Ilan Stavans

Josh Lambert

A momentous and diverse anthology of the influences and inspirations of Yiddish voices in America—radical, dangerous, and seductive, but also sweet, generous, and full of life—edited by award-winning authors and scholars Ilan Stavans and Josh Lambert. Is it possible to conceive of the American diet without bagels? Or Star Trek without Mr. Spock? Are the creatures in Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are based on Holocaust survivors? And how has Yiddish, a language without a country, influenced Hollywood? These and other questions are explored in this stunning and rich anthology of the interplay of Yiddish and American culture, edited by award-winning authors and scholars Ilan Stavans and Josh Lambert. It starts with the arrival of Ashkenazi immigrants to New York City’s Lower East Side and follows Yiddish as it moves into Hollywood, Broadway, literature, politics, and resistance. We take deep dives into cuisine, language, popular culture, and even Yiddish in the other Americas, including Canada, Argentina, Cuba, Mexico, and Colombia. The book presents a bountiful menu of genres: essays, memoir, song, letters, poems, recipes, cartoons, conversations, and much more. Authors include Nobel Prize–winner Isaac Bashevis Singer and luminaries such as Grace Paley, Cynthia Ozick, Chaim Grade, Michael Chabon, Abraham Cahan, Sophie Tucker, Blume Lempel, Irving Howe, Art Spiegelman, Alfred Kazin, Harvey Pekar, Ben Katchor, Paula Vogel, and Liana Finck. Readers will laugh and cry as they delve into personal stories of assimilation and learn about people from a diverse variety of backgrounds, Jewish and not, who have made the language their own. The Yiddish saying states: Der mentsh trakht un got lakht. Man plans and God laughs. How Yiddish Changed America and How America Changed Yiddish illustrates how those plans are full of zest, dignity, and tremendous humanity.

How Yiddish Changed America and How America Changed Yiddish

Arthur Miller

Jacobo Timerman

An Argentine newspaper publisher who dared to criticize his government's policy of cruel repression, tells the story of his arrest, imprisonment, and torture.

Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number

Euclides da Cunha

Elizabeth Lowe

The Backlands is a translation of Euclide da Cunha's work Os Sertoes, a non-fictional account of the War of Canudos in Brazil during the 1890s. The deadliest civil war in Brazilian history, the conflict was between the Brazilian government and a rebellious village of 30,000 Canudos living in the northeastern state of Bahia, led by Antonio Conselheiro, a religious zealot. Far from being simply an objective journalistic account, Da Cunha's story shows both the significance of this event and the complexities of Brazilian society.

The Canudos Campaign

Backlands

In this rich, eye-opening, and uplifting digital anthology, dozens of esteemed writers, poets, and artists from more than thirty countries send literary dispatches from life during the pandemic. Net proceeds benefit booksellers in need. As our world is transformed by the coronavirus pandemic, writers offer a powerful antidote to the fearful confines of isolation: a window onto lives and corners of the world beyond our own. In Mauritius, a journalist contends with denialism and mourns the last days of summer, lost to the lockdown. In Paris, a writer struggles to protect his young son from fear. In Chile, protesters who prevailed against tear gas and rubber bullets are now halted by a virus. In Queens, after thirteen-hour shifts in the ER, a doctor dons running shoes and makes the long jog home. And We Came Outside and Saw the Stars Again takes its title from the last line of Dante's Inferno, when the poet and his guide emerge from hell to once again behold the beauty of the heavens. In that spirit, the stories, essays, poems, and artwork in this collection--from beloved authors including Jhumpa Lahiri, Mario Vargas Llosa, Eavan Boland, Daniel Alarcón, Jon Lee Anderson, Claire Messud, Ariel Dorfman, and many more--detail the harrowing experiences of life in the pandemic, while pointing toward a less isolated future. Together, they comprise a profound global portrait of the defining moment of our time, and send a clarion call for solidarity across borders. Our literary culture depends on bookstores--and those irreplaceable sources of conversation and community, of inspiration and solace, have been decimated by the lockdown. Net proceeds from And We Came Outside and Saw the Stars Again will go to the Book Industry Charitable Foundation, which helps the passionate booksellers we readers depend upon.

Writers from Around the World on the Covid-19 Pandemic

And We Came Outside and Saw the Stars Again

The Jewish Theodicy of Jorge Luis Borges

Emma Zunz

With the release of the census figures in 2000, Latino America wasanointed the future driving force of American culture. The emergence of Spanglish as a form of communication is one of the more influential markers of an America gone Latino. Spanish, present on this continent since the fifteenth century, when Iberian explorers sought to colonize territories in what are now Florida, New Mexico, Texas, and California, has become ubiquitous in the last few decades. The nation's unofficial second language, it is highly visible on several 24-hour TV networks and on more than 200 radio stations across the country. But Spanish north of the Rio Grande has not spread in its pure Iberian form. On the contrary, a signature of the brewing "Latin Fever" that has swept the United States since the mid-1980s is the astonishing creative linguistic amalgam of tongues used by people of Hispanic descent, not only in major cities but in rural areas as well -- neither Spanish nor English, but a hybrid, known only as Spanglish.

The Making of a New American Language

Spanglish

A major bilingual anthology of twentieth-century Latin American poetry During a century of extraordinary change, poets became the chroniclers of deep polarizations. From Rubén Darío's quest to renew the Spanish language to César Vallejo's linking of religion and politics, from Jorge Luis Borges's cosmopolitanism to Pablo Neruda's placement of poetry as uncompromising speaker for the downtrodden, and from Alejandra Pizarnik's agonies of the self to Humberto Ak'Abal's examination of all things indigenous, it is through verse that the hemisphere's cantankerous collective soul in an age of overhaul might best be understood. A brilliant, moving, and thought-provoking summation of these forking paths, The FSG Book of Twentieth-Century Latin American Poetry invites us to look at an illustrious literary tradition with fresh eyes. Ilan Stavans, one of the foremost scholars of Hispanic culture and a distinguished translator, goes beyond easy geographical and linguistic categorizations in gathering these works. This bilingual anthology features eighty-four authors from sixteen different countries writing in Spanish, Portuguese, Mapuche, Nahuatl, Quechua, Mazatec, Zapotec, Ladino, and Spanglish. The poems are rendered into English in inspired fashion by first-rate translators such as Elizabeth Bishop, Galway Kinnell, W. S. Merwin, Alastair Reid, Mark Strand, and Richard Wilbur. In these pages the reader will experience the power of poetry to account for a hundred years in the life of a restless continent.

An Anthology

The FSG Book of Twentieth-Century Latin American Poetry

El iluminado

A study of the resurrection of the Hebrew language from extinction focuses on the role of Eliezer ben Yehuda in the nineteenth-century revival of Hebrew, as well as the part language plays in Jewish survival, the origins of Israel, Zionism, the Diaspora, and the idea of a promised land. 20,000 first printing.

Resurrecting Hebrew

Associate Professor of Spanish Ilan Stavans, PhD

Writers from Argentina, Brazil, Peru, Venezuela, Guatemala, Mexico, and other countries represent an ethnically diverse culture with roots in eastern Europe as well as Spain. . . . The anthology includes tales by such masters as Alberto Gerchunoff, . . . a large number of innovative women writers, and some authors more familiar to English-speaking readers. Library Journal Reminds us that society south of the border is just as multicultural as in the US, and that Jews have played an important role in it since the time of the Spanish conquest. Publishers Weekly Jewish identity and magical realism are the themes of the tales of adventure and cultural alienation collected here by the leading authority on Jewish Latin American literature. First published in 1994 as Tropical Synagogues: Short Stories by Jewish-Latin American Writers, Ilan Stavans s classic anthology is expanded and updated in this new edition."

An Anthology of Jewish Stories from Latin America

Oy, Caramba!

Margaret Sayers Peden

César Vallejo

A definitive, bilingual collection of poetry by one Latin America's most important poets features more than eighty poems that span the full range of his literary career, accompanied by an introduction that looks at Vallejo's life, his complex literary style, his leftist politics, and more. Original.

"Spain, Take this Chalice from Me" (and Other Poems)

Yiddish, Spanish, Hebrew, and English-at various points in Ilan Stavans's life, each of these has been his primary language. In this rich memoir, the linguistic chameleon outlines his remarkable cultural heritage from his birth in politically fragile Mexico, through his years as a student activist and young Zionist in Israel, to his present career as a noted and controversial academic and writer. Along the way, Stavans introduces readers to some of the remarkable members of his family-his brother, a musical wunderkind; his father, a Mexican soap opera star; his grandmother, who arrived in Mexico from Eastern Europe in 1929 and wrote her own autobiography. Masterfully weaving personal reminiscences with a provocative investigation into language acquisition and cultural code switching, On Borrowed Words is a compelling exploration of Stavans's search for his place in the world.

A Memoir of Language

On Borrowed Words

Recounts events surrounding the recovery, in 2017, of a sixteenth-century biographical manuscript by Luis de Carvajal the Younger, a crypto-Jew executed by the Inquisition in colonial Mexico.

A Mystery

The Return of Carvajal

Collects essays that examine the acclaimed novel, citing its original critical reception and its influence on subsequent Latin American literature and the magical realism genre.

One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel García Márquez

Moacyr Scliar

Margaret A. Neves

"A masterpiece of magical realism by one of Brazil’s most celebrated novelists." -- Amazon.com viewed January 5, 2021.

The Centaur in the Garden

Joshua Ellison

Based on a controversial opinion piece originally published in the New York Times, Reclaiming Travel is a provocative meditation on the meaning of travel from ancient times to the twenty-first century. Ilan Stavans and Joshua Ellison seek to understand why we travel and what has come to be missing from our contemporary understanding of travel. Engaging with canonical and contemporary texts, they explore the differences between travel and tourism, the relationship between travel and memory, the genre of travel writing, and the power of mapmaking, Stavans and Ellison call for a rethinking of the art of travel, which they define as a transformative quest that gives us deeper access to ourselves. Tourism, Stavans and Ellison argue, is inauthentic, choreographed, sterile, shallow, and rooted in colonialism. They critique theme parks and kitsch tourism, such as the shantytown hotels in South Africa where guests stay in shacks made of corrugated metal and cardboard yet have plenty of food, water and space. Tourists, they assert, are merely content with escapism, thrill seeking, or obsessively snapping photographs. Resisting simple moralizing, the authors also remind us that people don’t divide neatly into crude categories like travelers and tourists. They provoke us to reflect on the opportunities and perils in our own habits. In this powerful manifesto, Stavans and Ellison argue that travel should be an art through which our restlessness finds expression—a search for meaning not only in our own lives but also in the lives of others. It is not about the destination; rather, travel is about loss, disorientation, and discovering our place in the universe.

Reclaiming Travel

The most important creation story in the Americas before the European conquest,Popol Vuh was a millennia-old oral tradition that, in the 16th century, as the Mayan civilization was being threatened with destruction, was written down in verse by members of the K'iche' nobility in what is today Guatemala. That original was translated into Spanish by a priest and then vanished mysteriously. Composed of four parts, Popol Vuh tells the story of how the world was created in a series of rehearsals that included wooden dummies, demi-gods, and eventually humans. Cosmic in scope and yet intimately human,Popol Vuh offers invaluable insight into the Mayan way of life before 1492, their code of ethics, their views on death and the afterlife, and their devotion to passion, courage, and the natural world. One of the most extraordinary sections of the narrative is the description--as inspired as Dante's hell--of the underworld, Xibalba. Equally archetypal is the legend of the ultimate king, who, in the face of tragedy, became a spirit that accompanies his people in their struggle for survival. In his prose retelling of this classic that is as seminal as theIliad andOdyssey, award-winning scholar of Latin American civilization Ilan Stavans offers a much-needed opportunity to appreciate the timeless resonance of the account, while also connecting it with the current plight of the indigenous people of the Americas.

An Illustrated Retelling

Popol Vuh

Comprised mostly of memoirs with some fiction, this volume gathers selections from the writings of 85 immigrants from 45 countries that illustrate the changing views of immigrants in the United States.

Four Centuries of Immigrant Writing

Becoming Americans

Lewis-Sebring Professor in Latin American and Latino Culture Ilan Stavans, PhD

Verónica Albin

Surprising readers again and again, cultural critic Ilan Stavans creates a dialogue with Vernica Albin to explore love in its many variations.

Love & Language

In 2017, the New York Times announced that the long-lost memoir of Luis de Carvajal the Younger had been rediscovered. Considered the first autobiography by a Jew in the Americas, the book had been stolen decades earlier from Mexico’s National Archives. Here, Ilan Stavans recounts the extraordinary and entertaining story of the reappearance of this precious object and how its discovery opened up new vistas onto the world of secret Jews escaping the Spanish Inquisition. Called el Mozo (the Younger) to distinguish him from an uncle of the same name who was governor of Nuevo León, Luis de Carvajal learned of his Jewishness after being raised a Catholic. He came to recognize himself as a messiah for fellow crypto-Jews, and he was burned at the stake on December 8, 1596, in the biggest auto-da-fé in all of Latin America. His memoir—a 180-page manuscript written by a crypto-Jew targeted by the Holy Office of the Inquisition for unlawful proselytizing activities—was not only distinct but of enormous value. With characters such as conniving academics embroiled in a scholarly feud, a magnanimous philanthropist, naïve booksellers, and a secondary cast that could be taken from a David Lynch film, The Return of Carvajal recounts the global intrigue that placed crypto-Jewish culture at the heart of contemporary debates on religion and identity.

Ilan Stavans

About

Books

Join the club