Kirjahaku

The ancient world through the eyes of a young Jewish woman--Mary of Nazareth. Mary was born into a Palestine oppressed by Herod the Great; she is accustomed to living with uncertainty and unrest. But when her beloved father is wrongly imprisoned by the Romans, she takes action. She calls upon a well-known rebel by the name of Barabbas, and together they set out to save her father. A daring escape is planned. And against staggering odds, Mary's father is saved from crucifixion. Barabbas--flush with his success--is intent on leading a full-scale rebellion against Herod and the Romans. But as he speaks before Jewish leaders, Mary feels great frustration as the men endlessly debate morality, rebellion, and God's will. She has almost lost her father, but she is nevertheless compelled to speak out against violence. To her surprise, one man listens: Joseph. He makes Mary an offer that will change her life--and the history of the Jewish people--forever.

I can't be with those who throw stones at women and children.It's beyond me.Beyond my love for Ezra.Beyond my respect for God.In 397 BC, in Susa, the opulent capital of the Persian empire, where the Jews are living in exile, young Lilah is destined for a happy life: she is due to marry Antinoes, a great Persian warrior well known at the king's court.But her beloved brother Ezra, with whom she has been close since childhood, is opposed to this marriage with a foreigner.If Lilah insists, she will have to renounce Ezra, and that is something she cannot do, for she senses that he has been chosen by God to lead the exiled Jews to Jerusalem and, after centuries of displacement, revive the laws of Moses: laws which promote justice and give human life a meaning. Abandoning the promise of a golden future, Lilah urges her brother to leave for Jerusalem and gives him new hope that a return to the Promised Land is possible. But Ezra, blinded by faith, orders the rejection of all foreign wives. At the risk of losing the one person she still has left in her life, Lilah opposes her brother's fanaticism, thereby ensuring the survival of the women and children condemned to leave the city. But her opposition comes at great personal cost . . .Lilah concludes Marek Halter's trilogy about Biblical heroines. Sarah, Abraham's barren wife, brought her personal destiny to bear in the creation of a new religion. Zipporah, Moses wife, fought against racism and exclusion. By speaking out against religious extremism, of which women are the first victims, Lilah proves herself a champion of freedom.

People may know that Abraham, the great Patriarch of the Old Testament, was the first man to spread God's word. But how many know of his wife, Sarah? How she was born into a wealthy and powerful family in the Sumerian city of Ur?

When Marek Halter was five years old, he and his family fled the Warsaw Ghetto in the hope of fighting for the freedom of Poland. When his family was caught with hundreds of others at Malkinia and told to separate into Poles and Jews, Marek was saved by a Pole who pulled him under a wagon; he and his family escaped by running through open fields amidst the shots of German guns. A split second decision by a Catholic Pole saved Marek's life and the family continued on to Moscow. In 1994, Marek Halter began his search for the men and women who risked their own lives to save the live of Jews during World War II. He begins his journey in his childhood home of Warsaw, from which he has been away for over 40 years. By interviewing Jewish survivors of the holocaust, Halter developed a list of what he calls the "Good and Just" - the people who, according to the Talmud, must exist in each generation in order to save the world from destruction. Our protagonists range from simple peasants on the Polish border to Willy Brandt, the ex-Chancellor of Germany, to a Japanese Consul who disobeyed his government. Eventually, his journey leads him through the Netherlands, Sweden, Bulgaria, Lithuania, Japan, Tunisia - 14 countries in all. Halter was looking for personal stories with happy endings and the people who made those endings possible. Written as a series of conversations with the heroes and those they rescued, interspersed with the author's own memories, "Stories of Deliverance" offers glimpses of the hope and strength we find even in the darkest of times of our history. Halter uses this collection to convince us of two things: that there will always be good people in the world who will give us hope and sustain us in times of oppression; and to warn us that it is only with the memories of good deeds that we will be able to adequately deal with evil.

Sarah's story begins in the cradle of civilization: the Sumerian city-state of Ur, a land of desert heat, towering gardens, and immense wealth. The daughter of a powerful lord, Sarah balks at the marriage her father has planned for her. On her wedding day, she impulsively flees to the vast, empty marshes outside the city walls, where she meets a young man named Abram, son of a tribe of outsiders. Drawn to this exotic stranger, Sarah spends one night with him and reluctantly returns to her father's house. But on her return, she secretly drinks a poisonous potion that will make her barren and thus unfit for marriage. Many years later, Abram returns to Ur and discovers that the lost, rebellious girl from the marsh has been transformed into a splendid woman--the high priestess of the goddess Ishtar. But Sarah gives up her exalted life to join Abram's tribe and follow the one true God, an invisible deity who speaks only to Abram. It is then that her journey truly begins. From the great ziggurat of Ishtar to the fertile valleys of Canaan to the bedchamber of the mighty Pharaoh himself, Sarah's story reveals an ancient world full of beauty, intrigue, and miracles.

The second volume in the Canaan Trilogy, following Sarah, focuses on the life of Zipporah, the adopted Ethiopian daughter of Jethro, high priest of the Midanites, who became the consort of Moses and who played a vital role in supporting Moses in returning to Egypt to lead the Israelite slaves to freedom. Reprint. 75,000 first printing.

Set in the magnificent culture of the Middle East more than four thousand years ago, Lilah is a rich and emotionally resonant story of faith, love, and courage.Living in exile, Lilah is in love with Antinoes, a Persian warrior. They have known each other since they were children, and Antinoes dearly wants to make Lilah his wife. Yet Lilah does not feel she can marry without the blessing of her brother, Ezra. She and Ezra are close, and Lilah knows her brother well--he does not want his sister to have a husband outside their faith. Ezra is a scholar of the laws of Moses, and Lilah believes it is her brother's destiny to lead the Jewish people back to the Promised Land. While Antinoes pressures her to accept his proposal, Lilah realizes that before she can consider her own happiness, it is her duty to help her brother accomplish the seemingly impossible task that is before him.Putting herself in grave danger, and with the help of Antinoes, Lilah wins Ezra an audience with Artaxerxes II, the King of Kings, who grants permission to lead the exiles on their journey back to the Promised Land. After a hazardous trip across the desert, Lilah, Ezra, and the thousands who join them arrive in Jerusalem. But the hardship of rebuilding the Temple takes its toll, and the religious enthusiasm of some turns to extremism. Ezra, listening to the zealots, orders all non-Jewish wives and their children banished from Jerusalem. Lilah, whose love for Antinoes has never wavered, is horrified by this command. She knows she must now choose between her brother and her conscience, which tells her that the time has come to defy him.Lilah is a timeless story of one woman's stand against intolerance; it will linger in the reader's mind long after the last page has been turned.

** The latest provocative book by the international bestselling author, Marek Halter ** Seventy-five years after the Holocaust, which decimated a people several thousand years old, after we swore in an almost unanimous voice, "Never again," the scourge of anti-Jewish sentiment invades our sidewalks again, especially in Western Europe, including France, the homeland of human rights. Marek Halter, a Jew himself, asks, "Why always the Jews?" This hard-hitting essay examines all the false trials of Jews—religious or otherwise—during troubled periods throughout the world's history.