The three shots rang out very clearly in Edward Zupan's head as he crossed Times Square..." So begins this extraordinary novel by the author of The Other Shore and Death , which sets out to explore the mind of a protagonist who may or may not commit a mass shooting. While the act is viewed through the prism of possibility, utilizing parallel sets of characters, images and motifs, and in technique owes something to both Alain Robbe-Grillet and the music of Philip Glass, the novel was essentially inspired by Charles Whitman, the Texas sniper of the 1960s, and represents an attempt to elucidate the existential meaning of such an act at its deepest level.
In this collection of 26 stories, the author of The Other Shore and Death offers a wide selection of his absorbing short fiction, ranging from the realistic to the surreal and wildly satiric.
A Woman of Valor is a monumental family saga that is in effect a history of the Jews in the twentieth century. It centers around a heroine who grows up in Bialystok, survives the Holocaust fighting in the Underground, and rebuilds her family in Israel. The Lefkovitzes are a well-to-do family of five brothers and sisters and sixteen children operating a textile factory that employs 100 Poles and Jews. Emma Lefkovitz, the first grandchild, is born in September 1920 in Independent Poland a month after the Russians are driven out. The children grow up in an often hostile environment but the family flourishes. Then the war breaks out and the long nightmare begins. When the ghetto is liquidated in August 1943, Emma and her husband fight in the uprising, but it is easily suppressed and they flee to the forest to join the partisans. After the war, Emma and her husband, Yoel, make their way to Palestine with other family survivors. In the 1948 war, Emma fights in the Old City of Jerusalem. Yoel fights in the north and is killed. Emma gives birth to a boy, Zvi, then marries the kibbutz accountant and moves to Tel Aviv. She has two more children but in the 1967 war her son Zvi is killed in action. After the war the family continues to grow, experiencing the joys and sorrows of ordinary people. Emma dies at the age of 80. Someone counts the family members at the graveside. The number comes to 150. These are, in one form or another, the Lefkovizes in the year 2000.This is a unique and profoundly moving story. Rarely has ordinary family life been depicted with such verisimilitude, and certainly not in the shadow of horrendous war. The triumph of the Lefkovitzes is not only the triumph of a family. It is also the triumph of a nation.
In the late 1980s, the Arab-Israel conflict reaches the streets of a pre-gentrified New York City when an Israeli minister visits his sister in Brooklyn and rival assassins play a deadly game of cat and mouse with the minister's nephew, a young horse-playing slacker by the name of Arnold Gross. Gross may be sharp and wise in the ways of the street but finds that he has bitten off more than he can chew when he comes up against the PLO, the Israeli secret service, fugitive Nazis and more money than he knows how to count. Written with stylistic flare and an insider's knowledge of the Middle East, this Elmore-Leonardesque crime caper is a pitch-black yet smartly hilarious look at a bygone age, a droll retro thriller that enhances the growing reputation of American-Israeli author Fred Russell.
Fred Skolnik is the author of 6 novels: The Other Shore, Death, and Basic Forms under his own name, and Rafi's World, The Links in the Chain, and The Nightmare under his Fred Russell pen name. His stories, essays, and poems have appeared in around 200 journals. A collection of his longer stories called Americans & Other Stories appeared in 2017 and a 1,000-page novel of his covering Jewish life in the 20th century via Poland, the Holocaust, and the State of Israel will be published in Spring 2022 by Addison and Highsmith. He is also the editor in chief of the 22-volume second edition of the Encyclopaedia Judaica, winner of the 2007 Dartmouth Medal.
Set in Israel in the 1980s, between the Lebanese War and the outbreak of the first Intifada (1984-1989), this tale follows the lives of representative characters across the entire breadth of Israeli society but focuses on two families--the Shachars, a kibbutz family; and the Goldsteins, representing the emerging Israeli middle class.
Provides an exhaustive and organized overview of Jewish life and knowledge from the Second Temple period to the contemporary State of Israel, from Rabbinic to modern Yiddish literature, from Kabbalah to "Americana" and from Zionism to the contribution of Jews to world cultures.
Provides an exhaustive and organized overview of Jewish life and knowledge from the Second Temple period to the contemporary State of Israel, from Rabbinic to modern Yiddish literature, from Kabbalah to "Americana" and from Zionism to the contribution of Jews to world cultures.
A Woman of Valor is a monumental family saga that is in effect a history of the Jews in the twentieth century. It centers around a heroine who grows up in Bialystok, survives the Holocaust fighting in the Underground, and rebuilds her family in Israel. The Lefkovitzes are a well-to-do family of five brothers and sisters and sixteen children operating a textile factory that employs 100 Poles and Jews. Emma Lefkovitz, the first grandchild, is born in September 1920 in Independent Poland a month after the Russians are driven out. The children grow up in an often hostile environment but the family flourishes. Then the war breaks out and the long nightmare begins. When the ghetto is liquidated in August 1943, Emma and her husband fight in the uprising, but it is easily suppressed and they flee to the forest to join the partisans. After the war, Emma and her husband, Yoel, make their way to Palestine with other family survivors. In the 1948 war, Emma fights in the Old City of Jerusalem. Yoel fights in the north and is killed. Emma gives birth to a boy, Zvi, then marries the kibbutz accountant and moves to Tel Aviv. She has two more children but in the 1967 war her son Zvi is killed in action. After the war the family continues to grow, experiencing the joys and sorrows of ordinary people. Emma dies at the age of 80. Someone counts the family members at the graveside. The number comes to 150. These are, in one form or another, the Lefkovizes in the year 2000.This is a unique and profoundly moving story. Rarely has ordinary family life been depicted with such verisimilitude, and certainly not in the shadow of horrendous war. The triumph of the Lefkovitzes is not only the triumph of a family. It is also the triumph of a nation.
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