Letters can often be spontaneous expressions of their writer's search for meaning, redemption and identity. Such are the letters of Bruno Schulz, one of the most sensitive, and most tormented European-Jewish writers. In this collection of letters - published here for the first time in Hebrew, translated by Miriam Bornstein and edited by Jacob Golomb - Schulz expresses his most hidden thoughts in the most poignant way. These letters were a vital lifeline for him that connected his remote city of Drohowicz to the turbulent cultural and literary centers of Poland in the interwar period. Schulz's desperate need to gain public recognition resonates with them, along with a strong sense of loneliness and existential isolation. These letters can be read as works of art in their own right, and they have the potential to shed new light on Schulz's work, its mysteries and embarrassments. The book includes some of his spectacular paintings and a selection of the review notes he wrote and published. Schultz reveals himself as a sharp, attentive and sensitive critic. Oftentimes, his critical lists not only talk about the works, but reflect his own personality.

It is not an easy task to find in any creative field a person who is both an original and groundbreaking artist and a profound thinker-interpreter, who is well versed in the broad scope of the entire culture. Such is Michael Gurevitch – the playwright of "Happiness", "A Fleeting Shadow", "A Word of Love" and "The Dragon's Beloved" (out of more than eighteen plays) – who presented new, local and extremely challenging concepts about the context of a theatre play within the contemporary Israeli existence. Gurevitch designs a new local theatrical language in his plays and in the way he directs. He is an unforgettable director of classics such as "The King's Clothes" by Nissim Aloni, "Life is a Dream" by Calderón de la Barca, "A Midsummer Night's Dream" by Shakespeare, "Uncle Vanya" by Chekhov or "War on the House" by Aristophanes (adaptation by Ilan Hatsor). His theatrical insights are interwoven to the most contemporary Israeli issues without so much as a sensational wink. His theater is a "passing shadow" in the full sense of the word because it is based on one-time work with certain actors, at certain moments in their lives, and in the life of the country at a certain moment, and for that reason it is profoundly unique to theater alone, because it lives only when it is actually performed, hence it is poignant and unforgettable. Gurevitch was born (1951) and raised in Tel Aviv. He lived, breathed and studied local and international theater all his life, but his main strength is in the depths of the emotional, involving his childhood, his parents and his unique personality. In Two Children in The Field: Reflections on Theatre and Life Gurevitch manages to refine, from his rich experience, a series of lucid insights on the relation between theatrical conceptions and the contexts from which they stem.

The book explores the representations and depictions of old age in the rabbinic Jewish literature of late antiquity. Through close literary readings and cultural analysis, the book reveals the gaps and tensions between idealized images of old age on the one hand, and the psychologically, physiologically, and socially complicated realities of aging on the other hand. The authors argue that while rabbinic literature presents various statements on the qualities and activities that make for good old age, on the respect and reverence that the elderly should be awarded, and on harmonious intergenerational relationship, it also includes multiple anecdotes and narratives that portray aging in much more nuanced and poignant ways. These anecdotes and narratives relate, alongside fantasies about blissful or unnoticeable aging, a host of fears associated with old age: from the loss of physical capability and beauty to the loss of memory and mental acuity, and from marginalization in the community to being experienced as a burden by one’s own children. Each chapter of the book focuses on a different aspect of aging in the rabbinic world: bodily appearance and sexuality, family relations, intellectual and cognitive prowess, honor and shame, and social roles and identity.

Yaakov Shabtai is best known for his path-breaking novel Zichron Devarim (1977; translated into English as Past Continuous ), one of the most important works of prose in Hebrew if not in world literature due to its original structure. Shabtai discovered his gift for the theater in his twenties, and moved from Kibbutz Merchavia to Tel Aviv where he made his living authoring and translating plays and writing songs for entertainment evenings. In 1972 he published a collection of short stories entitled Uncle Peretz Takes Off . His novel-memoire Sof Davar (1984; Past Perfect ) was published posthumously. This biography interweaves a detailed description of Shabtai's life, his ideological evolution, and an analysis of his difficult path to literary achievement. His plays, though considered mediocre by some, emerge as essential for the crystallization of his novels.

The essay presents the lost archive of the Jewish author Zalman Shneour (Shklov 1887 – New York 1950). It was found in May 2018 at Calle Eraso 21 in Madrid – the city through which he had passed in the summer of 1941. Four carton boxes survived in the apartment of his late daughter, Renee Rebecca Shneour, who fled to New York together with her father but returned to live in Madrid in her adulthood. The essay offers a reading of Shneour's correspondences with three women - his mother in Shklov, his friend and lover in Berlin, and his daughter.

A man wanted a new house, with more and more rooms, for all his belongings. But then he discovered that he needed nothing but a single room and lots of good and friendly neighbors. By the beloved author Haya Shenhav and the award-winning illustrator Yirmi Pinkus.

This is the ninth volume of the series Judaica Latinoamericana , edited by AMILAT – Israeli Association of Researchers of Latin American Jewry. It is based on studies presented at the Latin American Section of the Seventeenth World Congress of Jewish Studies (2017). Former volumes of the series may be accessed at http://amilat.online. The book is a multi-disciplinary collection of 23 articles – 19 in Spanish, two in Portuguese and two in English –in five thematic sections: Jewish communities – internal processes presents studies on identities, migrations and religion in Argentina and Mexico, as well as informal education and the history of a peripheral community in Chile. Migrations analyzes processes of migration, acculturation and integration in different periods in Argentina, Brazil, Cuba and Mexico. Antisemitism, Shoah, Memory deals with Peruvian attempts to rescue Jews, silence and memory of the Holocaust in Mexico and Uruguay, as well as visual components of racism and memory in Cuba and Argentina. Zionism and the State of Israel analyzes Socialist Zionism in Uruguay and recent Brazilian policy toward the Middle East conflict. Literature presents a variety of topics, such as history of migration and post-migration literature, Shoah and exile, and contemporary Jewish literature in Argentina, Brazil and the US.

The Adventurous Simplicissimus , the great literary monument of the Thirty-Years War (1618–1648) published in nearly real time – 20 years after it took place – combines a picaresque, historical, satirical, autobiographic, realistic and fantastic novel. This war which devastated Europe was the first example of a "world war" in history. The author, Hans Jacob Christoffel Grimmelshausen (1622–1676), experienced it in person and also took part in it at a young age. As author, he avoids taking sides with anyone of the fighting parties, or, as he declares, "For the future generations I will describe the atrocities that were committed again and again in our German war." The strange adventures of the hero are depicted sometimes with lurid detail, but always with a pinch of humor, ridiculing any admiration of heroes or personality cult. Thus Simplicissimus has become one of the most powerful anti-war literary works of all times.

This book discusses Emile Habibi's stories "The Pessoptimist," "Ekhtayyeh" and "Saraya" and their revolutunary translation into Hebrew by Anton Shammas.

The Jewish Haskalah movement heralded a profound, unprecedented cultural-spiritual revolution in the Jewish world. Beginning in the German lands in the second half of the eighteenth century and subsequently spreading to central Europe, it called for reconstituting traditional Jewish society in line with maskilic values. This volume spotlights the early-nineteenth-century Galician Haskalah. Although a backwater annexed to the Austrian Empire from Poland but two generations earlier, Galicia’s impressive gallery of outstanding individuals and literary activity has granted the Galician Haskalah its place as one of the most productive, influential centers of the Haskalah movement. This collection of articles is based on lectures delivered at the "Revealers of Secrets—200 Years of Galician Haskalah" conference. Held in Jerusalem in 2013, this fifth annual conference for the study of the Haskalah movement aimed to submit the Galician Haskalah to renewed scholarly examination. Organized in five sections, the volume’s twenty-three essays by outstanding scholars portray the variegated aspects of this movement, which ranged from attempts to preserve Jewish identity by nurturing modern Jewish culture in Hebrew to radical attempts to reform traditional Jewish society.

Charles Perrault’s “Puss in Boots” was published in Paris at the end of the seventeenth century in his collection Stories or Tales from Times Past or, Tales of Mother Goose . Yigal Schwartz reveals how Perrault dresses the story in a new and colorful literary garment woven from the fairy tale and the contemporary story of the court of Louis XIV. Perrault’s story and the fairy tale both conceal and reveal things about each other and cruelly illuminate the nature of crowds and the royal court. Among the folds of this literary garment, a social, cultural, and political crossroads can be found. And what do the cat’s boots conceal? This question has excited Yigal Schwartz since childhood and is what sent him on a unique, sometimes perplexing, and multifaceted quest for “Puss in Boots.” In this in-depth literary study, Schwartz analyzes the well-known tale and determinedly examines each of its details, comparing style and content. Why does the cat wear boots? Why a miller’s son? Why the Marquis of de Carabas? And why the ogre’s castle? Schwartz draws his answers from a wide range of perspectives—those of psychoanalysis, phenomenology, sociology, and literary studies—all of which meet at the roots of the anxiety he identifies at the foundation of the tale: the anxiety involved in concealment, which is at the same time anxiety about the mask but also about what may not be concealed behind it at all.