|
Showing 1 - 7 of
7 matches in All Departments
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.
|
You may like...
Loot
Nadine Gordimer
Paperback
(2)
R383
R318
Discovery Miles 3 180
Personal Shopper
Kristen Stewart, Nora von Waldstätten, …
DVD
R83
Discovery Miles 830
Ab Wheel
R209
R149
Discovery Miles 1 490
|