disaster readiness and preparation. Dr. Shapiro issues stern warnings regarding the preparedness—or lack thereof—of America for the current Covid-19 pandemic. Doctor on Call exposes the horrifying truths of Chernobyl and alerts us to the deceptions that undermine our ability to respond to global disasters.

How much do we really know about the lives of our parents and the secrets lodged in their past? Judy Bolton-Fasman’s fascinating saga, "Asylum: A Memoir of Family Secrets," recounts the search for answers to the mysteries embedded in the lives of her Cuban-born mother, Matilde Alboukrek Bolton and her elusive, Yale-educated father, K. Harold Bolton. In the prefatory chapter, “Burn This,” Judy receives a thick letter from her father and conjectures that the contents will reveal the long hidden explanations, confessions, and secrets that will unlock her father’s cryptic past. Just as she is about to open the portal to her father’s “transtiendas,” his dark hidden secrets, Harold Bolton phones Judy and instructs her to burn the still unopened letter. With the flick of a match, Judy ignites her father’s unread documents, effectively destroying the answers to long held questions that surround her parents’ improbable marriage and their even more secretive lives. Judy Bolton, girl detective, embarks on the life-long exploration of her bifurcated ancestry; Judy inherits a Sephardic, Spanish/Ladino-speaking culture from her mother and an Ashkenazi, English-only, old-fashioned American patriotism from her father. Amid the Bolton household’s cultural, political, and psychological confusion, Judy is mystified by her father’s impenetrable silence; and, similarly confounded by her mother’s fabrications, not the least of which involve rumors of a dowry pay-off and multiple wedding ceremonies for the oddly mismatched 40-year-old groom and the 24-year-old bride. Contacting former associates, relatives, and friends; accessing records through the Freedom of Information Act; traveling to Cuba to search for clues, and even reciting the Mourner’s Kaddish for a year to gain spiritual insight into her father; these decades-long endeavors do not always yield the answers Judy wanted and sometimes the answers themselves lead her to ask new questions.Among Asylum’s most astonishing, unsolved mysteries is Ana Hernandez’s appearance at the family home on Asylum Avenue in West Hartford, Connecticut. Ana is an exchange student from Guatemala whom Judy comes to presume to be her paternal half-sister. In seeking information about Ana, Judy’s investigations prove to be much like her entire enterprise--both enticing and frustrating. Was Ana just a misconstrued memory, or is she a still living piece of the puzzle that Judy has spent her adult life trying to solve? Readers will relish every step and stage of Judy’s investigations and will begin toshare in her obsession to obtain answers to the mysteries that have haunted her life.The suspense, the clairvoyant prophecies, the discoveries, the new leads, the dead-ends, the paths not taken—all capture our attention in this absorbing and fascinating memoir.

A portal into the perseverance of Jewish culture in the face of attempts to destroy it.To answer his son's question: what was it like growing up in Samarkand? Rabbi Hillel Zaltzman wrote and researched this memoir and history about Chassidic Jews who found refuge in Samarkand during the World War II and continued to live there under Soviet rule. This is a personal story for Zaltzman, who was born in Kharkov, Ukraine. When the Nazis invaded Kharkov, Zaltzman’s parents fled with their three young children to Samarkand (Uzbekistan). There they reconnected to other refugee Chassidic families, as well as some famous Chassidic rebbes also in flight. In Uzbekistan they created a thriving Jewish community until its institutions were abruptly shut down by Stalin immediately after the war. Still this Jewish community in Samarkand, Uzbekistan is remembered as shpitz Chabad—the epitome of Chassidic ideals and devotion.Zaltzman’s father kept him out of the Soviet schools, where atheism was promoted and Sabbath observance was impossible, teaching him furtively at home, until a neighbor discovered his existence at the age of 9. Zaltzman had no choice but to attend a public school then, but he still observed the demands of his faith and stayed home from school when necessary. Hillel studied with esteemed Chabad Chassidic rebbes who taught at great personal risk. If discovered, they could be sentenced to harsh labor in Siberia.Zaltzman credits his father’s unswerving commitment to his chinuch—his Jewish education—was beyond any compromise, and it was an exemplary expression of their Chabad brand of Chassidic Judaism: “The Chabad community was infused with a rich inner world of Chassidic vitality,” Zaltzman writes.Meanwhile, the Soviet regime remained obsessed with eliminating a Jewish religious identity; a special division of the NKVD (Soviet secret police) was assigned the task of destroying Jewish schools and yeshivas, and surveilling individuals through synagogue informers. Zaltzman records his experiences and adventures and those of other memorable people he has known and the sacrifices they made to share their love of Torah and Jewish learning in the secret underground yeshivas. He describes their attempts to celebrate Jewish holidays, make matzah, and obtain prayer books, as well as their other colorful escapades. He also tells of their exasperating experiences trying to obtain exit visas to leave the Soviet Union. The largely untold story of Chabad activism and heroism comes through with great immediacy in this first-person account of spiritual resistance to a Communist regime at war with the Jewish devotion to God and Torah. From the age 16, along with several other idealistic young men, Hillel Zaltzman was involved in Chamah, an underground Jewish organization that helped sustain and preserve Jewish life in the Soviet Union through education. Chamah established a network of underground Jewish schools that clandestinely taught more than 1,500 children over the years and provided material and spiritual support to Jews trying to obtain exit visas in the 1960s and 70s. Hillel himself was allowed to immigrate to Israel only in 1971, after years of trying. Now living in New York, he is the director of IChamah, an international organization which is devoted to serving Jews from the Former Soviet Union in Israel, Russia, and the US. Rabbi Zaltzman was honored for his humanitarian and Jewish outreach in the U.S. Senate in May 2016, as part of Jewish American Heritage Month.

Beautifully translated by Shelley Frisch, The Number on Your Forearm Is Blue Like Your Eyes is a poignant and riveting memoir that sets a family story in historical context and brings psychological insight to bear on accounts of emotional trauma. Having achieved prominence as a pediatrician, child therapist, and international speaker, Eva finally decided to tell her story. In 2016, at the age of seventy-four, with the assistance of journalist Stefanie Oswalt, Eva Umlauf published Die Nummer auf deinem Unterarm ist blau wie deine Augen: Erinnerungen (Hoffmann und Campe Verlag).As someone who has endured the effects of the Holocaust from infancy, she writes, I wish for all that has happened to be understood and processed from diverse perspectives so that personal suffering, societal ruptures, and brutal transgenerational traumas can be prevented from being passed on to future generations.” This book draws on years of interviews, copious correspondence, archival research in Europe and Israel, trips to labor and concentration camps, and the author’s personal recollections.On November 3, 1944, a toddler named Eva, one month shy of her second birthday, was branded prisoner A-26959 in Auschwitz. She fainted in her mother’s arms but survived the tattooing and countless other shocks. Eva Hecht was born on December 19, 1942, in Novaky, Slovakia, a labor camp for Jews. Eva and her parents, Imrich and Agnes, were imprisoned in this camp until their deportation to Auschwitz. A month prior to their arrival there, several thousand mothers and their children had been gassed. Now that the Red Army was rapidly advancing in Poland, the murders stopped. Agnes, then pregnant with her second daughter, and Eva were still alive when the camp was liberated on January 27, 1945. Her father was transferred to Melk, a subcamp of the Mauthausen concentration camp, and died there in March 1945. In late April, Nora, Eva’s sister, was born. Agnes Hecht remained in the camp infirmary until her two little girls were well enough to travel, then brought them back to her home in Trenčín in western Slovakia. Eva grew up with a mother who had to “survive her survival”—the little family lived with the loss in the Holocaust of the husband/father, the mother’s three siblings, and the grandparents and great-grandparents. Having also lost her family’s fortune, Agnes worked hard to create a normal home life for her daughters. Like many survivors in the post-Holocaust era, Eva’s mother never talked about her experiences. Eva suffered frequent flare-ups of the illnesses she had suffered in Auschwitz. She did well at school and went on to study medicine in Bratislava. In 1966 she married Jakob Sultanik, a fellow Holocaust survivor who had resettled in Munich, Germany. Eva left the communist regime in Czechoslovakia in 1967 to join him in West Germany. There she began her practice as a pediatrician and later as a psychotherapist—and for the first time she had the opportunity to live out her Jewish identity. Unfortunately, Eva's husband, Jakob, died in a tragic accident when their son, Erik, was a small boy. Eva later married a fellow physician, Bernd Umlauf, and they had two sons, Oliver and Julian. Every so often, the horrors of Eva's early years would resurface in nightmares involving dead babies and Auschwitz gas chambers.

Yad Vashem, Jerusalem's memorial to the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis during World War II, also recognizes non-Jewish individuals who risked their lives to save the Jews from the Nazi executioners. One of the trees that line the memorial's "Avenue of the Righteous" was planted to honor Raoul Wallenberg, a Swede. Among the bravest heroes of World War II, he saved about 100,000 Jews. But when the war ended, Wallenberg did not return home to well-earned acclaim. Instead he was arrested by the Soviet troops who marched into Budapest. The Soviet government has declared time and again that he is dead. And, just as often, new witnesses have insisted that Raoul Wallenberg is--or was--still alive in a Soviet prison or a mental hospital. For over seventy years his fate has remained a mystery, and that mystery is the subject of Alan Lelchuk's novel, Searching for Wallenberg--at once a detective story and an unusual, multilayered love story, with surprising characters, daring plunges into the gaps of history, and an engaging narrative. Here history is enhanced and challenged by fiction

This novel is inspired by a true historical event. Before Theodore Herzl there was Mordecai Manuel Noah, an American journalist, diplomat, playwright, and visionary. In September 1825 he bought Grand Island, downriver from Niagara Falls, from the local Native Americans as a place of refuge for the Jewish people and called it "Ararat." But no Jews came. What if they had followed Noah's call? In Nava Semel's alternate history Jews from throughout the world flee persecution and come to Ararat. Isra Isle becomes the smallest state in the US. Israel does not exist, and there was no Holocaust. In exploring this what-if scenario, Semel stimulates new thinking about memory, Jewish/Israeli identity, attitudes toward minorities, women in top political positions, and the place of cultural heritage. The novel is divided into three parts. Part 1, a detective story, opens in September 2001 when Liam Emanuel, an Israeli descendant of Noah, learns about and inherits this island. He leaves Israel intending to reclaim this "Promised Land" in America. Shortly after he arrives in America Liam disappears. Simon T. Lenox, a Native American police investigator, tries to recover Israel's "missing son."Part 2 flashes back to the time and events surrounding Mordecai Noah's purchase of the island from the local Native Americans. Part 3 poses an alternate history: the rise of a successful modern Jewish city-state, Isra Isle, on the northern New York and Canadian border--a metropolis that looks remarkably like New York City both before and after 9/11--in which the Jewish female governor campaigns to become president of the United States. Nava Semel has published novels, short stories, poetry, plays, children's books, and a number of TV scripts. Her books have been translated and published in many countries. Her book, Becoming Gershona, received the 1990 National Jewish Book Award in the US.

This powerful and moving historical novel is inspired by the written recollections and the memories that haunted the author’s father, Nicias Aridjis,—a captain in the Greek army, who returned from the fields of battle to Smyrna, 50 miles northwest of his hometown of Tire,  in 1922 just as Turkish forces captured this cosmopolitan port city. Smyrna in Flames , by the internationally acclaimed Mexican writer and poet Homero Aridjis, lays bare the unimaginable events and horrors that took place for nine days between September 13 and 22—known as the Smyrna Catastrophe. After capturing Smyrna, Turkish forces went on a rampage, torturing and massacring tens of thousands of Greeks and Armenians and devastating the city—in particular, the Greek and Armenian quarters—by deliberately setting disastrous fires.After years of fighting in World War I and the Greco-Turkish War, Nicias enters a Smyrna under siege. He desperately moves through the city in search of Eurydice, the love of his life whom he left behind. Wandering the streets, the sounds of hopelessness commingle in his mind with echoes of the ancient Greek poets who sang of the city’s past glories. Images and voices, suggestive of Homeric ghosts adrift in a catastrophic scenario, conjure up a mythological, historical, geographical quest that, in the manner of classical epic, hovers between the heroic and the horrible, illustrating the depths and depravity of the human soul.Making his way from district to district, evading capture, Nicias observes the last vestiges of normal life and witnesses unspeakable horrors committed by roaming Turkish forces and irregulars who are randomly abusing and raping Greek and Armenian women and torturing and murdering their men. What he experiences is literally a living hell unfolding before his eyes. As Nicias passes familiar buildings, cafes, and churches, his mind and soul fill with nostalgia for his earlier life and the promise of love.Fortunately for the reader, the brutal and bloodthirsty scenes of the Smyrna Catastrophe are leavened by the voice of this “visionary poet of lyrical bliss, crystalline concentrations and infinite spaces,” as Kenneth Rexroth has described Aridjis. His portrayal of a genocide-in-progress floods our senses, turning these chaotic scenes into a poignant drama.At the very end, aboard one of the last ships to take refugees out of Smyrna before its final fall, Nicias scours the throng of thousands of desperate Greeks and Armenians pressing forward to escape on already overcrowded ships. Suddenly Turkish forces move in to shoot and stab, and, overwhelmed by the all-pervasive tragedy, Nicias abandons Smyrna and Asia Minor forever.