Tevye the Dairyman and Motl the Cantor's Son
10 best books like Tevye the Dairyman and Motl the Cantor's Son (Sholom Aleichem): The Collected Stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer, Meet Me in St. Louis, Yiddishkeit: Jewish Vernacular and the New Land, The Women's Decameron, The Rise of David Levinsky, Orlando Furioso: Part Two, Tolstoy, Rasputin, Others, and Me: The Best of Teffi, The Wives: The Women Behind Russia's Literary Giants, Old Peter's Russian Tales, Boychiks in the Hood: Travels in the Hasidic Underground
| Author | Isaac Bashevis Singer |
| ISBN | 0374517886 |
The forty-seven stories in this collection, selected by Singer himself out of nearly one hundred and fifty, range from the publication of his now-classic first collection, Gimpel the Fool, in 1957, until 1981. They include supernatural tales, slices of life from Warsaw and the shtetls of Eastern...
| Author | Sally Benson |
| ISBN | 1891442260 |
There are times when a film does a more enjoyable job with a book than the book does for itself. "Meet Me in Saint Louis" is one of the great old movie musicals, and probably provided the best performance ever given by Judy Garland. The book, on the other hand, is nothing extraordinary in the genre of happy-old-time-family...
| Author | Harvey Pekar |
| ISBN | 0810997495 |
Yiddish is everywhere. We hear words like nosh, schlep, and schmutz all the time, but how did these words come to pepper American English? In Yiddishkeit: Jewish Vernacular and the New Land, Harvey Pekar and Paul Buhle trace the influence of Yiddish from medieval Europe to the tenements of New York’s...
| Author | Julia Voznesenskaya |
| ISBN | 0704325551 |
Like Boccacio's famous Florentines, Julia Voznesenskaya's Russian women are cunning and savvy—about all facets of the Soviet system. They know how to beat it and how to endure. Quarantined in a Leningrad maternity ward after giving birth, ten women from all walks of Soviet life amuse themselves...
| Author | Abraham Cahan |
| ISBN | 0140186875 |
I read this one a long time ago and was really drawn in by the pathos and the humor, and, of course, the journey. Cahan refuses to make this a simple story about good and evil. Levinsky falls as he rises, and rises as he falls, and perhaps there is something almost universally true about the human predicament...
One of the greatest epic poems of the Italian Renaissance, Orlando Furioso is an intricate tale of love and enchantment set at the time of the Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne's conflict with the Moors. When Count Orlando returns to France from Cathay with the captive Angelica as his prize, her beauty...
Early in her literary career Nadezhda Lokhvitskaya, born in St. Petersburg in 1872, adopted the pen-name of Teffi, and it is as Teffi that she is remembered. In pre-revolutionary Russia she was a literary star, known for her humorous satirical pieces; in the 1920s and 1930s, she wrote some of her finest...
The six literary wives in the book, Anna Dostoevsky, Sophia Tolstoy, Véra Nabokov, Elena Bulgakov, Nadezhda Mandelstam, and Natalya Solzhenitsyn were muses, intellectual companions, and indispensable aids to Russia’s most celebrated writers. Popoff draws from the women’s autobiographical...
| Author | Arthur Ransome |
| ISBN | 1903252164 |
This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important,...
| Author | Robert Eisenberg |
| ISBN | 0062512234 |
Boychiks in the Hood is your passport to the Hasidic "underworld" -- a destination far different from popular expectations. Join Robert Eisenberg as he hangs out with an ex-Deadhead in Antwerp, makes a pilgrimage to the grave of the revered Rebbie Nachman in the Ukraine, munches mini-bagels with Rollerblading...
| Author | Alisa Solomon |
| ISBN | 0805092609 |
A sparkling and eye-opening history of the Broadway musical that changed the world
In the half-century since its premiere, Fiddler on the Roof has had an astonishing global impact. Beloved by audiences the world over, performed from rural high schools to grand state theaters, Fiddler is...
| Author | Harriet Beecher Stowe |
| ISBN | 0140437029 |
From the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a domestic comedy that examines slavery, Protestant theology, and gender differences in early America.First published in 1859, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s third novel is set in eighteenth-century Newport, Rhode Island, a community known for its engagement...
| Author | Elisa Albert |
| ISBN | 0743291271 |
Elisa Albert's debut story collection marks the arrival of an extraordinary new voice in fiction. In "How This Night Is Different," Albert boldly illuminates the struggles of young, disaffected Jews to find spiritual fulfillment. With wit and wisdom, she confronts themes -- self-deprecation,...
The Book of the Unknown: Tales of the Thirty-six
| Author | Jonathon Keats |
| ISBN | 0812978978 |
Marvelous and mystical stories of the thirty-six anonymous saints whose decency sustains the world–reimagined from Jewish folklore.
A liar, a cheat, a degenerate, and a whore. These are the last people one might expect to be virtuous. But a legendary Kabbalist has discovered the truth:...
| Author | Joseph W. Yoder |
| ISBN | 0836190181 |
This book tells the story of a baby who was raised by an Amishwoman after the baby's mother died a few days after her birth. Pat McGonegal of Ireland had followed the love of his life, Bridget O’Connor, to America. Pat boarded with an Amish woman, Elizabeth Yoder, and after he married Bridget, the two...
American Judaism: A History
| Author | Jonathan D. Sarna |
| ISBN | 0300109768 |
This magisterial work chronicles the 350-year history of the Jewish religion in America. Tracing American Judaism from its origins in the colonial era through the present day, Jonathan Sarna explores the ways in which Judaism adapted in this new context. How did American culture—predominantly...
Reflections of a Scientist
| Author | Henry Eyring |
| ISBN | 0877479445 |
Elder Neal A. Maxwell once called Henry Eyring "the most distinguished Mormon scientist of this dispensation."
Henry Eyring discusses various aspects of science, religion, and life. Some of his topics are truth, heredity and environment, communication, freedom through obedience, the...
| Author | Mort Zachter |
| ISBN | 0820329347 |
Mort Zachter’s childhood revolved around a small shop on Manhattan’s Lower East Side known in the neighborhood as “the day-old bread store.” It was a bakery where nothing was baked, owned by his two eccentric uncles who referred to their goods as “the merchandise.” Zachter grew up sleeping...
| Author | Jackie Wullschlager |
“When Matisse dies,” Pablo Picasso remarked in the 1950s, “Chagall will be the only painter left who understands what color really is.” As a pioneer of modernism and one of the greatest figurative artists of the twentieth century, Marc Chagall achieved fame and fortune, and over the course...
Jewish Comedy: A Serious History
| Author | Jeremy Dauber |
| ISBN | 0393356299 |
In a major work of scholarship that explores the funny side of some very serious business (and vice versa), Jeremy Dauber examines the origins of Jewish comedy and its development from biblical times to the age of Twitter. Organizing Jewish comedy into “seven strands”—including the satirical,...
Diary of Two Mad Black Mormons: Finding the Lord's Lessons in Everyday Life
Are Mormons funny? Oh, heavens, yes! Especially when looking through the lens of Sistas in Zion two very funny ladies
with testimonies of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Their unique
perspective and diary entries will have you laughing one minute
and saying "Amen!" the next...
| Author | S.Y. Agnon |
| ISBN | 0815606184 |
I had expected a lot more from this Israeli Nobel Prize winner. Agnon indeed seems to bring a simple story, but it was a hell of a struggle to get through. This is mainly due to the slow rhythm, the archaic style and the dull romantic story, in which the inner soul stirrings of the protagonists Hirsjl and Blume...
Every few decades a book is published that shapes Jewish consciousness. One thinks of Wiesel's Night or Levi's Survival in Auschwitz. But in 1927, years before these works were written, Joseph Roth (1894-1939) composed The Wandering Jews. In these stunning dispatches written when Roth was a correspondent...
Seemingly a set of prose ballads about the southeastern tip of Poland, Tales of Galicia brilliantly blurs the line between the short-story genre and the novel, while giving a vivid, poetic portrait of an imaginary village that was once part of a vibrant collective farm system. It is a part of Poland that...
In 1941, a young Harvard-educated classicist named Varian Fry arrived in occupied France on a daring mission to rescue more than 2,000 of Europe's leading writers, artists, and intellectuals from the Nazis. Hounded by the Gestapo, he smuggled Marchel Duchamp, Marc Chagall, Hannah Arendt and dozens...
