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The Reuben/Rifkin Jewish Women Writers Series: A joint project of the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute and The Feminist Press.
The Reuben/Rifkin Jewish Women Writers Series, established in 2006 by Elaine Reuben, honors her parents, Albert G. and Sara I. Reuben, and her grandparents, Susie Green and Harry Reuben, Bessie Goldberg and David Rifkin. The series focuses on literary works that can embody and connect the varieties of Jewish women’s experiences, speaking for the many whose names and stories are now lost.
This essential and innovative series will produce books by Jewish women writers from the United States and beyond. Following are descriptions of the two inaugural books in the series.
Dream Homes: From Cairo to Katrina, An Exile's Journey
by Joyce Zonana
An Egyptian-Jewish Under the Tuscan Sun, Dream Homes chronicles Joyce Zonana’s quest to find a sense of home among people, foods, and places as far from her native Cairo as Oklahoma and Katrina-stricken New Orleans.
After the Arab-Israeli war of 1948, newlyweds Felix and Nellie Zonana flee Cairo with their infant daughter Joyce, ending up in Brooklyn. Growing up, Joyce swiftly realizes that her Jewish family and their Egyptian culture are neither typically American nor typically American-Jewish; they eat kobeba instead of kugel and speak French instead of Yiddish. Struggling with her feelings of isolation from other Americans and frustrated by never getting full access to Egyptian-Jewish culture, Zonana sets out on a life-long journey to find her place in the world.
She meets her extended family living in Colombia and Brazil and travels to Cairo to get a glimpse of her parents’ past. After she and her mother survive the devastation of Katrina, Zonana comes to see that “home” is not a location, but a spiritual state of mind. Zonana’s heritage and quest are also evoked in numerous photos and family recipes.
"In luminous and lucid prose, at once lament, elegy, and song, Zonana remembers the world of Egyptian Jews, a world she never knew, a world she knows intimately." -Carol P. Christ, author of She Who Changes and Rebirth of the Goddess
"Joyce Zonana's memoir is a lush and beautiful read--a picture of the exotic (Egypt, Brazil), the mundane (New York), and the devastating (New Orleans after Katrina). Zonana writes gorgeous prose, full of spices and senses and sounds, while telling the story of a bookish girl who, like all of us, wants independence and love and great food. There are even recipes!" -Emily Toth, Professor of English and Women's Studies, Louisiana State University
Joyce Zonana earned her B.A. at Brooklyn College and her Ph.D. in English literature at the University of Pennsylvania. Her primary interest as a college professor is working with underserved populations, particularly immigrants and returning adult women students; in her current position at Borough of Manhattan Community College, she feels especially privileged to be working with people whose lives and careers resonate with her own.
$15.95 paper, ISBN-13 9781558615731• $55.00 library cloth, ISBN-13 9781558615748• Rights: USA
Arguing with the Storm: Stories by Yiddish Women Writers
Edited by Rhea Tregebov
Foreword by Kathryn Hellerstein
From rural Jewish towns in Eastern Europe to the New World, from abortive revolutions in Tsarist Russia to the Holocaust, nine women writers from the golden age of Yiddish explore multiple lost worlds. The stories range from the wryly humorous--a girl finds a shiksa wet nurse for her cousin with dire consequences--to the bittersweet, when a once idealistic revolutionary decides her hopes for humanity as mere “fantasy.” The title of the collection is taken from a poem that metaphorically anticipates the Holocaust.
“These brave women . . . left us thinly disguised stories and actual memoir of the cruel times in which they lived. . . . Immensely readable.” --Maxine Kumin, Pulitzer Prize–winning poet.
“Expands the Yiddish canon. . . . What they all reflect collectively is women artists’ passionate engagement with their Jewish communities and history.” --Irena Klepfisz, Barnard College, author of A Few Words in the Mother Tongue
Rhea Tragebov is the author of six collections of poetry and five children’s picture books. She is assistant professor of creative writing at the University of British Columbia, where she teaches workshops in poetry and translation.
Kathryn Hellerstein is the Ruth Meltzer Senior Lecturer of Yiddish and Jewish Studies, University of Pennsylvania, and coeditor of Jewish American Literature: A Norton Anthology.
199 pages • $14.95 paper, 978-1-55861-558-8 • $55.00 library cloth, 978-1-55861-559-5 • Rights: USA
"Dearest Anne: A Tale of Impossible Love
By Judith Katzir
Translated from the Hebrew by Dalya Bilu
Afterword by Hannah Ovnat-Tamir
Best-selling Israeli novelist Judith Katzir recreates a writer’s coming-of-age during the 1970s. When Rivi returns to Israel decades after a turbulent affair with her female literature teacher, she recovers the emotionally charged journals she once addressed to Anne Frank. As Rivi reads them again, readers experience her teenage angst and the jolt of her illicit affair that ended in scandal. Provocative and heartbreaking, the book gracefully echoes Frank’s famous diary and at the same time engages with its tragic heroine, revealing universal truths about the transition from girl to woman.
“I read the book with wonder and emotion. The love between Michaela and Rivi is depicted precisely and delicately.... It’s beautiful.” --Amos Oz
“Judith Katzir is by far the most talented of the . . . young Israeli women writers. It is really impressive, how Katzir lets her protagonist trace these two decisive years in her life and to see the emotional depth and the poetic sharpness of her descriptions. . . . [A] great literary achievement.” --Jüdische Zeitung
“[T]he author manages to get inside a fourteen-year-old girl without judging her, teaching her or setting herself above her.” -- Nathan Shaham, author (Anjoli has the name of his book)
Judith Katzir (1963– ) is the winner of Israel’s Prime Minister’s Prize and the French WIZO Prize.
Dalya Bilu received the Jewish Book Council Award for Hebrew-English translation.
Hannah Ovnat-Tamir is a lecturer at Sapir Academic College and Hebrew University.
May 2008 • 240 pages • $15.95 paper, 978-1-55861-575-5 • $55.00 library cloth, 978-1-55861-579-3 • Rights: World English
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