Pascal Mercier

Barbara Harshav

Raimund Gregorious is a predictable character. A bookish Latin professor, well-respected, perhaps a little boring. One storm morning, he encounters a beautiful, distraught Portuguese woman in a red leather coat. Later that day Raimund will realise: that moment change everything. All of a sudden nothing in his life feels right.

Night Train to Lisbon

Hanoch Levin

Israeli playwright and director Hanoch Levin was one of the most original and innovative writers of his generation. Although Levin is familiar within the Israeli cultural context--and despite the steadily growing stream of literary and theatrical research of his oeuvre--there are few resources on his work available outside of Israel. The present volume, containing a selection of ten of his plays, is the first comprehensive effort to present this unique playwright and director to a broad readership. Levin's artistic credo was based on a constant urge to criticize Israeli society and its mainstream ideology while simultaneously confronting the basic human and existential issues of life and death. A whole generation of Israeli theater audiences has grown up on Levin's performances with all their paradoxical complexities. At this point, just a few years after his death from cancer in 1999 at the age of 56, it may not be possible to evaluate the full impact of his work. But this volume will contribute significantly to scholarship in this direction and to the appreciation of Levin's unique style.

Selected Plays

The Labor of Life

Meir Shalev

Zayde Rabinovitch relates the story of his mother, Judith, the three men who loved her, and the mystery surrounding his paternity

The Loves of Judith

Marc Chagall

Benjamin Harshav

I︠A︡kov Aleksandrovich Tugendkholʹd

Abram Markovich Ėfros

Marc Chagall (1887-1985) traversed a long route from a boy in the Jewish Pale of Settlement, to a commissar of art in revolutionary Russia, to the position of a world-famous French artist. This book presents for the first time a comprehensive collection of Chagall's public statements on art and culture. The documents and interviews shed light on his rich, versatile, and enigmatic art from within his own mental world. The book raises the problems of a multi-cultural artist with several intersecting identities and the tensions between modernist form and cultural representation in twentieth-century art. It reveals the travails and achievements of his life as a Jew in the twentieth century and his perennial concerns with Jewish identity and destiny, Yiddish literature, and the state of Israel. This collection includes annotations and introductions of the Chagall texts by the renowned scholar Benjamin Harshav that elucidate the texts and convey the changing cultural contexts of Chagall's life. Also featured is the translation by Benjamin and Barbara Harshav of the first book about Chagall's work, the 1918 Russian The Art of Marc Chagall.

Including the First Book on Chagall's Art by A. Efros and Ya. Tugendhold (Moscow, 1918)

Marc Chagall on Art and Culture

Abram Markovich ?fros

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1986.

A Bilingual Anthology

American Yiddish Poetry

Michael Theunissen

The literature on Kierkegaard is often content to paraphrase. By contrast, Michael Theunissen articulates one of Kierkegaard's central ideas, his theory of despair, in a detailed and comprehensible manner and confronts it with alternatives. Understanding what Kierkegaard wrote on despair is vital not only because it illuminates his thought as a whole, but because his account of despair in The Sickness unto Death is the cornerstone of existentialism. Theunissen's book, published in German in 1993, is widely regarded as the best treatment of the subject in any language. Kierkegaard's Concept of Despair is also one of the few works on Kierkegaard that bridge the gap between the Continental and analytic traditions in philosophy. Theunissen argues that for Kierkegaard, the fundamental characteristic of despair is the desire of the self "not to be what it is." He sorts through the apparently chaotic text of The Sickness unto Death to explain what Kierkegaard meant by the "self," how and why individuals want to flee their selves, and how he believed they could reconnect with their selves. According to Theunissen, Kierkegaard thought that individuals in despair seek to deny their authentic selves to flee particular aspects of their character, their past, or the world, or in order to deny their "mission." In addition to articulating and evaluating Kierkegaard's concept of despair, Theunissen relates Kierkegaard's ideas to those of Heidegger, Sartre, and other twentieth-century philosophers.

Kierkegaard's Concept of Despair

Renowned Israeli-American scholar Harshav presents the first comprehensive investigation of Marc Chagall's life and consciousness after the classic 1961 biography by Chagall's son-in-law Franz Meyer.

A Documentary Narrative

Marc Chagall and His Times

Sing, Stranger is a comprehensive historical anthology of a century of American poetry written in Yiddish and now translated into English for the first time. This anthology reveals both an amazing achievement of Jewish creative work and an important body of American poetry.

A Century of American Yiddish Poetry : a Historical Anthology

Sing, Stranger

Abraham Sutzkever

Avrāhām Sûṣqewer

A collection of poetry and prose relates the author's thoughts on God, nature, love, war, and childhood memories

Barbara Harshav

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