The National Book Award–winning, New York Times–bestselling history of Yiddish-speaking immigrants on the Lower East Side and beyond.In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, two million Jewish immigrants poured into America, leaving places like Warsaw or the Russian shtetls to pass through Ellis Island and start over in the New World. This is a "brilliant" account of their stories ( The New York Times).Though some moved on to ...

Originally published in 1951 and reissued in 1966 this book combines stimulating biography with sound literary criticism in its account of a writer who observed America’s great nineteenth century change from an agrarian to an industrial society. Irving Howe places Anderson in the cultural context of his times and gives a fresh and balanced judgment both of his virtues and limitations. As an artist, the author of Winesburg, Ohio and Dark Laughter was over-valued and then i...

Originally published in 1976, this monumental volume is a study of one of the major migrations of modern times – the result of which has been significantly to alter the history of the United States and of the whole Middle East. In researching this volume, the author drew on many different sources, including the rich materials of the Yiddish press and the vast number of memoirs written in both English and Yiddish. The book traces the historical, cultural and social experience of the immigra...

First published in German in 1905 as Das Wesen des Judentums, Leo Baeck’s The Essence of Judaism is perhaps the most widely read example of German Jewish scholarship in the 20th century. Written as a response to Adolf von Harnack’s lectures Das Wesen des Christentums (The Essence of Christianity), the book seeks to both define the fundamental principles of Judaism, and contrast them with other religions. But by outlining Judaism’s essence, Baeck also shows how th...

Published in 1919, Winesburg, Ohio is Sherwood Anderson’s masterpiece, a work in which he achieved the goal to which he believed all true writers should aspire: to see and feel “all of life within.” In a perfectly imagined world, an archetypal small American town, he reveals the hidden passions that turn ordinary lives into unforgettable ones. Unified by the recurring presence of young George Willard, and played out against the backdrop of Winesburg, Anderson’s loosely con...

A new edition of the definitive book on the depression-era immigrant experience in New York City.Now with an exciting new preface by rock musician Lou Reed (Delmore Schwartz’s student at Syracuse), In Dreams Begin Responsibilities collects eight of Schwartz’s finest delineations of New York’s intellectuals in the 1930s and 1940s. As no other writer can, Schwartz captures the speech, the generational conflicts, the mocking self-analysis of educated, ambitious, Depression-st...

This book, first published in 1979, is a representative sample of some of the best articles that have appeared in DISSENT, the American democratic socialist quarterly. They provide a two-sided view of political and social action with the democratic society of the USA.

Man of letters, political critic, public intellectual, Irving Howe was one of America’s most exemplary and embattled writers. Since his death in 1993 at age 72, Howe’s work and his personal example of commitment to high principle, both literary and political, have had a vigorous afterlife. This posthumous and capacious collection includes twenty-six essays that originally appeared in such publications as the New York Review of Books, the New Republic, and the Nati...

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, two million Jewish immigrants poured into America, leaving places like Warsaw or the Russian shtetls to pass through Ellis Island and start over in the New World. This is a "brilliant" account of their stories (the New York Times).Though some moved on to Philadelphia, Chicago, and other points west, many of these new citizens settled in New York City, especially in Manhattan's teeming tenements. Like others before and a...

From the Newbery award-winning author of The Hero and The Crown , a magic-filled retelling of Beauty and the Beast featuring Beauty and her sisters.Once upon a time, a wealthy merchant had three daughters. When his business failed, he moved his daughters to the countryside. The youngest daughter, Beauty, is fascinated by the thorny stems of a mysterious plant that overwhelms their neglected cottage. She tends the plant un...

An outcast princess must earn her birthright as a hero of the realm—in this "utterly engrossing" Newbery Medal–winning fantasy ( The New York Times ).Aerin is an outcast in her own father's court, daughter of the foreign woman who, it was rumored, was a witch who enchanted the king to marry her.That is, until the day that the king is riding out at the head of an army. A weary man on an exhausted horse staggers into...

Stories from the world of The Hero and the Crown and other magical places by a New York Times –bestselling Newbery Medal winner.Robin McKinley returns to the mythical setting of The Hero and the Crown and The Blue Sword in this "thrilling, satisfying, and thought-provoking collection" featuring two stories set in the world of Damar, plus three other fantasy ta...