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Absence and Loss:
Holocaust Memorials in Berlin and Beyond
by Marion Davies
Introductions by Dr James Smith and Julia Weiner
Photographer Marion Davies has focused her lens on the remarkable numbers of Holocaust memorials in Berlin; on the sculptures, art instillations, and unusual plaques and signs that can be found in public places - on street corners walls and pavements; in market places or on railway lines.
Juxtaposing images and text, Davies reveals the destructive impact of the Nazis on the daily life of German Jews and other minorities and the void left in post-war Germany by their annihilation and emigration. The images run in historical sequence; charting Jewish achievement, the rise of the Nazis, the subsequent destruction of Jews and others and includes portraits and memorials of rescuers and survivors. With introductions by leading Holocaust educator and museum innovator, Dr James Smith, chief executive of the UK Holocaust Centre and art critic and curator, Julia Weiner.
Absence and Loss is being shown at exhibitions throughout the UK and abroad including the London Jewish Cultural Centre, Norwich Cathedral and the Goethe Institute, Johannesburg. It is set to become a valued resource in Holocaust education.
Marion Davies, whose parents were German Jewish refugees won the London Evening Standard/Canon Spirit of London competition in 1998. Her prize-winning work is shown regularly, in competitions and galleries.
"A remarkable photographic essay on Germany’s dialogue with the loss and absence of its once thriving Jewish community"
Dr James Smith, chief executive of The UK Holocaust Centre
"Marion Davies’s excellent photographs show the array of memorials around Berlin commemorating the victims of the Holocaust. Increasingly, monuments can be found around Europe where the crimes against humanity took place and in the countries to where survivors and refugees fled"
Julia Weiner art critic and curator
£11.99
ISBN 13 978-0-9548482-4-8
Paperback -64 page
47 illustrations
Once Upon A Time in Lithuania
by Naomi Alexander
Introductions by Professor Aubrey Newman and John Russell Taylor
Naomi Alexander was inspired by an artist's residency at the Europas Parkas Museum in Vilnius to draw and paint Jewish culture.
The result is a unique visual survey of the country's Jewish heritage. Alexander's depictions of Jewish homes, synagogues and places of historical significance are a powerful, evocative tribute that brings to life the world of Lithuanian Jewry that was all but destroyed in the Holocaust.
She also drew the non-Jewish world around her, the churches that loomed over the shtetls and the people that now live in the homes where Jews once lived. There are introductions by John Russell Taylor on her artistic achievement and by Professor Aubrey Newman on Lithuanian Jewish history with wry captions by the artist, describing what she saw.
"She captures a world which looks amazingly as it must have a century ago. There is one radical difference. There are no Jews"John Russell Taylor, The Times art critic
"Naomi Alexander puts down what she sees directly and unaffectedly. With the utmost economy of means we get the story"
Paula Rego
"A unique and remarkable book with its moving paintings and sketches of that tragic land"
Lord Janner of Braunstone, Chairman of the Holocaust Educational Trust
"Wishing this marvellous book every success in bringing us the flavour of Jewish Lithuania which is no more"
The Association of Baltic Jews in Great Britain
£19.99
ISBN 0-9548482-1-7
Paperback -160 pps May 2006
139 illustrations
300 x 240mm
Deborah
by
Esther Kreitman
Introduction by IIan Stavens. Afterword by Anita Norich
New edition of this classic of feminist Jewish literature!
This popular novel, by Esther Kreitman, tells in fictionalised form, of the lives of the young Singer family in Poland before the First World War.
This is a book that scholars and fans of the Singers continually refer to for its authentic account of life in the Singer household. It mirrors the struggle of Esther Kreitman to be free and her determination to achieve the same accolades for her fiction as her more famous brothers .
Esther Kreitman (1891-1954), born Bilgoray in Poland, lived most of her adult in London. Apart from Deborah and Blitz and other stories (first published in Yiddish in 1950) she published one other novel Brilyantyn (Diamonds) in Poland in 1944. Diamonds will be published in 2005 by David Paul in a first-ever English translation.
"The welcome republication of this novel makes available to a new generation of readers this powerful testimony to Jewish life in Poland on the eve of the First World War" Ruth Wisse, author of The Modern Jewish Canon: A Journey through Language and Culture
"It's rare to find a book so free of artifice, written in a voice so unpretentious and clear, that the story creeps up around you without even letting you realize it" Dara Horn, author of In The Image
"I do not know of a single woman in Yiddish Literature who wrote better than she did" Isaac Bashevis Singer
£14.99
ISBN 09540542-7-X
Hardback, 140x216mm: 384 pp
UK Publication date: December 2004
Gaza
Blues, Different Stories
by Etgar Keret and Samir el-Youssef  Two
writers, Israeli Etgar Keret and Palestinian Samir el-Youssef,
have engaged in a challengingand provocative artistic collaboration,
producing a book of short stories and a novella exploring
different aspects of a fraught and complex situation. Their
bleak, hip, urban tales reflect the dreams and nightmares
of living in contemporary Israel and during the first Intifada.
Etgar Keret, born in Tel-Aviv in 1967 is a popular author amongst Israeli
youth who see him as expressing their world.. all his books have been bestsellers
and he has been translated world-wide. He lectures at the Tel Aviv University
Film School. His film Skin Deep won an Israeli Oscar. This is the first time
he has been published by a UK publisher
Samir El-Youssef was born in the Lebanon in 1965 now living in London. He is
an essayist, short story writer and reviewer. He is a regular contributor to
major Arab periodicals and to London-based Arabic news services. His first
collection of stories 'Domestic Affairs' was published in Beirut in 1994.
"My book of the Year" Linda Grant, The Guardian
"A bold experiment in partnership, it merits the warmest applause" Boyd Tonkin, The Independent
"A powerful collaboration, one from which we are sure to learn" Katherine Sale, Financial Times
“brilliant ... extraordinary” Jerusalem Report
£8.99
ISBN 0-9540542-4-5
Paperback - 180pp - May 2004
The House of Jacob
by
Sylvie Courtine-Denamy
 Touching
and beautifully written book where the author, a French academic,
traces her family history of exile back to the Spanish expulsion
of 1492. The family's journey leads her to Salonika, Istanbul,
Paris, America and Israel and to Auschwitz. But through all
that time the Sephardic culture, foods and customs and the
Judaeo-Spanish language of Ladino were never forgotten and
are richly recreated here. Courtine-Denamy shows that Ladino
is as vibrant as Hebrew. In the introduction, Julia Kristeva
criticises Israel for exclusively promoting Hebrew and not
doing more to prevent the Ladino language from dying. Translated
from the French by William Sayers.
"The House of Jacob is an exceptional book with a powerful message" Miriam Bodian, Pennsylvania State University.
"At once tale and autobiography, this book leads us poetically and with fondness into the world of Sephardi Jewry" Esther Benbassa, École Pratique des Hautes Études, Sorbonne.
"It is a valuable contribution to the growing literature on Sephardi Jewry" Samantha Ellis, Jewish Quarterly
“On a personal and historic quest she travels through Bulgaria, Turkey, Salonika and Cuenca in Spain … life and death stories tumble over each other in fragments of Spanish songs and poems” Jewish Chronicle
£12.99
ISBN 0-9540542-6-1
H ardback - 168 pages - Autumn 2003
Blitz and other stories
by Esther Kreitman  Esther
Kreitman was the elder sister of Isaac Bashevis and Israel
Joshua Singer. She inspired her brothers to write and was
the inspiration for IB Singer's story "Yentl." She had to
overcome the prejudices of her orthodox Hassidic family before
she gained recognition as a writer. These stories are set
in London and Poland before and around the time of the Second
World War. Originally published as Yikhes (Lineage) in Yiddish
in 1950 this is the first time the work has been translated
into English. The translator is Dorothee Van Tendeloo.
"Remarkable, fraught vignettes of lovelessness and disappointment, fleeting anticipations, sometimes of joy but mostly of catastrophe" Howard Jacobson, The Times
"Perhaps now - albeit a few decades too late - Esther Kreitman will become a somebody, will be spoken about in the same breath as her brothers, will be recognised as a writer of distinction" Clive Sinclair, Times Literary Supplement
“Her stories are poignant and powerful, evoking a lost world from a woman’s point of view” Jewish Chronicle
£9.99
ISBN 0-9540542-5-3
Paperback - 180pp - Feb. 2004
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