The Jewish Wife and Other Short Plays

Author: Bertolt Brecht
Publisher: Grove Press
ISBN: 9780802150981
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 180

Book Description
These six plays represent the best and most humorous of Brecht's shorter works. The Jewish Wife is from the Fear and Misery in the Third Reich cycle of one-act plays, which, along with In Search of Justice and The Informer, chromicles the hardships of life in Nazi Germany. The Exception and the Rule, one of Brecht's most popular short works, grimly depicts the consequences of the mutually dependent -- yet inevitable inequitable -- relationship between the priviledged and the poor; it is included here with The Measures Taken and The Elephant Calf. Though all of these ales of horror, ad Eric Bentley calls them, have tragic undertones, they are also infused with farcical absurdities and cosmic irony so characteristic of Brecht's work.

The Zookeeper's Wife

Author: Diane Ackerman
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 9780393061727
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 384

Book Description
A true story--as powerful as "Schindler's List"--in which the keepers of the Warsaw Zoo saved hundreds of people from Nazi hands.

The Lost Wife

Author: Alyson Richman
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101552549
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 369

Book Description
A rapturous novel of star-crossed love in a time of war—from the international bestselling author of The Secret of Clouds. During the last moments of calm in prewar Prague, Lenka, a young art student, and Josef, who is studying medicine, fall in love. With the promise of a better future, they marry—only to have their dreams shattered by the imminent Nazi invasion. Like so many others, they are torn apart by the currents of war. Now a successful obstetrician in America, Josef has never forgotten the wife he believes died in the war. But in the Nazi ghetto of Terezín, Lenka survived, relying on her skills as an artist and the memories of a husband she would never see again. Then, decades later and thousands of miles away, an unexpected encounter in New York leads to an inescapable glance of recognition, and the realization that providence has given Lenka and Josef one more chance. From the glamorous ease of life in Prague before the occupation to the horrors of Nazi Europe, The Lost Wife explores the power of first love, the resilience of the human spirit, and our capacity to remember.

Echoes From The Holocaust

Author: Alan Rosenberg
Publisher: Temple University Press
ISBN: 0877226865
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 472

Book Description
The murder of six million Jewish men, women, and children during World War II was an act of such barbarity as to constitute one of the central events of our time; yet a list of the major concerns of professional philosophers since 1945 would exclude the Holocaust. This collection of twenty-three essays, most of which were written expressly for this volume, is the first book to focus comprehensively on the profound issues and philosophical significance of the Holocaust. The essays, written for general as well as professional readers, convey an extraordinary range of factual information and philosophical reflection in seeking to identify the haunting meanings of the Holocaust. Among the questions addressed are: How should philosophy approach the Holocaust? What part did the philosophical climate play in allowing Hitlerism its temporary triumph? What is the philosophical climate today and what are its probable cultural effects? Can philosophy help our culture to become a bulwark against future agents of evil? The multiple dimensions of the Holocaust—historical, sociological, psychological, religious, moral, and literary—are collected here for concentrated philosophical interpretations.

Edward II

Author: Bertolt Brecht
Publisher: Grove Press
ISBN: 9780802151476
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 132

Book Description
Edward II is, in a sense, Bertolt Brecht's only tragedy. Based on Christopher Marlowe's classic of the same name, it departs from its source as widely as The Threepenny Opera departs from Gay's Beggar's Opera. Brecht has made a multitude of technical changes calculated to streamline the play, with a smaller cast and simpler action, and he has created virtually new and totally compelling characters with his extravagant variations on Anne, Edward's queen, and Mortimer, the villain of the piece. Brecht also reinterprets Marlowe's famously homosexual protagonist, creating an Edward initially more crudely homoerotic and ultimately more truly heroic. Brecht's Edward is a hero for the modern era: an existential hero defying a meaningless universe with his courage.

Recovering Jewishness

Author: Frederick S. Roden
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1440837759
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 289

Book Description
Judaism and Jewish life reflect a diversity of identity after the past two centuries of modernization. This work examines how the early reformers of the 19th century and their legacy into the 20th century created a livable, liberal Jewish identity that allowed a reinvention of what it meant to be Jewish—a process that continues today. Many scholars of the modern Jewish identity focus on the ways in which the past two centuries have resulted in the loss of Jewishness: through "assimilation," intermarriage, conversion to other faiths, genocide (in the Holocaust), and decline in religious observance. In this work, author Frederick S. Roden presents a decidedly different perspective: that the changes in Judaism throughout the 19th and 20th centuries resulted in a malleable, welcoming, and expanded Jewish identity—one that has benefited from intermarriage and converts to Judaism. The book examines key issues in the modern definition of Jewish identity: who is and is not considered a Jew, and why; issues of Jewish "authenticity"; and the recent history of the debate. Attention is paid to the experiences of individuals who came to Judaism from outside the tradition: through marrying into Jewish families and/or choosing Judaism as a religion. In his consideration of the tragedy of the Holocaust, the author examines how a totalitarian regime's racial policing of Jewish identity served to awaken a connection with and reconfiguration of what that Jewish identity meant for those who retrospectively realized their Jewishness in the postwar era.

The Threepenny Opera

Author: Kurt Weill
Publisher: Grove Press
ISBN: 9780802150394
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 132

Book Description
Brecht's famous adaptation to the modern era of John Gay's The beggar's opera, satirizing social and political beliefs through its portrayal of a world of thieves and prostitutes.

The Nervous System

Author: Michael Taussig
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136606394
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 220

Book Description
In a series of intriguing essays ranging over terror, State fetishism, shamanic healing in Latin America, homesickness, and the place of the tactile eye in both magic and modernity, anthropologist Michael Taussig puts into representational practice a curious type of engaged writing. Based on a paranoiac vision of social control and its understanding as in a permanent state of emergency leaving no room for contemplation between signs and things, these essays hover between story-telling and high theory and thus create strange new modes of critical discourse. The Nervous System will appeal to writers, scholars, artists, film makers, and readers interested in critical theory, aesthetics, and politics.

The Mother

Author: Bertolt Brecht
Publisher: Grove Press
ISBN: 9780802131607
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 164

Book Description
Bertolt Brecht's play The Mother is freely adapted from Gorky's world-famous novel of the same name. Brecht tells the story of a working-class mother who is drawn into the struggle for a Bolshevik revolution; in the character of Pelagea Vlassova, the mother of the title, Brecht draws a richly human figure who emerges as the single entirely positive major hero in all of Brecht's dramatic works. This edition has an extensive introduction by the translator, Lee Baxandall, which gives a detailed history of the play and its first production. In addition, there are twenty-five pages of notes by Brecht himself.

Between Dignity and Despair

Author: Marion A. Kaplan
Publisher: Studies in Jewish History
ISBN: 9780195130928
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 306

Book Description
Kaplan tells the story of Jews in Germany not from the hindsight of the Holocaust, nor by focusing on the persecutors, but from the bewildered and ambiguous perspective of Jews trying to navigate their dally lives in a world that was becoming more and more insane.