In 1951, Meyer Levin’s wife gave him a copy of The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank, which had just been published in France. Levin was already a successful writer in his mid-forties, searching for a way to bear witness to his experiences as a war correspondent in Europe. In Anne Frank’s diary, he found the voice he had been waiting for. The Obsession, widely regarded as one of Meyer Levin’s finest works, is a candid account of his struggle to bring his version of Anne Frank’s diary to Broadway. Levin’s adaptation, begun with the support of Anne’s father, Otto, was eventually deemed ‘unstageworthy,’ and he was supplanted by non-Jewish writers. To Levin, it was a clear case of sanitizing Anne’s story in favor of mass appeal. He battled for his version in courtrooms and out, but the fallout nearly destroyed both his family and his career. In recounting the mania that gripped him for twenty years, Levin spares neither himself nor others. Like all his best work, this extraordinary memoir encompasses larger themes—the nature of Jewishness, the price of assimilation, the writer’s obligation to himself and to his subject, and the search for identity and purpose. "The Obsession is an autobiographical account by one of America's best contemporary novelists of his twenty-year agonizing enslavement to an idea. ... It is a dramatic book, beautifully written, with suspense, sensational revelations, the striking changes of pace and focus, and relentless seeking after the meaning of the obsession." - Sage Journal Publications
The acclaimed autobiography of the Chicago journalist and author hailed as “the most significant American Jewish writer” of the mid-twentieth century (Los Angeles Times). Raised in the notorious Bloody Nineteenth Ward in Chicago, Meyer Levin landed a job at the Chicago Daily News at eighteen. He pursued reporting as a means to support his fiction writing, yet it was as a war correspondent that Levin found his voice. One of the first Americans to enter the concentration camps during World War II and record the horrors there, Levin also helped smuggle Jews from Poland to Palestine, capturing the events in his now classic film The Illegals. In this vivid chronicle, Levin traverses America, France, Spain, Eastern Europe and Palestine, incisively documenting some of the most important events of the twentieth century. Yet In Search is equally the story of Levin’s quest to define his Jewishness to himself and to the world. Both personal and universal, it affords a glimpse into a singular life and career and is, as Levin puts it, “more than a book about the Jews; it seeks to touch the human spirit.”
The acclaimed novel of growing up in Chicago’s Jewish ghetto in the shadow of WWI: “A landmark in the development of the realistic novel” (Harold Strauss, The New York Times). Chicago reporter and author of Compulsion, Meyer Levin won critical acclaim with this debut novel based on his own coming of age in the west side of Chicago. It follows the lives of nineteen teenagers—eleven boys and eight girls—who grow up together in the same working class Jewish Chicago neighborhood. The children of immigrants, these young people strive to forge their own paths in the aftermath of World War I and the struggles of the Great Depression. With compassion, intimacy, and photographic detail, Levin captures not only the lives of this unique “bunch,” but also the life of a generation from the Roaring Twenties through the New Deal and the Chicago World’s Fair. First published in 1937, The Old Bunch “brilliantly succeeds in taking the reader on a memorable tour of the world in which the old bunch lived” (The New York Times). “Written in good hard-driving colloquial prose, full of sharp characterizations . . . A very fine novel.” —New Republic
This 1940 novel of the labor movement offers an unflinching portrait of a Chicago steel strike: “A fine American novel—one of the best I ever read” (Ernest Hemingway). For Chicago physician Mitch Wilner, July 4, 1937, began as a typical holiday—a leisurely afternoon at the beach with his wife and young children. But when a peaceful protest erupts in violence, and Mitch sees unarmed steel mill strikers attacked by the local police, he finds himself thrust into the heart of America’s labor struggles. In the days and months that follow, Mitch witnesses the aggressive strike-breaking tactics used by the steel mill companies, the brutality of the authorities, and the blatant corruption of the local government and media. But in the unionists, Mitch discovers a bond that crosses ethnic, class, and racial boundaries, and truly embodies the spirit of the American dream. Inspired by the Memorial Day Massacre of 1937, Citizens looks at some of the darkest days in modern US labor history in a “powerful, photographic novel [that] will catch the imagination of the social minded” (Kirkus Reviews). “One of the best American writers working in the realistic tradition.” —Norman Mailer
From the acclaimed author of Compulsion comes the saga of a Jewish family that flees Russia to become settlers of the nascent state of Israel. Proclaimed “most significant American Jewish writer of his time” by Los Angeles Times, Meyer Levinturns his journalistic eye for character and detail to an epic tale of the founding of Israel. At the turn of the twentieth century, Feigel and Yankel Chaimovitch are among the many Russian Jews caught up in the burgeoning revolution. To escape the pogroms, they flee with their children to their ancient homeland, Eretz Yisroel. Though Eretz Yisroel is a place of unparalleled beauty, these pioneers face innumerable hardships: poverty, disease, grueling physical labor, and violent tensions with their Arab neighbors. There are even conflicts within their own ranks, especially between new arrivals and established settlers. And as World War I escalates, each family member—from second-oldest son Gidon, who struggles through the disastrous Gallipoi campaign, to Leah, who awaits the return of her fickle Moshe—struggles to build their future.
Judd Steiner and Artie Straus have it all: wealth, intelligence, and the world at their feet as part of the elite, upper-crust Jewish community of 1920s Chicago. Artie is handsome, athletic, and popular, but he possesses a hidden, powerful sadistic streak and a desire to dominate. Judd is a weedy introvert, a genius who longs for a companion whom he can idolize and worship. Obsessed with Nietzsche’s idea of the superhuman, both boys decide to prove that they are above the laws of man by arbitrarily picking and murdering a Jewish boy in their neighborhood. This new edition of Meyer Levin's classic literary thriller Compulsion reintroduces the fictionalized case of Leopold and Loeb – once considered the "crime of the century" – to a new generation. This incisive psychological portrait of two young murderers seized the imagination of an era and is generally recognized as paving the way for the first non-fiction novel. Compulsion forces us to ask what drives some further into darkness, and some to seek redemption. Heartbreaking as it is gripping, Compulsion is written with a tense and penetrating force that led the Los Angeles Times to call Levin, “the most significant Jewish writer of his times.”
Two lovestruck teenagers stumble toward adulthood in 1920s Chicago in a novel by “one of the best American writers working in the realistic tradition” (Norman Mailer). Johnnie didn’t plan on falling for Frankie. She was too young, too naïve, and his best friend’s sister to boot. But from the moment he sees her, Johnnie knows that Frankie is the only girl for him. There’s only so much pretending he can do before he admits it. And there’s so much to learn—about her, about himself, about life—when he does. Meanwhile, Frankie used to think all boys were the same, wild and reckless. But sweet, sincere Johnnie is proving that he’s different. Plus, when he’s not around, her thoughts keep circling back to him. As they spend more time together, their feelings grow deeper—is this real love or just a youthful fling? Set amid the bustle of 1920s Chicago, Frankie & Johnnie is an emotionally charged story of first love, second chances, and the bittersweet journey to adulthood.
The family saga that began in The Settlers continues through WWII and the creation of Israel in a novel that “follows history’s beat closely and knowingly” (Kirkus Reviews). When the Chaimovitch family fled the Russian pogroms at the turn of the twentieth century, they hoped their family could flourish in Eretz Yisroel, the land of their ancestors. Twenty years later, they are thriving in Palestine and sending their youngest son Mati off to attend an American college. But the difficulties of their old lives in Russia are harder to shake than they thought. With the rumblings of World War II comes anti-Jewish violence reminiscent of the pogroms they once fled. And that violence claims the life of Mati’s younger brother. When Mati returns home to help his family deal with the sudden tragedy, he brings his new Jewish American bride Dena. Bridging the generations, the Chaimovitch family will confront unimaginable horrors as they work toward the triumphs and trials that created the Jewish state of Israel. “The culmination of a prodigiously productive and important career.” —Norman Mailer
Eva: A Novel of the Holocaust, first published in 1959, is a fictionalized account of Ida Loew, a young Jewish girl from Poland who survived the Jewish pogroms of the Nazis and the Auschwitz camp. The book opens with the girl at age 16 leaving her home in southeastern Poland and posing as a gentile from the Ukraine named Katya. The story follows Eva as she works as a maid in the home of a prominent Austrian family in Linz (the husband is an SS officer), and then as an office worker in a German munitions factory. When she is eventually discovered to be a Jew, she is sent to Auschwitz. After the evacuation of the camp she manages to escape, finding refuge with a Polish family. At the end of the novel she is trying to find her family and home, difficult because so many Jewish communities in Eastern Europe had been destroyed. In real life, Ida Loew made her way to Israel after the war where she settled in Tel Aviv.
On her sixteenth birthday, Aisha suddenly can't touch anything without breaking it. With the help of a friend, she's able to get a handle on her new super strength. But Aisha is determined to keep her super power a secret at all cost. When an earthquake hits and starts destroying her school, will she be willing to reveal her secret in order to save the day?
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