Tales of Mendele the Book Peddler
(Fishke der krumer, 1869)
(Kitser masoes Binyomin hashlishi, 1878)
S.Y. Abramovitch

Known almost universally by his pen name, Mendele Moykher Sforim, Abramovitch (1835-1917) is considered the founder of both modern Hebrew literature and (with the publication of The Little Man in 1864) of modern Yiddish writing, accomplishments that led Sholem Aleichem to nickname him der zayde, the grandfather. Tales, a pair of novellas (Schocken Books, 1996), shows alter ego Mendele in classic form, as interested in telling tales as selling books. Fishke the Lame is a delicate story of love among outcasts which was later made into the most romantic of Yiddish-language films. The Travels and Adventures of Benjamin III is a completely charming, consistently amusing picaresque novel about the misbegotten adventures of a Don Quixote/Sancho Panza-type pairing in Eastern Europe. -- K.T.

The Nag (Di Kliyatshe, 1873-1909)
S.Y. Abramovitch

In this allegorical novel, a young Jewish student in Czarist Russia, under intense pressure to pass the rigorous exams preventing most Jews from entering university, begins to hallucinate encounters between himself and a talking horse who seems to be the personification of the Jewish people in exile. The Nag is a biting satire which examines and rejects simple solutions of integration for nineteenth-century Eastern European Jewry. -- J.D.

Ash on a Young Man's Sleeve (1954)
Dannie Abse

This elegiac autobiographical novel tells the story of a young Jewish boy growing up in South Wales in the 1930s. A series of anecdotes, the book spans the years of childhood to young adulthood. Both humorous and moving, with much of the material drawn from Abse's own experiences, Ash on a Young Man's Sleeve evokes the bittersweet quality of Jewish family life and the sense of belonging to two minorities, the Welsh and the Jews. The work ends with its protagonist at university studying medicine, with Europe at war. -- G.A.

A Guest for the Night (Oreakh nata lalun, 1939)
S.Y. Agnon

Published just a few months before the outbreak of the Second World War and the Holocaust in Europe, A Guest for the Night prefigures the destruction of the shtetl even before it was condemned to death by outside forces. Agnon wanted to find an objective correlative for the trivialization of horror; for the destruction of the shtetl; for the loss of faith; and for the fate of the individual condemned by an impersonal decree. -- G.S.

A Simple Story (Sipur Pashet, 1935)
S.Y. Agnon

A Simple Story is the second, shortest, most modestly conceived, and most perfectly executed of Agnon's five major novels. A tale balanced on the fine edge between comedy and pathos, it tells of Hirshl Hurvitz, the son of wealthy shopkeepers in a Galician shtetl in the first decade of the twentieth century; of his unconsummated love for his poor, beautiful, and mysterious cousin, Blume Nacht; and of his reluctant marriage to Mina Ziemlich, the daughter of rich landowners. On the surface a typical romantic European novel in which eros does battle with bourgeois convention and loses, it is also a reversal of the genre, for Hirshl's marriage to Mina, though disastrous at the start, turns out to be a happy one. The difficulty of deciding whose side Agnon is on, love's or social order's, or whether he truly sees the two as opposed, is what makes A Simple Story far from simple. -- H.H.

Only Yesterday (Tmol shilshom, 1945)
S.Y. Agnon

This large panoramic novel set in Jaffa and Jerusalem in the first decade of the twentieth century is viewed by many as Agnon's greatest achievement, and is arguably the one modernist masterpiece of Hebrew fiction. A novel abounding in ingenious symbolism and intricate allusion, it combines leisurely historical realism with grotesque comic fantasy. Its most engaging character proves to be not the naive and passive protagonist Isaac Kumer, whose Zionist dreams of returning to the land end in bitter catastrophe, but the dog Balak, whose philosophical quest for the inscrutable truth that has shaken his canine world turns him into a bizarre latter-day Job. -- R.A.

The Joy of the Poor (Simkhat aniyyim, 1941)
Nathan Alterman

Written in a symmetrical rhythm and rich euphony and using intense intertextual allusions and symbols from traditional biblical texts and medieval liturgy, this poem attempts to be a secular response to modern despair, an answer to the negation of values implied in the first lines of Ecclesiastes. The Dead sings to his living beloved maintaining that the eternal secular values are love, friendship, and loyalty to the ethnic group. The human bond does not need metaphysical legitimacy; it exists beyond life and death. The poem had national and local implications and became in the forties the secular Bible of the generation of 1948. -- G.S.

Selected Poetry
Yehuda Amichai

Yehuda Amichai (1924-2001) produced one of the most immediately engaging and accessible bodies of verse of any of the major twentieth-century poets. He led the revolution in Israeli poetry in the early 1950s that sought to make the language of Hebrew poetry more colloquial, more in tune with contemporary realities. At the same time, his metaphorically inventive verse is rich in surprising echoes, usually ironic, of classical experience in a time and place which made repeated and often severe public demands on the self. -- R.A.

Pioneers (Pionern, 1904-05)
S. An-ski

Subtitled A Chronicle of the 1870s, this novel in two parts re-creates the period when ideas of Enlightenment began penetrating Russian Jewish towns, turning young Jews against their religious way of life and setting them on a collision course with the rest of their community. Drawing on his own experience in "tearing down the fences," An-ski explores the most treacherous aspects of the break with tradition, both on the part of the individual who tried to infect others with his skepticism, and on the part of the growing movement for reform. -- R.W.

The Dybbuk (Der Dibuk: Tsvishn tsvey veltn, 1911)
S. An-ski

Perhaps the most famous play in Yiddish literature, An-ski's classic work draws on his experience as an ethnographer and folklorist to tell the story of two lovers, destined for each other from before birth, whose star-crossed love lasts beyond death. An-ski's ability to weave together Hasidic legend, Eastern European Jewish ritual custom, and modern dramatic convention creates a work which truly is, as the play's subtitle suggests, "between two worlds." -- J.D.

The Age of Wonders (Tor hapelaot, 1978)
Aharon Appelfeld

The author of this impressionistic pre-Holocaust novel is himself a survivor of the Holocaust. From the point of view of a Jewish child, Appelfeld depicts the generation of his assimilated parents who try to deny their identity and ignore the signs of impending catastrophe. The group runs into its own death sentence and there is no way out from the disaster created by historic destiny and human (Jewish) blindness.-- G.S.

Salvation (Der tilim-yid, 1934)
Sholem Asch

As arrogant as he was gifted ("What I discard,'' he once said, "other Yiddish writers would make into entire books''), Asch has been both the most exalted and reviled of Yiddish novelists. He turned out huge historical epics like Three Cities, realistic tales of less than honorable Jews like Mottke the Thief, and controversial novels like Mary and The Nazarene that pointed out parallels between Judaism and Christianity. Salvation is in many ways his most lyrical and lasting work. Set in the world of nineteenth-century Hasidism, this elegiac story of how a plain man becomes a saint is a romantic tribute to the strengths of simple piety and Jewish spirituality. -- K.T.

Collected Stories
Isaac Babel

Perhaps the most eminent Russian follower of Flaubert's painstaking approach to the art of fiction, Babel (1894-1940) uses language with sharp precision and chaste restraint to produce an unflinching representation of his vivid and violent times in Russia before and during the Revolution and the ensuing Civil War. His Tales of Odessa offers a unique window into the Jewish-dominated underworld of that city. His stories based on his experience with the Cossack cavalry in the Civil War powerfully focus the confrontation of a Jewish ethos of gentle gestures and sacred texts with the brutal new historical order. -- R.A.

The First Day and Other Stories (2001)
Dvora Baron

One of the first female writers of the second emigration, Baron (1887-1956) created stories that reflect the lives of deprived women in Jewish communities of Lithuania. She depicted the oppression of women in the male-dominated society of the shtetl and could be regarded as the first feminist writer in Hebrew literature. Her plots record the trajectory of a woman protagonist's life from an "idyllic" departure to an "anti-idyllic" ending. She often uses biblical allusions in order to draw analogies between past and present. -- G.S.

The Garden of the Finzi-Contini (Il giardino dei Finzi-Contini, 1962)
Giorgio Bassani

In evocative and leisurely detail, Bassani describes the lives of the Finzi-Contini, a wealthy and exclusive Jewish Ferrarese family in the period immediately before the Second World War, when Mussolini's racial laws had come into effect. Against this background, relationships develop among a group of Jewish students, including the Finzi-Contini children, while the aristocratic Finzi-Contini parents refuse to confront the external events. The novel's power lies in the detailed portrait of the disintegration of Jewish society in prewar Western Europe. -- G.A.

Feathers (Notzot, 1979)
Haim Be'er

A major novel in a minor key, Feathers was first published in Israel in the early 1970s. On the surface, it tells the story of the relationship between a teenage boy from an Orthodox home in Jerusalem and a middle-aged eccentric who is the world's only remaining disciple of the forgotten nineteenth-century Viennese Jewish utopian thinker Josef Popper-Linkaeus. Beneath the surface, the implicit parallel between Popper-Linkaeus and his Viennese contemporary Theodor Herzl creates a symbolic underpinning on which Feathers rests with droll humor. No funnier work of serious Israeli fiction exists. -- H.H.

Herzog (1964)
Saul Bellow

Arguably Bellow's best novel, Herzog is at once funny and philosophical. Herzog in between marriages, his life in many ways a hopeless muddle, writes imaginary letters to everybody from Heidegger to God, recalling the pungent reality of his experience as the child of Jewish immigrants in Montreal, evoking the conjugal catastrophe of his most recent marriage as well as his current amorous adventures -- all the while conducting a running argument with "the Wasteland ideology," the intellectual clichÈs of alienation and despair that he stubbornly resists with his old Jewish instincts. -- R.A.

Mr. Sammler's Planet (1970)
Saul Bellow

Artur Sammler, a cosmopolitan European Jew brought to America by a generous nephew in the wake of the Second World War, lives on New York City's Upper West Side. During a two-day period in the late 1960s when this nephew lies dying, Sammler is buffeted by a number of experiences with strangers, acquaintances, and other relatives that shake -- without quite toppling -- his confidence in American civilization. This is Saul Bellow's seventh, and perhaps most controversial, novel. -- R.W.

Selected Stories
Michah Yosef Berdichevsky

In both a literary and a psychological sense, Michah Yosef Berdichevsky (1865-1921) was the most complex writer of the modern Eastern European Hebrew renaissance. A novelist, short-story writer, essayist, anthologist, folklorist, and scholar, he wrote in Hebrew, Yiddish, and German. His love-hate relationship with Judaism and Jewish tradition, which tore him emotionally while fueling him creatively, carried to an extreme an inner conflict experienced by many Hebrew writers of his generation. His short stories, which frequently deal with the darker passions of aggression and sexuality in the Eastern European shtetl, touched on themes that Jewish literature had previously shied away from. -- H.H.

Descent (Opgang, 1920)
David Bergelson

Descent is very much a modernist novel: emotional, allusive, psychologically acute. Set in Russia and the Ukraine, its story centers around a friend's inconclusive investigation into the suicide of an idealistic young man. Its triumph is its evocative portrait of the generation coming of age just before the Revolution: dissatisfied, cut off from tradition, uncertain about the future. A passionate Communist who felt he could not write outside the Soviet Union, Bergelson was executed in Stalin's 1952 anti-Jewish purge. -- K.T.

Selected Poems
H.N. Bialik

Bialik's (1873-1934) poetry exhibits an astonishing mastery of all the historical strata of the Hebrew language. He can express himself in biblical diction as though he were a contemporary of Isaiah or the Job-poet, and he also abundantly exploits all the post-biblical layers of the language in his densely allusive verse. His poetry represents, as the critic Dov Sadan once observed, a magisterial recapitulation of the Jewish self from the Bible through rabbinic literature and the Kabbalah to the ordeal of modernity. At the same time, his evocations of the Eden of childhood make him one of the most sumptuously Wordsworthian of twentieth-century poets. -- R.A.

Breakdown and Bereavement (Shekhol vekishalon, 1920)
Joseph Hayyim Brenner

Credited with being the first psychological novel in Hebrew, Breakdown and Bereavement describes the life of Hanokh Hefetz, who immigrates to Palestine as a pioneer but is unable to find happiness on an agricultural settlement and moves to Jerusalem. Ill and embittered from the start, this helpless anti-hero seeks solutions to his internal dissatisfaction through love, in which he is unsuccessful, and other equally doomed relationships. The novel's complex structure marks it as a milestone in Hebrew fiction. -- G.A.

The Rise of David Levinsky (1917)
Abraham Cahan

Thematically, The Rise of David Levinsky, the first intellectually and aesthetically accomplished American Jewish novel, remains the American Jewish novel to this day. Its story of a young yeshiva bokhur who immigrates to New York and becomes a wealthy businessman while losing his Jewish soul is still the classic account of Jewish assimilation in the United States. Cahan, better known as the influential and outspoken editor of the daily Forverts, for decades America's leading Yiddish newspaper, wrote only this single work of fiction, but it was enough to put him in the Jewish literary hall of fame. -- H.H.

The Memoirs (1977-1986)
Elias Canetti

This volume is the crowning achievement of the Bulgarian-born, London-based, German-language author who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1981. Originally released in English translation in three successive volumes (1977, 1982, and 1986), it follows Canetti's life from his birth to the rise of Nazism (he left Austria in 1938, when Hitler annexed it). The contribution of this massive volume is in the way it explores the crossroads of high-brow culture and politics in the Old Continent in the early half of the twentieth century. It is narrated by a voice that fully acknowledges its role of witness but only half-heartedly agrees to become a participant in major intellectual events. -- I.S.

Selected Poems and Prose (2000)
Paul Celan

Paul Celan was born in Czernowitz in 1920 and died in Paris in 1970. His experiences during the Second World War, his incarceration in a concentration camp, and the loss of his parents became the main concerns of his poetry. His style is hermetic, the attempt to create silence within language through the use of strange conjunctions and neologisms. John Felstiner's translations from the original German (W.W. Norton, 2000), the products of a life's work, convey the mysterious starkness at the heart of this poetry. -- G.A.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000)
Michael Chabon

This novel, amazing indeed, follows the lives of two young Jewish artists in New York City who launch their strange careers at the onset of World War II. Their wildly popular comic book characters mirror their own hopes, dreams, and hatred of fascism. Joe Kavalier, a refugee from Prague, and his cousin Sam Clay (nee Klayman) strike it rich in the big city just as Hitler is sweeping through Europe. But fate has more in store for them. In unfailingly inventive language, Chabon's sprawling plot depicts the forces of history clashing with human imagination and will. --N.S.

Belle du Seigneur (1968)
Albert Cohen

An extraordinary love story of epic proportions, this novel, filled with humor, is set in Geneva in the mid-1930s. Cohen (1895-1981), born on the island of Corfu, was a French-language author who eventually became a Swiss citizen. He edited La Revue Juive and worked for the United Nations. Cohen published a series of novels that form a Faulknerian cycle with a cast of interconnected characters. The most accomplished -- indeed, the most astonishing of them all -- is Belle du Seigneur, probably one of the best Jewish books of modern times. Its protagonist, Solal, an idealist who works as Under-Secretary General of the League of Nations, invariably finds himself making choices that pit his personal against his national interests. -- I.S.

Tales in Praise of the Baal Shem Tov (Shivkhei Ha-Besht, 1814)
Dov Ber of Linitz

Over fifty years after the death of the founder of Hasidism, the tales and legends which had grown around the figure -- his miraculous birth, his disguise as a simple shepherd and as a schoolteacher's helper, his eventual revelation as the holy man he was, the way in which he convinced his greatest skeptics to become his greatest disciples -- were gathered together and printed in both Hebrew and Yiddish. The Yiddish version was to become one of the biggest bestsellers in Jewish Eastern Europe, and served as the basis for numerous reworkings by later Yiddish writers. -- J.D.

Whither? (Lean, 1927)
Mordecai Ze'ev Feierberg

Feierberg (1875-1899) died of tuberculosis at such a young age, and was developing so rapidly as a writer when he did, that almost no estimate can be too high of what he might have accomplished had he lived. The one major work of Hebrew fiction he produced, the novella Whither?, is a beautifully written account of an intensely religious East European childhood and adolescence and the psychological breakdown that follows in the paralyzing wake of intellectual maturation. The traumatic loss of religious faith as the result of its head-on collision with modernity was the great leitmotif of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Eastern European Hebrew literature, and Whither? is its most haunting fictional description. -- H.H.

Jud Süss (1925)
Leon Feuchtwanger

In this sweeping historical novel about Joseph Suess Oppenheimer, the eighteenth-century Court Jew, Leon Feuchtwanger weaves together factual accounts with literary imagination to create a telling portrait of the possibilities and perils of Jewish power and success in a non-Jewish society. Though the book later became the basis of a notoriously anti-Semitic Nazi propaganda film, Feuchtwanger's 1925 novel is not only sympathetic to its Jewish characters, but offers an intriguing perspective on the possibilities for Jewish and non-Jewish coexistence in Germany and the Diaspora a short decade before the Nazis' rise to power. -- J.D.

The Journey (Podroz, 1990)
Ida Fink

Ida Fink was born in Poland in 1921 and survived the war in hiding. Her only novel is about two young sisters who disguise themselves as Polish peasants, leave the ghetto, and journey through wartime Germany to work as hired laborers. Delicately written, carefully wrought, the book offers insights into the human relationships that underpinned the Holocaust and that cracked beneath its terrors. One critic praised Fink for confronting "mortal fear and a sickness unto death without losing the sense of her protagonists' fragile and courageous humanity." -- N.S.

The Diary of A Young Girl
Anne Frank

Behind this deceptively simple title lives one of the most exceptional of twentieth-century documents, a book that has inspired almost cult-like reverence and occasional disdain. Yet, if read in the unabridged (1995) edition, this record of more than two years spent in hiding from the Nazis in an Amsterdam attic emerges as simultaneously charming and heartbreaking, artful and guileless, simple and potent, a book that captivates the unwary with its freshness, insight, and terrible reality. -- K.T.

The Williamsburg Trilogy (1961)
Daniel Fuchs

These three classic serio-comic novels (Summer in Williamsburg, Homage to Blenholt, Low Company) about the New York Jewish immigrant experience were individually published in the 1930s, then republished as a trilogy in 1961, to considerable acclaim. A fluid writer who segued to considerable success in Hollywood (Criss Cross, Panic in the Streets, Love Me or Leave Me), Fuchs created a vivid portrait of a neighborhood's people that was more humanistic than the standard 1930s proletariat novels. "A comedie humaine of Brooklyn immigrant life,'' one critic has called them, and the comparison to Balzac is apt. -- K.T.

The Jewish Gauchos of the Pampas (Los gauchos judios, 1940)
Alberto Gerchunoff

In this series of related vignettes, Gerchunoff, inspired by both Cervantes and Sholem Aleichem, tells the story of the Eastern European Jewish emigrants who settled in Argentina at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries. The book offers a remarkable portrait of a community in the process of creating a new type of Jewish existence, one which participated equally in traditional Ashkenazic culture and the gaucho inheritance of the Argentinian countryside. -- J.D.

The Things We Used to Say (Lessico famigliare, 1963)
Natalia Ginzburg

Rather than direct autobiography, this novel is an account of the author's youth through the words and phrases, gestures and habits of the various members of her family, a "lexicon" comprehensible only to those who use it. The novel attempts to define the mysterious entity we call "family." The narrator's parents and her brothers, both active in the anti-fascist movement, invite some of the great intellectuals of the time to their home, so the story becomes one not only of one family, but of the culture and history of the time. -- G.A.

Selected Poems
Jacob Glatstein

The Introspectivist movement that the Yiddish poet Jacob Glatstein (1896-1971) helped to launch in New York in 1920 insisted that poetry refract reality -- both private and public experience -- through an integrated consciousness of intellect and emotion. Glatstein's poetry makes intellect the vehicle for emotion and emotion the driving force of intellect. His poetry offers a trenchant view of the modern Jew's adjustment to America, his travails in the twentieth century, and his own troubled soul. -- R.W.

Next To (Etzel, 1913)
Uri Nisan Gnessin

Gnessin (1881-1913) was the great modernist of the Eastern European Hebrew renaissance, the virtuoso master of a Hebrew prose whose ruminative complexity and associative jumps, situated within the minds of his characters, have much in common with stream-of-consciousness writing. These characters, young Jewish intellectuals adrift in pre-revolutionary Russia, are thoroughly modern in their loneliness and isolation. Next To, the last and longest of Gnessin's works, completes a quartet of novellas of which the first three are Sideways, Meanwhile, and Before -- all titles emblematic of the existential strandedness that was his recurrent theme. -- H.H.

The Fragmented Life of Don Jacobo Lerner (1978)
Isaac Goldemberg

This groundbreaking novel by a Peruvian poet, playwright, and writer has as its protagonist a mestizo child -- part Jewish, part Indian -- estranged from his larger-than-life father. Goldemberg masterfully uses a pastiche of narrative techniques (a third-person voice, juxtaposed with news clippings and ads in Jewish community newspapers) to ponder the fate of immigrant Jews to South America in the early part of the twentieth century. -- I.S.

The Yeshiva (Tsemakh Atlas, 1967)
Chaim Grade

An ambitious, two-volume novel set in Lithuania between the wars, this masterwork of one of the major figures of post-war Yiddish literature tells the deeply felt story of Tsemakh Atlas, a soul in several kinds of torment. Grade was intimate with the Eastern European rabbinic world. He was thus able to provide a portrait from the inside of the fiercely religious Musar sect his protagonist belongs to, a group that was severe, self-critical, and devoted to purity. This novel is known for its richness of character and its moral concerns, as well as the depiction of spiritual yearnings and the secular roadblocks that stand in their way. -- K.T.

Selected Poetry
Uri Zevi Greenberg

Very few Jewish poets of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have managed to create a distinguished body of work in both Hebrew and Yiddish. Greenberg (1896-1981) is the exception that proves the rule. Though in his early Yiddish writings his expressionist and avant-garde tendencies come to the fore -- in works like In the Kingdom of the Cross and Mephisto -- a turn toward Zionism and the horror of the events in Europe directed his writing toward a religious, mystical nationalism, an attempt to see redemptive possibilities at the end of all the tragedy. The passionate fiery lyric writing and irregular rhyme and metrical schemes make him one of the most unforgettable of all Jewish poets. -- J.D.

See Under: Love (Ayen erekh ahava, 1986)
David Grossman

This ambitious Hebrew novel is one of the most daring and resonant fictional treatments of the Holocaust that has appeared in any language. Its boldest move is to adopt the mode of magical realism in order to probe the violence done to language and meaning as well as to human beings by the perpetrators of genocide. At the center of the novel is a reverse Scheherazade story in which a Jewish concentration camp inmate longing for death, whose body perversely refuses to die, agrees to produce nightly installments of a story for the camp commandant on the condition that at the end of each telling the Nazi officer will try to kill him. -- R.A.

Life and Fate (Zhizn i sudba, 1980)
Vasily Grossman

The structure of Life and Fate is similar to that of Tolstoy's War and Peace: the life of a whole society is evoked by means of a large number of different sub-plots centered around one family. It is a broad but accurate portrayal of life in Russia from the pre-Revolutionary period, the Second World War, and under Stalinist rule. Sub-plots concern friends and members of the family working in various locations, serving at the Front, attempting to organize rebellions in a German concentration camp, and being transported by cattle-truck to the gas chambers. No other writer has so convincingly established the identity of Nazism and Soviet Communism. -- G.A.

The Victory (1969)
Henryk Grynberg

Based on the story of his own and his mother's survival in central Poland after World War II, Grynberg's autobiographical novel conveys the inner life of a child whose first instinct is not to want to be a Jew any more. As the mother tries to discover what happened to her husband, and then to reconstruct a life without him under the Soviet occupation, the boy tries to figure out who really won the war, and what new kinds of subterfuge will be necessary in their struggle for survival. The Victory is one of three autobiographical novels in this series.. -- R.W.

Selected Poems
Moishe Leib Halpern

Among a large, dynamic cohort of Yiddish poets who debuted in New York in the first decade of the twentieth century, Moishe Leib Halpern (1886-1932) adopted the role of the outcast, the street drummer. A poet of delicate refinement who championed coarse language, an anti-bourgeois critic and tender family man, Halpern made verse out of the conflict within himself and the mixture of freedom and want that he found in America. -- R.W.

The Dweller in Gardens (Yoshevet baganim, 1943)
Hayim Hazaz

For much of his career, Hazaz (1898-1973) was mentioned by critics in a single breath with Agnon as one of Israel's two greatest living writers of fiction. Subsequently Agnon's reputation has soared and Hazaz's has languished more than it deserved. A sometimes too-highly polished stylist, Hazaz was at his best a marvelous storyteller who looked deep into the Jewish soul. In The Dweller in Gardens, a novel set in the 1940s in a Yemenite neighborhood of Jerusalem and revolving, often comically, around the opposed poles of everyday life and the kabbalistic messianism of Yemenite religious tradition, he is at his very best. -- H.H.

Jewish Stories and Hebrew Melodies (1987)
Heinrich Heine

This great German Jewish poet (1797-1856) was famously baptized as a Lutheran in 1825; he changed his first name from Hayim to Heinrich, and referred to his baptismal certificate as an "admission ticket to German culture." Later, he bitterly regretted it, saying in 1850, "I make no secret of my Judaism, to which I have not returned, because I have never left it." This edition of Jewish Stories and Hebrew Melodies brings together some of Heine's most important works on Jewish themes: the unfinished historical novel The Rabbi of Bacherach; a section of Heine's Maidens and Women (1838) where Heine takes a different approach from many of his contemporaries on the question of Shakespeare's Shylock and his daughter; and the famed Hebrew Melodies, where his prodigious talents as a lyric poet are trained on Jewish subjects. -- J.D.

Heschel's Kingdom (1999)
Dan Jacobson

This mature memoir by the London-based South African critic, novelist, and author of the autobiography Time and Time Again, is a moving exploration of a late twentieth-century intellectual and family man in search of his ancestry in Lithuania. Jacobson, the master of a sharp, concise style, travels with a son to the land of one of his grandfathers in search of clues that will help him sort out the existential odyssey of a conflicted, contradictory man immersed in dark times. -- I.S.

The Castle (Das Schloss, 1926)
Franz Kafka

One of the most important novels of the twentieth century, Franz Kafka's chronicle of K.'s attempts to ascend from the village to the castle raises hosts of questions that it intentionally fails to answer: Who is K.? What does he want? What is his relationship to the castle? Can he, and will he, succeed on his mission, whatever it may be? In a work which is by turns humorous, grotesque, frustrating, and eventually somehow enlightening, Kafka seems to suggest that all we really have is the struggle and the question, and it is merely our role to do with that what we can and what we must. -- J.D.

Collected Stories
Franz Kafka

A non-observant Jew who lived in Prague and wrote in precise German, Kafka (1883-1924) felt he belonged nowhere yet created a specific universe that resonated everywhere. Brilliant, sui generis stories like "A Hunger Artist,'' "Metamorphosis,'' and "In The Penal Colony'' have turned his name into a synonym for the edgy states of anxiety, absurdity, and alienation that invade modern life with the logic of nightmare. He is, as the poet W.H. Auden famously said, "the author who comes nearest to bearing the same kind of relation to our age as Dante, Shakespeare, and Goethe bore to theirs." -- K.T.

The Trial (Der Prozess, 1925)
Franz Kafka

This enigmatic story of Joseph K., who one morning at eight is inexplicably arraigned in his boardinghouse by representatives of a mysterious court of which he knows nothing for a crime that is never specified, has become a parable of the modern era, though interpretations of what it means vary widely. The novel contains no Jewish references, and its climactic scene takes place in a cathedral; yet it grapples stubbornly, and even comically, with the issues of law and exegesis that are the warp and woof of Jewish tradition. -- R.A.

A Walker in the City (1951)
Alfred Kazin

This memoir by one of New York's great men of letters describes the author's boyhood in Brownsville, Brooklyn's hardscrabble immigrant neighborhood. The unselfconscious poetry of Kazin's language and his vivid use of details make this book a feast of memories and an essential record of Jewish immigrant life. --K.T.

Fateless (1975)
Imre Kertesz

The Holocaust autobiography of this Hungarian novelist is an attempt to describe the delivery of an adolescent boy from Budapest to Auschwitz and from Auschwitz to Buchenwald in the last years of the German "occupation" of Hungary. Fateless is a kind of bildungsroman in which the youngster passes from the rites of initiation into adult human society through the worst possible tortures. His is an ironic transition, from innocence to an apocalyptic vision of dehumanization. Though the character survives and returns to a normal world, he will never get used to normalcy and the past will be his permanent present. -- G.S.

The Second Scroll (1951)
A.M. Klein

To reflect his excitement at the birth of the state of Israel, the Canadian poet A.M. Klein casts his only novel in the form of a "second scroll," in which modern Jewish history parallels the five books of the Torah. The narrator sets out from Canada on a double quest, one literary and actual, the other personal and symbolic, to compile an anthology of new Hebrew verse based on what he will find in the new country, and to locate his uncle Melech Davidson, who haunted his imagination since childhood. The narrator's journey through Europe and Casablanca to Israel follows the trajectory of the refugee flight from "Egypt," and his adventures interpret his revelation of national rebirth. -- R.W.

Zelmenyaner (1928)
Moyshe Kulbak

This Yiddish poet's novel about three generations of a Russian Jewish family living around a communal courtyard in the early years of the Soviet regime is a book that cost its author his life. A tragi-comic account, written in diamond-hard, expressionist prose, of this family's struggle and ultimate failure to survive the pressures of economic and spiritual collectivization, and its ridicule of Communism, delivered Kulbak into the hands of Stalin's executioners. Earthy, antic, and doomed, the Zelmenyaners are the Jewish Everymen of Soviet Russia. -- H.H.

Hebrew Ballads and Other Poems (1902-1939)
Else Lasker-Schüler

Though she died destitute in Jerusalem in 1945, Lasker-Schüler was one of the great German, Jewish, and women poets of the twentieth century. She was a well-known figure in bohemian circles in Berlin before she fled Germany in 1932. Her expressionist verse always surprises with the unexpected image, the flamboyant turn of phrase, the improbable yet precisely right choice of word. An uninhibitedly romantic personality, she was at the same time a deeply religious individual and a highly disciplined artist. Hebrew Ballads, a collection of poetic sketches of biblical characters, contains some of her finest and most Jewish verse. -- H.H.

The Golem (Der Goylem, 1919)
H. Leivick

This poetic drama in five acts presents the classic legend of the Golem as a referendum on the attempt of Man to take life into his own hands. The Maharal (Rabbi Judah Loew of Prague) creates a creature out of clay in order to save the Jewish community from a murderous plot against it, but he cannot control the affection or aggression of his creation without becoming its servant in turn. -- R.W.

If This Is a Man (Se questo e un uomo, 1946) [Survival in Auschwitz]
Primo Levi

Early in 1944 Levi, a young chemist from Turin, Italy, was deported to Auschwitz. Some years later he wrote about the twenty months he had spent in the camp. The classic memoir If This Is a Man is a record of this experience. Levi was not "selected," and he was ill with scarlet fever when the Germans fled from Auschwitz in January 1945, taking all the healthy prisoners with them. More than an autobiography, this work is also an act of witness and a reaffirmation of the author's worth as a human being. -- G.A.

The Complete Stories (1997)
Bernard Malamud

Malamud (1914-1986), an American educated at City College and Columbia University and for years a faculty member at Bennington College, was a novelist best known for The Natural, The Assistant, and The Fixer, among other titles. But it was as a short story writer that he fulfilled his greatest literary talents. His stories are about humble people facing moral dilemmas, people looking for the little piece of the happiness that they should be entitled to. -- I.S.

Khumesh Lider and Selected Poems
Itzik Manger

One of the preeminent Yiddish poets of the twentieth century, Manger (1901-1969) set his sights on a retelling of the Hebrew Bible in an Eastern European key. In the ballads and poems which make up the cycle Khumesh Lider, Manger fleshes out biblical characters who rarely speak in the original text. He gives them voices of their own and adds characters, ideas, and motifs which do the miraculous: they bring the great epic of the Jewish people into human perspective. -- J.D.

Selected Poetry
Peretz Markish

The explosive imagery, earthy language, and long-breathed lines of Peretz Markish (1895-1952) are the most potent expression in Yiddish literature of the spirit of the Bolshevik Revolution. Although not ideologically Marxist, Markish felt the need for a radical new beginning in the cultural tradition of East European Jewry, and his poems delivered both the joyous abandon and the bloody pangs of its birth. --R.W.

The Pillar of Salt (La statue de sel, 1953)
Albert Memmi

Identity is this novel's central theme. It tells of Alexandre, "a native in a colonised country, a Jew in an anti-Semitic universe and an African in a world conquered by Europe." As he grows up he rejects the Judaism of his family, yet is not accepted by his Christian friends. In France during the Second World War, he is interned in a labor camp. Ultimately he goes into exile to Argentina, yet like Lot's wife whose backward glance turned her into salt, Alexandre's ambivalence freezes him in his cultural isolation. -- G.A.

Victoria (Viktoryah, 1993)
Sami Michael

The Israeli author Sami Michael covers the life of Victoria, born at the beginning of the century in the Jewish quarter of Baghdad. Her story is told from her childhood, through marriage and motherhood, from life in Baghdad under Ottoman control to the years of her prosperity in Ramat Gan as the elderly matriarch of an Israeli family. At times almost brutally realistic, and with no concessions to romanticism, Victoria became a bestseller in Israel. -- G.A.

Death of a Salesman (1949)
Arthur Miller

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Miller's drama is arguably the greatest of twentieth-century American plays. Through his story of road warrior Willie Loman, a man whose life is collapsing around him for reasons he does not want to understand, Miller deals with the conflict between the American dream and uncomfortable reality, with the price that ultimately must be paid for cleaving to hollow values and worshipping false gods. "Attention,'' his wife Linda says, "attention must be paid,'' and Miller wouldn't have it any other way. -- K.T.

Paper Bridges (2000)
Kadya Molodowsky

Molodowsky, who was born in Poland in 1894 and died in New York City in 1975, was one of the leading modern Yiddish poets. Although her voice -- quiet but always clear; feminine but never coy; passionate yet far from sentimental -- was entirely her own, her poetry came from, and ultimately returned to, the wellsprings of Jewish peoplehood in which she was immersed. Kathryn Hellerstein's well-translated collection of her poems (Wayne State Press, 2000) is a model of critical editing. -- H.H.

The Tales (Mayses, 1815)
Nachman of Bratslav

Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav was the great-grandson of the Baal Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidism. Nachman was the founder of an important sect of Hasidism in his own right, but he is most famous for the tales he told of Hasidism. These tales seem on the surface to mimic the structure and contain the features of Central European folktales, but underneath they reflect the kabbalistic and spiritual struggles of the Jew for redemption, not just individually but for the universe and, indeed, for God Himself. -- J.D.

The Family Mashber (Di mishpokhe mashber, 1939; 1943)
Der Nister

This massive, enveloping novel of Russia before the Revolution lacks its final third, adding an ironic twist to the pen name of "The Hidden One'' chosen by Yiddish novelist Pinhas Kahanovitch, who died under Stalin's rule in 1950. Even in an incomplete form, this scrupulously detailed, grandly plotted family novel, a realistic work that deals with questions of both faith and commerce while managing mystical overtones, compels attention and admiration. -- K.T.

Unto Death (Ad mavet, 1971)
Amos Oz

Set in the Middle Ages, this Hebrew novella tells the story of a band of crusaders en route from France to Jerusalem. It describes the relationships between the aristocratic Christian protagonists and their brutish followers, among them a Jew whom all fear but cannot identify. Strongly allegorical, the novella explores religious fanaticism, anti-Semitism, Jewish aspirations for Jerusalem, and implicitly, through its bleak view of Europe, it evokes the Holocaust. -- G.A.

The Pagan Rabbi (1971)
Cynthia Ozick

With this maiden collection of short stories, Cynthia Ozick introduced a new phase of American Jewish literature, of densely allusive Jewish prose and highly intricate Jewish subjects. One of her most famous stories, "Envy; or, Yiddish in America," sympathetically evokes the New York literary community of aging Yiddish writers that is fading as her English one is rising. The title story interprets the ongoing struggle between pagan and Jewish values that Ozick sees persisting in the modern age. -- R.W.

Selected Poetry (1989)
Dan Pagis

Restraint, understatement, a paradoxical fusion of cool intellectual surface and emotional depth characterize Pagis's poetry. He acquired Hebrew only when he arrived in Israel after the Second World War as an adolescent refugee from his native Bukovina. His poetry is very much the work of a person who underwent a radical change of homeland, language, and cultural context. It explores the phenomena of displacement and transformation in a variety of inventive ways -- beast into man and man into beast, inanimate into animate, time into memory, history into archaeological traces, and being into nothingness. -- R.A.

Collected Stories (1994)
Grace Paley

In small, delicate tales delivered in crisp, matter-of-fact language, the American writer, clearly influenced by Chekhov, and, along with Raymond Carver, a master of telescoping explorations into the heart of common people, finds passion in depicting human connections. Paley, a forceful left-wing political activist, offers us an unusual tour of her characters' inner lives. This volume brings together Paley's various collections: The Little Disturbances of Man, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, and Later the Same Day. -- I.S.

Selected Stories
I.L. Peretz

The third of the great triumvirate of "classic Yiddish writers" (the others being S.Y. Abramovitch and Sholem Aleichem), Peretz (1852-1915) was the writer who truly brought European literary traditions into Yiddish literature, both in his own work and by creating a literary salon that influenced a generation of Yiddish writers. His own stories range widely in genre, from biting social satire to reworking of folkloric and Hasidic tales to modernist masterpieces, as well as intensely realistic memoirs and travel descriptions. -- J.D.

Revealer of Secrets (Megale temirin, 1819)
Joseph Perl

Although Abraham Mapu's The Love of Zion (1853) is often credited with being the first Hebrew novel, it came a generation after Joseph Perl's Revealer of Secrets. Moreover, Perl's little-known work is a wild and witty literary tour de force that, unlike The Love of Zion, can still be read with literary appreciation today. A fictional satire on the then-young Hasidic movement, Revealer of Secrets is narrated as an epistolary exchange among the followers of a Hasidic rabbi willing to go to all lengths of skullduggery to destroy an anti-Hasidic expose written by none other than Joseph Perl himself. Yet so wonderfully does Perl insinuate himself into the language and world of the Hasidim he ridicules that his characters assume an exuberant vitality of their own, lifting the book above mere satire to the level of zany comedy. All but forgotten today, Revealer of Secrets is a Jewish classic waiting to be rediscovered -- H.H.

Selected Poems
Rakhel

Rakhel was the pen name of Rachel Blovshtein, who was born in Russia in 1890 and died in Tel Aviv in 1931. No other twentieth-century Hebrew poet -- not even Bialik -- has meant more to the people of Israel. Terse yet quivering with emotion, her poems were the first major body of Hebrew verse to reflect the new, spoken Hebrew of the halutzim, the Zionist pioneers in Palestine, of whom she was one until hospitalized for the tuberculosis she died of. Whether full of her love for the Palestinian soil and landscape, or of her sadness at her own solitude, these poems speak simply of complex things without oversimplifying. Perhaps because of this, Rakhel's work has rarely been as popular with the critics as it has been with ordinary readers. Her ordinary readers have been the more discerning. -- H.H.

Blood from the Sky (Le sang du ciel, 1961)
Piotr Rawicz

Sitting in a Paris cafe in 1961, a Ukrainian Jewish refugee unravels his memories of some twenty years earlier, beginning with the order of expulsion from his native town to his liberation from Nazi imprisonment upon "proving" that he is not a Jew. The novel serves up its story of surviving Hitler's manhunt in a tortured, surrealistic style that corresponds to the nightmare it recounts. -- R.W.

Collected Poems (1937)
Isaac Rosenberg

Isaac Rosenberg died in April 1918 in the trenches of France, at age twenty-seven. Permanently rendered a young poet by this fate, he had nonetheless begun to speak with a striking authority. His early work is heavy with the undigested influence of the great English poets and the fin-de-siecle spiritual voluptuaries. The squalor and terror of war purged his voice of its inessentials, and his last work sketches a world in which men are helpless against bomb and flame and rat, where they swear "oaths Godhead might shrink at, but not the lice." To read Rosenberg is to see a short and swift evolution: from the apprentice poet with time for reverie and alienation, to the soldier poet whose time is running out. -- C.M.

Call It Sleep (1934)
Henry Roth

This book about the coming-of-age of a Jewish immigrant child on the East Side of New York in the early years of the twentieth century has come to be widely viewed as one of the great American novels of that century. As an American work of fiction adapting the techniques of stream of consciousness and richly lyric prose pioneered by James Joyce, its only equals are Faulkner's best novels. Melville, too, resonates in the poetic prose of this book, which endows the figures of an immigrant family in a tenement setting with mythic largeness and intensity. -- R.A.

Leviathan (Der Leviathan, 1940)
Joseph Roth

This German Jewish novelist was born in Brody (then Galicia, part of the Habsburgian monarchy) in 1897 and died in Paris in 1939. He was a prolific author, the product of three traditions: Jewish, Slavic, and German. In Leviathan, his symbolic world was Jewish, the locality of the plot Slavic (Polish and Ukrainian), and his language German. The main character, Nissen Piczenik, is a merchant who sells real corals in a capitalistic world that starts to prefer artificial ones. The new trend is anti-Semitic and materialistic: Nissen loses his customers and his self-esteem. A sailor who visits the shtetl brings the mythic message of the ocean: the mother of real corals and the mythic king of the ocean are the Leviathan. Nissen escapes from the shtetl to Odessa and sails out to meet the mythic reality of the Leviathan. His defeat as a productive member of his society and his longing for authenticity bring about his oceanic death wish: a return to the innocence of the womb and to a pure, pre-civilized stage of humanity. -- G.S.

The Counterlife (1986)
Philip Roth

This is Philip Roth's most formally innovative novel, a book in which the protagonist's fate splits off into two mutually exclusive alternatives that are richly played out. It is also the novel in which Roth moves beyond his characteristic fictional-autobiographical concerns to a compelling dialectical engagement in the large issues of Israel, America, and the contested contemporary options of Jewish identity and Jewish collective existence. This is at once a piece of resourceful self-reflexive fiction and a strong novel of ideas. -- R.A.

Patrimony (1991)
Philip Roth

After writing several award-winning novels, Philip Roth tells the true story of his father's battle with the brain tumor that will kill him. Roth portrays the gritty details of the disease, including the earthy tasks he undertook in caring for his dying father. Despite the rather grim material, the book offers many uplifting moments. Eschewing sentimentality, Roth presents a loving, if awkward, relationship between father and son. He paints Herman Roth as intelligent, witty, and charming -- a ladies' man in his eighties, always ready to defend his controversial son. Ultimately Patrimony achieves greatness both as a celebration of a relationship and a meditation on aging and death. -- P.G.

The Street of Crocodiles (Sklepy cynamonowe, 1934)
Bruno Schulz

In this surrealistic work, set in the Polish city of Drohobycz, Schulz's narrator weaves his memories of childhood into an interlinked series of fantastic stories taking place in his father's small haberdashery. The father, a draper, ornithologist, and prophet, is the book's protagonist and also a deranged embodiment of Schulz's ideas. In his lectures the father draws his philosophy from Jewish mysticism and myth; otherwise he is constantly defeated by the object of his sexual fantasies, his maidservant Adela. Schulz's work has been compared with that of Kafka and Thomas Mann. -- G.A.

In Dreams Begin Responsibilities (1938)
Delmore Schwartz

Time has turned this innovative volume of work (it includes thirty-five poems, a story, and a play, all of them invariably autobiographical) by the poet, critic, and writer Delmore Schwartz into the testament of an entire generation -- that of the children of Eastern European immigrant Jews to the United States. The title story in particular is a haunting exploration of guilt across generations. It focuses on a protagonist who, in a movie theater, sees on screen the dawn of his own life. -- I.S.

The Centaur in the Garden (1980)
Moacyr Scliar

This is a humorous novel that walks the thin line separating myth and fiction. Scliar, a Brazilian novelist and storyteller and one of the most important Jewish authors of Latin America, uses his protagonist, a centaur -- a Jew that is part human and part animal and was born into a family of Russian immigrants -- to engage the reader in an adventure in the pampas. He uses motifs from Kafka but assimilates them with ease into the rural environment of Rio Grande do Sul. -- I.S.

Past Continuous (Zikhron Devarim, 1977)
Yaakov Shabtai

One of the most influential and powerful books in Israeli literature, Shabtai's Zikhron Devarim (which could just as easily be translated Remembrance of Things Past) contrasts two generations of Israeli society in order to produce a sharp critique of Zionism. The death of Goldman senior, a member of Israel's founding generation with its bold ideas and grand ideologies, is contrasted with the suicide of his son, who represents the weak and aimless following generation, bereft of the ultimate sense of purpose his father was lucky enough to possess. A stylistic tour de force, the entire novel is essentially told in a single paragraph, shifting between past and future to demonstrate the inability of separating one from the other. -- J.D.

The Blue Mountain (Roman rusi, 1988)
Meir Shalev

This novel, in which the principal action takes place in an agricultural village in the Galilee in the early years of the twentieth century, manages to be funny, fantastic, and serious all at once. It deploys striking elements of magical realism; it satirizes the failings and the inner contradictions of the founding generation of Zionists in Palestine with scathing effectiveness; and it powerfully sets the enterprise of renascent Jewish nationalism against a vast natural backdrop going all the way back to prehistory. Remarkably, an affirmation of the Zionist enterprise emerges from the comedy and the satiric sharpness. -- R.A.

The Jewish Government and Other Stories (1971)
Lamed Shapiro

This Ukraine-born author (1878-1948) who immigrated to the United States remains little known. This, partly, has to do with the fact that only a small portion of his work has been translated from the Yiddish. His famous stories "The Kiss" and "White Challah," about bloody anti-Semitic incidents, are particularly frightful because they are told from the viewpoint of the aggressor and not that of the victim. This volume (Twayne Publishers, 1971) contains some of the most distilled, striking tales produced by Lamed Shapiro (nee Levi Joshua Shapiro). -- I.S.

Menakhem-Mendl and Mottel Peyse the Cantor's Son (Menakhem-Mendl, Mottel Peyse dem khazns, 1909)
Sholem Aleichem

Sholem Aleichem, born Sholem Rabinovitz (1859-1916), was known for creating characters who were both brilliantly sketched individuals and archetypal expressions of the Jewish condition. In his epistolary novel Menakhem-Mendl, the eponymous figure tries every Jewish career under the sun, and succeeds at none of them, providing his wife, Sheyne Sheyndl, with comic descriptions of his travails along the way. If Menakhem- Mendl is the dreamer who never manages to make it, Mottel Peyse is the artist as young man, the small, ever-optimistic child who goes with his family to America and whose wide-eyed encounters echo European Jewry's turn to new worlds. -- J.D.

Tevye the Dairyman (Tevye der milkhiger, 1895-1914)
Sholem Aleichem

Sholem Aleichem's best-loved character is watching an age change before his very eyes. Luckily, he tells Sholem Aleichem about it, in a style both self-consciously comic and full of real pain and pathos. Most of the Tevye stories concern his relationship with his beloved daughters and his attempts to marry them off; in the process, he sees how the forces of history are leading both to hope and to tragedy. Perhaps the most famous novel in all of Yiddish literature. -- J.D.

Fables (Mesholim, 1932)
Eliezer Shteynbarg

The poetic fables of Eliezer Shteynbarg (1880-1932) exploit the vitality of Yiddish vernacular and the rich Jewish homiletic tradition for altogether novel and comic ends. Through such vehicles as shoe and brush, bayonet and needle, American potato, as well as the usual bestiary, Shteynbarg animates many modern debates and delivers his own refined judgments on his time. -- R.W.

The Brothers Ashkenazi (Di brider ashkenazi, 1937)
I.J. Singer

The revered, eleven-years-older brother of Isaac Bashevis Singer, I.J. Singer died prematurely at age fifty. He had become a literary celebrity in the United States after Maurice Schwartz and the Yiddish Art Theater staged a theatrical version of his earlier novel, Yoshe Kalb. He wrote The Brothers Ashkenazi three years later, an epic work and the first he wrote in America. A multigenerational story set in Lodz, Poland, this passionate, enthralling novel tells of two brothers, willful and ambitious Max and charming, sybaritic Jacob, who became terrible rivals. -- K.T.

Satan in Goray (Sotn in goray, 1935)
Isaac Bashevis Singer

Isaac Bashevis Singer's brilliant first novel is set in seventeenth-century Poland, during the reign of the false messiah Sabbatai Zevi. The action does not follow Zevi himself, but focuses on the small town of Goray. In Goray, the traumas and tragedies of the previous decades have led to a psychological state so precarious that when news of the false messiah comes, all hell breaks loose. This is a masterful psychological and political novel, which speaks to essential Jewish questions about hope in exile and the nature of grief and illusion. -- J.D.

The Collected Stories (1953)
Isaac Bashevis Singer

Though he became popular as a novelist, Singer (1904-1991) was so gifted a short story writer that the almost 150 examples he wrote were specifically noted by the Swedish Academy when he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1979. This edition, published by Farrar Straus Giroux, gathers the best of eight previous collections -- stories of fallible creatures at the mercy of temptation or evil spirits in settings ranging from the shtetls of Eastern Europe to the tenements of Brownsville and the Lower East Side. The collection includes such classics as "The Spinoza of Market Street,'' "Yentl the Yeshiva Boy,'' and Saul Bellow's translation of "Gimpel the Fool.'' -- K.T.

Maus: A Survivor's Tale (1986)
Art Spiegelman

In this graphic novel, Spiegelman tells two separate but related stories: the story of the wartime experiences of his father, Vladek Spiegelman, and his own attempts to come to terms with the man that his father has become after the war, and with the shadow the Holocaust has cast on his upbringing. Though much has been made of the symbolic pairings of Jews and mice and Nazis and cats, this work's real power comes from its unflinching pairing of tragedies on a national and a familial scale. -- J.D.

As a Driven Leaf (1939)
Milton Steinberg

This memorable book, the only novel written by a rabbi who taught at the Jewish Theological Seminary and died tragically young, is about the tensions between major chief rabbis around 135 C.E., including Rabbi Akiva. The novel's protagonist, Elisha ben Avuyah, an emblematic figure about whom only obscure mentions are to be found in the Talmud, was a heretic who gave up his Jewish faith to embrace a life in his pagan milieu. -- I.S.

The Collected Poems of Abraham Sutzkever (1991)
Abraham Sutzkever

Sutzkever began writing poetry in Vilna in the 1930s, emerged as a figurehead of cultural resistance during the Vilna Ghetto, and came to Eretz Israel in 1947, on the eve of the creation of the state. His poetry, while reflecting these experiences, reaches for a standard of expression that can transform descriptions of the everyday into sublimity. He is a master of paradox, giving classical form to romantic longing, proving that the dead are deathless, that the past is present. -- R.W.

Selected Poems
Saul Tchernikhovsky

Tchernikhovsky (1875-1943) was a traditionalist in form, who favored rhyme and stanzaic poems and wrote sonnets and hexameter idylls, but he was an iconoclast in his vision of Jewish values. No other Hebrew poet, and very few in other national traditions, has so forcefully expressed a neo-pagan, vitalistic sense of reality in which the old myths come to life. Tchernikhovsky characteristically mines the most archaic stratum of Hebrew -- the language of biblical poetry -- to evoke a dynamic world of cosmic powers and divine presences generally suppressed in the canonical texts of the Bible. -- R.A.

The Investigation (Die Ermittlung, 1965)
Peter Weiss

Weiss's quasi-documentary play, based on the transcripts of the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials, uses only voices as vocal witness to the reality of Auschwitz. Weiss structured his play as an oratorio in thirty-three cantos, referring to Dante's Inferno. Echoing Dante's circular geography of Purgatory and Hell, Weiss's play moves by means of spoken testimony, from various locations: the train platform, the entrance to Auschwitz, the gas chambers, and, finally, the crematorium, his evocation of Hell. -- G.A.

Night (1958)
Elie Wiesel

This signature work of the prolific Nobel Peace Prize winner is an abbreviation of a longer, 1956 Yiddish-language memoir, And the World Remained Silent. Translated first into French and then English, Night is an extraordinarily emotional first-hand account of what it was like to be a child of fourteen in the death camps, what it was like to survive the murders of a mother and sister in Auschwitz and a father in Buchenwald. Night is an intensely personal, undeniably powerful report from inside the inferno. -- K.T.

Five Seasons (Molkho, 1987)
A.B. Yehoshua

This novel about a middle-aged bureaucrat in Haifa trying to find himself (and romance) after the death of his wife is a psychologically subtle character study articulated with a muted lyricism that notably moves beyond the starkly understated style of Yehoshua's earlier fiction. It is also the first novel in which Yehoshua makes a character of Sephardic background the central figure, raising issues of Sephardi against Ashkenazi in Israeli culture, with the culturally conditioned habits of character that pertain to both. -- R.A.

The Days of Ziklag (Yemei Ziklag, 1958)
S. Yizhar

S. Yizhar, who reversed his given name of Yizhar Smilanksy when he first started writing fiction in the late 1940s, is a writer with an early and late but no middle career. In a Hebrew of extraordinary richness and power that ranged from sabra slang to a thorough mastery of traditional sources, he published his Days of Ziklag, a huge, sprawling novel that takes place during Israel's 1948-49 War of Independence. Then, as though exhausted by the effort, he fell silent for nearly forty years until he began publishing again in the 1990s. Telling the story of a besieged platoon and its fighters on a hilltop position in the Negev, Days of Ziklag is the one major work of fiction to have come out of Israel's many wars. Although the reader who gets through its 1,156 pages may feel that he too has lived through a siege of words, he emerges the witness of a literary victory. -- H.H.

Selected Poetry
Natan Zakh

Though hardly a household name in America, Zakh (born in 1930) is considered one of the brightest figures of the "State of Israel" period in Hebrew literature, where writers shifted from ideologically driven works to more complicated, non-realist, avant-garde prose and poetry. His works, as he characterized them in a seminal article of the period, rejected rhetoric, displayed increased receptivity to the modern world, and attempted to demonstrate that receptivity through a focus on the unfamiliar and different aspects of the poetic subjects. This said, all his writings demonstrate a low-key approach that avoids rhetorical flourish while illuminating an important transition in Israeli literature. -- J.D.

Contributors

G.A. Glenda Abramson
R.A. Robert Alter
J.D. Jeremy Dauber
P.G. Philip Graubart
H.H. Hillel Halkin
C.M. Catherine Madsen
G.S. Gershon Shaked
N.S. Nancy Sherman
I.S. Ilan Stavans
K.T. Kenneth Turan
R.W. Ruth Wisse