Books published by Academic Studies Press

Like a Drop of Ink in a Downpour: Memories of Soviet Russia traces Yelena Lembersky's childhood in Leningrad (Saint Petersburg) in the 1970s and '80s. Her life is upended when her family decides to emigrate to America, but instead her mother is charged with a crime and unjustly incarcerated. Told in the dual points of view, this memoir is a clear-eyed look at the reality of life in the Soviet Union during the Cold War, giving us an insider's perspective on the roots of contemporary Russia. It is also a coming-of-age story, heartfelt and funny, a testament to the unbreakable bond between mothers and daughters, and the healing power of art.

The past two decades have witnessed a remarkable renaissance in the academic study of the history of the Jews in Great Britain and of their impact upon British history. This title presents essays that reflect the richness of this renaissance.

This book is an invitation to rethink our understanding of Turkish literature as a tale of two "e;others."e; The first part of the book examines the contributions of non-Muslim authors, the "e;others"e; of modern Turkey, to the development of Turkish literature during the late Ottoman and early republican period, focusing on the works of largely forgotten authors. The second part discusses Turkey as the "e;other"e; of the West and the way authors writing in Turkish challenged orientalist representations. Thus this book prepares the ground for a history of literature which uncouples language and religion and recreates the spaces of dialogue and exchange that have existed in late Ottoman Turkey between members of various ethno-religious communities.

Boleslaw Prus and the Jews shows the complexity of the so-called "e;Jewish question"e; in nineteenth-century Congress Poland and especially its significance in Prus' social concept, reflected in his extensive body of journalistic work, fiction, and treatises. The book traces Prus' evolving worldview toward Jews, from his support of the Assimilation Program in his early years to his eventual support of Zionism. These contrasting ideas show us the complexity of the discourse on Jewish issues from the individual perspective of a significant writer of the time, as well as the dynamics of the Jewish modernization process in a "e;non-existent"e; partitioned Poland. The portrait of Prus that emerges is surprisingly ambivalent.

Tsar Ivan the Terrible (Ivan IV, 1533-1584) is one of the most controversial rulers in Russian history, infamous for his cruelty. He was the first Russian ruler to use mass terror as a political instrument, and the only Russian ruler to do so before Stalin. Comparisons of Ivan to Stalin only exacerbated the politicization of his image. Russians have never agreed on his role in Russian history, but his reign is too important to ignore. Since the abolition of censorship in 1991 professional historians and amateurs have grappled with this problem. Some authors have manipulated that image to serve political and cultural agendas. This book explores Russia's contradictory historical memory of Ivan in scholarly, pedagogical and political publications.

For a century, Jews were an unmistakable and prominent feature of Shanghai life. In this book, we hear their own words and the words of modern scholars explaining how Baghdadi, Russian and Central European Jews found their way to Shanghai, created lives in the world's most cosmopolitan city, and were forced to find new homes in the late 1940s.

The Jewish intellectual tradition has a long and complex history that has resulted in significant and influential works of scholarship. This book suggests that there is a series of common principles that can be extracted from the Jewish intellectual tradition that have broad, even life-changing, implications for individual and societal achievement.

Celebrates the literary oeuvres of David Shrayer-Petrov - poet, fiction writer, memoirist, essayist and translator (and medical doctor and researcher). Published in the year of his 85th birthday, this is the first volume to gather materials and investigations that examine his writings from various literary-historical and theoretical perspectives.

Explores the encounter between Jewish and Christian thought and the fact-value divide that invites the unsettling recognition of the dramatic acosmism that shadows and undermines a considerable number of modern and contemporary Jewish and Christian thought systems.

When the Holocaust broke out, Hansi and Joel Brand and Israel (Rezs) Kasztner launched an organised effort to save thousands of human lives. Their efforts helped to end the Auschwitz extermination. Their success put them at odds with the political machine of the young state of Israel, and led to Israel's first politically-motivated homicide.

Focuses on memory and history in its purest form, as narrated by witnesses who lived through the most tragic century in Russian history. Their stories involve Grand Dukes, Russian literary and political giants, as well as one of the architects of the Gulag, and show how these lives intertwined.

A book of reportage originally published in Poland in 1933 by Ksawery Pruszyski, a young reporter who went to Mandate Palestine to see for himself whether the Zionist dream of returning to Eretz Yisrael had a chance of turning into reality. This book is a unique firsthand account of the early stages in formation of the state and nation of Israel.

Much post-Holocaust Jewish thought published in North America has assumed that the Holocaust shattered traditional religious categories that had been used by Jews to account for historical catastrophes. But most traditional Jewish thinkers during the war saw no such overwhelming of tradition in the death and suffering delivered to Jews by Nazis. Through a comparative reading of postwar North American and wartime Orthodox Jewish texts about the Holocaust, Barbara Krawcowicz shows that these sources differ in the paradigms-modern and historicist for North American thinkers, traditional and covenantal for Orthodox thinkers-in which they emplot historical events.

Covers the entire sweep of the history of the largest Jewish community of all time. The book provides an introduction to many facets of that history. Each chapter is written by an expert in the field, and includes a bibliography for further reading.

Collects the critical prose of award-winning writer Anna Frajlich. The Ghost of Shakespeare takes its name from Frajlich's essay on Nobel Prize laureate Wisawa Szymborska, but informs her approach as a comparativist more generally as she considers the work of major Polish writers of the twentieth century.

This book analyzes the ways in which literary works and cultural discourses employ the construct of the Jew's body in relation to the material world in order either to establish and reinforce, or to subvert and challenge, dominant cultural norms and stereotypes. It examines the use of physical characteristics, embodied practices, tacit knowledge and senses to define the body taxonomically as normative, different, abject or mimetically desired. Starting from the works of Gogol and Dostoevsky through to contemporary Russian-Jewish women's writing, broadening the scope to examining the role of objects, museum displays and the politics of heritage food, the book argues that materiality can embody fictional constructions that should be approached on a culture-specific basis.