Kirjahaku

GOLIATH'S HEAD tells of a search for courage and hope amidst crushing oppression. Avi Schneider is a Jewish boy growing up in Russia on the eve of early-twentieth-century revolution. He is nine years old when he meets his own personal devil, Viktor Askinov, a brutal youngster who relishes tormenting Jews. In the following years, Avi is the object of his tormentor's obsession. Fourteen years later in 1905 the Tsar instigates riots - pogroms - against the poor, teeming Jewish villages. Now a husband and father, Avi takes to the barricades to defend his village from the mob coming to kill the men, rape the women, and burn down his village. Armed, he again faces Viktor Askinov, who is leading the mob. But he has been warned that if he kills Viktor Askinov, he puts his beautiful young wife Sara and newborn son Itzhak in deadly peril. Avi must decide this night what he stands for. Is it survival at any cost, for himself and those he loves? Or is it righteous vengeance for his people?

In 1905 Russia, Avi Schneider shoots a man, flees to America and, with his wife Sara, lives the Jewish immigrant's dream. His beloved brother Lieb stays behind and lives the nightmare of the Bolshevik revolution, civil war, typhus, and famine. Still Lieb refuses Avi's pleas to leave Russia. Then on the eve of World War II, Stalin's pathological purges finally ensnare Lieb's family. At last he realizes he must escape the Communist nightmare, but now all avenues are blocked, and Hitler's armies are gathering. He turns to Avi, his brother in America, who frantically tries to rescue Lieb and his family with no more to work with than his own wit. A Fine September Morning blends historic facts and fictional characters. It continues the epic family saga begun in Fleishman's successful debut novel, Goliath's Head.

Eli Schneider hates Germans as hard as anyone can hate. And for good reason. Then he falls in love with one of them. LARA'S SHADOW is told against the backdrop of post-World War II Germany and the tensest moments of the Cold War. Eli is a young lieutenant in the U.S. Army, a Jew expected to defend the perpetrators of the Holocaust. While he struggles to protect his aging alcoholic company commander from a mutinous junior officer, he meets fraulein Lara Kohler. He initially pursues her just for sex, but it's her quirky personality and fascinating mind that ensnare him. In a country filled with former Nazis, there are bound to be secrets. He uncovers one layer of Lara's secrets after another until he must ask how much he can be expected to forgive. And how much responsibility she must carry? Lara's Shadow is a love story full of perplexities that strain the limits of atonement and forgiveness. It probes the mixture of good with evil, and the visitation of parents' guilt on their children.

With the Gestapo pounding on every door, no Jew in Athens is safe. Theo Kantos, a dress shop owner, has a desperate choice to make if he is to save his family. Does he trust the most despicable man he knows to hide them? Or does he place the lives of those he loves in the hands of a communist? And what does he do about his obstinate brother who always has to have the last word? SIX CONTEMPORARY SHORT STORIES follow the title novella. All are about dramatic events and choices that alter the course of lives and form who we are.

With the Gestapo pounding on every door, no Jew in Athens is safe.At the start of ODYSSEY OF CHAOS, Theo Kantos, a dress shop owner, has a desperate choice to make if he is to save his family. Does he trust the most despicable man he knows to hide them? Or does he place the lives of those he loves in the hands of a communist? And what does he do about his obsti-nate brother who always has to have the last word?Nearly 90% of Greece's Jews perished in the Holocaust, the highest percentage lost in any country. ODYSSEY OF CHAOS was inspired by the true story of the author's Greek cousins who survived hidden in a cellar by a shepherd. Other cousins joined the partisan resistance. And others died in Auschwitz. SIX CONTEMPORARY SHORT STORIES follow the title novella. All are about dramatic events and choices that alter the course of lives and form who we are.

This collection brings together the short stories of Alan Fleishman, most previously published elsewhere in such places as the Avalon Literary Review, the Pennsylvania Literary Journal, and Evening Street Review. If there is a theme to these stories, it is of the tangled relationships at the core of our lives - some good, some bad, some enduring, and some fleeting. They each leave their mark and change who we are.

In 1937, a young American woman named Frannie Potter goes off to fight in the Spanish Civil War to save the Republic and keep her friend Marty alive. Together, these two friends join the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, a cohort of idealistic young American volunteers determined to fight fascism in the prelude to World War II. Marty's love for Frannie drives everything he does. She is why he came to Spain in the first place. Frannie loves him too but not in the romantic way he wants. Both of their young lives are stamped by the ferocious fighting, the atrocities, the heat, the cold, privations, and their undiminished passion for the Spanish people and their cause. Within a year, the flower of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade has been reduced to a husk. Marty and Frannie are among the few who have survived. They refuse to surrender to defeat, accepting their own likely fate. Then a Soviet major, with his eye on Frannie, changes everything.