The historical biography of a true Jewish heroine in her day, Gracia Mendes. Born in 1510 in Portugal, the book details this woman's extraordinary personality until her death in 1569 in Constantinople (today's Istanbul). Her life exemplified a perseverance by the Jewish culture to survive and triumph even in the worst of conditions. As a young girl, Gracia secretly married successful Jewish spice trader, Francisco Mendes. But at age 27 she became a widow, yet she went on to raise her children and run the family business all on her own. Her travels led her through Antwerp, Venice, Ferrara, Ragusa, and finally to Constantinople, from where the Ottoman Empire dominated former Byzantium territories and offered shelter for battered Conversos (converted Jews). The text recounting the last fifteen years of Gracia's life at the center of the Empire is particularly revealing. Birnbaum's biography has the unique distinction of being the first among many studies to pay tribute to a woman during this period. It is also one of the first titles to pay equal attention to the lives of the Conversos in Christian West Europe and in the Muslim East.

The historical biography of a true Jewish heroine in her day, Gracia Mendes. Born in 1510 in Portugal, the book details this woman's extraordinary personality until her death in 1569 in Constantinople (today's Istanbul). Her life exemplified a perseverance by the Jewish culture to survive and triumph even in the worst of conditions. As a young girl, Gracia secretly married successful Jewish spice trader, Francisco Mendes. But at age 27 she became a widow, yet she went on to raise her children and run the family business all on her own. Her travels led her through Antwerp, Venice, Ferrara, Ragusa, and finally to Constantinople, from where the Ottoman Empire dominated former Byzantium territories and offered shelter for battered Conversos (converted Jews). The text recounting the last fifteen years of Gracia's life at the center of the Empire is particularly revealing. Birnbaum's biography has the unique distinction of being the first among many studies to pay tribute to a woman during this period. It is also one of the first titles to pay equal attention to the lives of the Conversos in Christian West Europe and in the Muslim East.

The essays in this book provide interesting contributions to the ongoing debate concerning the representation of differing cultures, i.e., the "image of the Other" in the early modern period . They deal with images, projections, and perceptions, based on various experiences of coexistence. Although the individual contributions contain sources and references of iconography, this is not just another volume of art history or visual studies. As examples of practices in diverse historical contexts, the book includes a variety of textual material, such as literary productions, rhetorical exercises, dramatic applications, chronicles, epistles, and diary-like historical accounts that express ethnographic sensitivities. Thus, supported by a thorough research apparatus, these studies propose a new cultural history of the early modern coexistence of various communities, as identified in current research by young scholars. Another novel feature of the volume is the deliberate digression of traditional scholars' focus and the investigation of rarely examined regions and practices.This approach allows the contributors to spotlight their special areas of research and to share a fresh new look at "the Renaissance. "

The recognized cultural historian and researcher of the Middle Ages relates about the gruesome year of 1944 in Hungary, as she has seen the events with the eyes of a small Jewish girl. The memoir describes life in Budapest and in Komarom, in the Hungarian countryside, in the preceding years before March 1944 when the German army marched in, and what happened thereafter. "It is not true that you can no longer write anything new about the Holocaust. All you need is an excellent memory, restraint, irony hidden among the lines, and know-how. The bulk of Marianna D. Birnbaum's book is about her relatives, her childhood friends and their parents who have not returned. She attached photos of several of them; here and there the author too appears as a small child. Well-to-do adults, nicely dressed children: They ought to have lived out their days in peace. With a vision pointing toward the grotesque and using experience honed on literary criticism, the author avoids provoking our tears. That makes this book beautiful and true." (G. Spiro)

This farcical tale tells how the British bombing of a Finnish port city changes the life of the Russian governor, his wife, their cook, and the cook's Finnish fiance. The story takes place during a Nordic offshoot of the Crimean conflict, known as the Aland War, in which a British-French naval force attacked military and civilian facilities on the coast of the Grand Duchy of Finland in 1854-1856. The location of the novella is Abo, today's Turku, where soldiers in the Russian garrison enjoy life, Cossacks dance and drink, and the governor's wife is preoccupied about her cook's marriage to a local lad, against which the governor and the English admiral devise a plot. After studies in Swiss and German universities, Carl Spitteler worked in Russia between 1871 and 1879 as the private tutor in the family of a Finnish general. In the process he came to know Finnish and Baltic noble families in Saint Petersburg and Finland. He published this story in 1889, and went on to become, in 1919, the first Swiss winner of the Nobel Prize for literature. The Bombardment of Abo is an ironic Western gaze on life and culture in the Tsarist Empire. Spitteler's deeply held pacifism breaks through his otherwise sarcastic description of the characters and episodes in the novella.