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4 books match the query 'Levine, Madeline G.'

cover of A Scrap of Time and Other Stories

A Scrap of Time and Other Stories

Ida Fink

Northwestern University Press, 1995

Named a New York Times Notable Book
Winner of the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize
Winner of the Anne Frank Prize

These shattering stories describe the lives of ordinary people as they are compelled to do the unimaginable: a couple who must decide what to do with their five-year-old daughter as the Gestapo come to march them out of town; a wife whose safety depends on her acquiescence in her husband's love affair; a girl who must pay a grim price for an Aryan identity card.
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cover of Bread for the Departed

Bread for the Departed

Bogdan Wojdowski

Northwestern University Press, 1997

Bread for the Departed details the experience of the Jewish community in Warsaw between 1940 and 1942; the final chapters take place during the mass deportation of Warsaw's Jewish community to death camps. Episodic, chaotic as the teeming ghetto itself, the novel records the inexorable breakdown of morals and loyalties that accompanied the physical deterioration of the ghetto population.
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cover of Collected Stories

Collected Stories

Bruno Schulz, Translated from the Polish by Madeline G. Levine Foreword by Rivka Galchen

Northwestern University Press, 2018

Winner of the 2019 Found in Translation Award

Collected Stories is an authoritative new translation of the complete fiction of Bruno Schulz, whose work has influenced writers as various as Salman Rushdie, Cynthia Ozick, Jonathan Safran Foer, Philip Roth, Danilo Kiš, and Roberto Bolaño.

Schulz’s prose is renowned for its originality. Set largely in a fictional counterpart of his hometown of Drohobych, his stories merge the real and the surreal. The most ordinary objects—the wind, an article of clothing, a plate of fish—can suddenly appear unfathomably mysterious and capable of illuminating profound truths. As Father, one of his most intriguing characters, declaims: “Matter has been granted infinite fecundity, an inexhaustible vital force, and at the same time, a seductive power of temptation that entices us to create forms.”

This comprehensive volume brings together all of Schulz's published stories—Cinnamon Shops, his most famous collection (sometimes titled The Street of Crocodiles in English), The Sanatorium under the Hourglass, and an additional four stories that he did not include in either of his collections. Madeline G. Levine’s masterful new translation shows contemporary readers how Schulz, often compared to Proust and Kafka, reveals the workings of memory and consciousness.
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cover of God's Horse and The Atheists' School

God's Horse and The Atheists' School

Wilhelm Dichter

Northwestern University Press, 2012

Wilhelm Dichter's autobiographical novels, God's Horse and The Atheists' School, have been translated into English for the first time and are presented here in a single volume. From the gradually maturing perspective of the narrator, a Polish Jewish youngster, they recount the harrowing tale of his family's struggle to survive the Holocaust and their privileged post-Holocaust lives as members of Poland's political elite. God's Horse depicts the sudden reversal of victim status that occurred when, in the postwar period, the hidden Jewish child became a little Red prince, thanks to his stepfather, a Jewish rising star in the communist regime. The Atheists' School, the sequel, follows the narrator through the years of high Stalinism into young adulthood and depicts the tensions between dedicated Jewish communists, some of whom join the elite, and Jews who are convinced that the Jews in Poland will inevitably be victimized again. 

In spare, precise prose, Dichter brings to life the tensions between ideologues and pragmatists, Polish patriots and their Soviet masters. These evocative novels also provide a psychologically persuasive and profoundly moving portrait of the narrator. The author's alter ego, supported by his stalwart and overly indulgent mother, possesses the tenacity to transform himself from an awkward, traumatized child survivor into an unsettled but eventually independent-minded young man.
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