One summer day in 1941, half of the Polish town of Jedwabne murdered the other half, 1,600 men, women, and children, all but seven of the town’s Jews. Neighbors tells their story.
One summer day in 1941, half of the Polish town of Jedwabne murdered the other half, 1,600 men, women, and children, all but seven of the town’s Jews. Neighbors tells their story.
This is a shocking, brutal story that has never before been told. It is the most important study of Polish-Jewish relations to be published in decades and should become a classic of Holocaust literature.
Jan Gross pieces together eyewitness accounts and other evidence into an engulfing reconstruction of the horrific July day remembered well by locals but forgotten by history. His investigation reads like a detective story, and its unfolding yields wider truths about Jewish-Polish relations, the Holocaust, and human responses to occupation and totalitarianism. It is a story of surprises: The newly occupying German army did not compel the massacre, and Jedwabne’s Jews and Christians had previously enjoyed cordial relations. After the war, the nearby family who saved Jedwabne’s surviving Jews was derided and driven from the area. The single Jew offered mercy by the town declined it.
Most arresting is the sinking realization that Jedwabne’s Jews were clubbed, drowned, gutted, and burned not by faceless Nazis, but by people whose features and names they knew well: their former schoolmates and those who sold them food, bought their milk, and chatted with them in the street. As much as such a question can ever be answered, Neighbors tells us why.
This is the story of Father Damien Modeste, priest to his beloved people, the Ojibwe. Modeste, nearing the end of his life, dreads the discovery of his physical identity — for he is a woman who has lived as a man.
This is the story of Father Damien Modeste, priest to his beloved people, the Ojibwe. Modeste, nearing the end of his life, dreads the discovery of his physical identity — for he is a woman who has lived as a man.
For more than a half century, Father Damien Modeste has served his beloved people, the Ojibwe, on the remote reservation of Little No Horse. To complicate his fears, his quiet life changes when a troubled colleague comes to the reservation to investigate the life of the perplexing, difficult, possibly false saint Sister Leopolda. Father Damien alone knows the strange truth of Sister Leopolda’s piety and is faced with the most difficult decision of his life: Should he reveal all he knows and risk everything? Or should he manufacture a protective history though he believes Leopolda’s wonder-working is motivated by evil?
This collection of poems by award-winning poet Marilyn Nelson provides a compelling and revealing portrait of Carver’s complex, richly interior, profoundly devout life.
Poems about the life, character, and achievements of the African American inventor, botanist, artist, and teacher. George Washington Carver was born a slave in Missouri about 1864 and raised by the childless white couple who had owned his mother. In 1877 he left home in search of an education, eventually earning a master’s degree. In 1896 Booker T. Washington invited Carver to start the agricultural department at the all-black-staffed Tuskegee Institute, where he spent the rest of his life seeking solutions to the poverty among landless black farmers by developing new uses for soil-replenishing crops such as peanuts, cowpeas, and sweet potatoes. Carver’s achievements as a botanist and inventor were balanced by his gifts as a painter, musician, and teacher.
This collection of poems by award-winning poet Marilyn Nelson provides a compelling and revealing portrait of Carver’s complex, richly interior, profoundly devout life.
In this first novel, a young girl describes her family’s bittersweet experience in the United States after their emigration from Korea. An Na’s striking language authentically reflects the process of acculturation as Young Ju grows from a child to an adult.
In this first novel, a young girl describes her family’s bittersweet experience in the United States after their emigration from Korea. While going up and up into the sky on the flight from Korea to California, four-year-old Young Ju concludes that they are on their way to heaven – America is heaven! After they arrive, however, Young Ju and her parents and little brother struggle in their new world, weighed down by the difficulty of learning English, their insular family life, and the traditions of the country they left behind. An Na’s striking language authentically reflects the process of acculturation as Young Ju grows from a child to an adult.
This unique book is the first to tell the story of the role young people have played in the making of our nation. It brings to life their contributions throughout American history–from the boys who sailed with Columbus to today’s young activists.
This unique book is the first to tell the story of the role young people have played in the making of our nation. It brings to life their contributions throughout American history–from the boys who sailed with Columbus to today’s young activists. Based largely on primary sources–first-person accounts, journals, and interviews–it highlights the fascinating stories of more than seventy young people from diverse cultures.
Meet Olaudah Equiano, kidnapped from his village in western Africa and forced to endure a terrifying voyage into slavery; Rebecca Bates, who with her sister plays the fife and drum that scare off British soldiers during the War of 1812; and Anyokah, who helps her father create a written Cherokee language. Descend into the darkness of a Pennsylvania coal mine with nine-year-old Joseph Miliauskas for a ten-hour day that leaves his fingers bloody; read Carolyn McKinstry’s account of being hosed by police during the 1963 Birmingham civil rights march; and join Jessica Govea, who, as a teenager, worked side by side with Cesar Chavez to organize migrant farm workers.
These and many other compelling accounts, linked together by Phillip Hoose’s lively, knowledgeable voice, make We Were There, Too! not only a great reference but a great read–one that prompts Howard Zinn, author of A People’s History of the United States, to comment: “This is an extraordinary book–wonderfully readable, inspiring to young and old alike, and unique. I know of nothing like it.”
Walking through the misty Florida woods one morning, twelve-year-old Rob Horton is stunned to encounter a tiger—a real-life, very large tiger—pacing back and forth in a cage.
Walking through the misty Florida woods one morning, twelve-year-old Rob Horton is stunned to encounter a tiger—a real-life, very large tiger—pacing back and forth in a cage. What’s more, on the same extraordinary day, he meets Sistine Bailey, a girl who shows her feelings as readily as Rob hides his. As they learn to trust each other, and ultimately, to be friends, Rob and Sistine prove that some things—like memories, and heartache, and tigers—can’t be locked up forever.
LaVaughn is fifteen now, and she’s still fiercely determined to go to college. But that’s the only thing she’s sure about. Loyalty to her father bubbles up as her mother grows closer to a new man. The two girls she used to do everything with have chosen a path LaVaughn wants no part of. And then there’s Jody. LaVaughn can’t believe how gorgeous he is…or how confusing. He acts like he’s in love with her, but is he?
LaVaughn is fifteen now, and she’s still fiercely determined to go to college. But that’s the only thing she’s sure about. Loyalty to her father bubbles up as her mother grows closer to a new man. The two girls she used to do everything with have chosen a path LaVaughn wants no part of. And then there’s Jody. LaVaughn can’t believe how gorgeous he is…or how confusing. He acts like he’s in love with her, but is he?
In this series of poems Gail Mazur takes stock-of the complexity of relationships between parents and children, the desires of the body as well as its frailties, the distinctions between memory and history, and the hope of art to capture these seemingly inscrutable realities.
In this series of poems Gail Mazur takes stock-of the complexity of relationships between parents and children, the desires of the body as well as its frailties, the distinctions between memory and history, and the hope of art to capture these seemingly inscrutable realities. By turns mordant and passionate, narrative and meditative, Mazur’s poems imply that life, with all of its losses, triumphs, and abrasive intimacies, is far richer and more elaborately metaphorical than poetry can aspire to be-and yet her poems do affectingly recreate this reality. These illuminating poems are the work of an acclaimed poet at the top of her form.
Poems addressing the status of black men in America confront the white man’s vision of blacks and the obstacles of color and class facing black families.
Poems addressing the status of black men in America confront the white man’s vision of blacks and the obstacles of color and class facing black families.
