Hillel Halkin Knihy

Of all the characters in modern Jewish fiction, the most beloved is Tevye, the compassionate, irrepressible, Bible-quoting dairyman from Anatevka, who has been immortalized in the writings of Sholem Aleichem and in acclaimed and award-winning theatrical and film adaptations. And no Yiddish writer was more beloved than Tevye’s creator, Sholem Rabinovich (1859–1916), the “Jewish Mark Twain,” who wrote under the pen name of Sholem Aleichem. Beautifully translated by Hillel Halkin, here is Sholem Aleichem’s heartwarming and poignant account of Tevye and his daughters, together with the “Railroad Stories,” twenty-one tales that examine human nature and modernity as they are perceived by men and women riding the trains from shtetl to shtetl.

A woman in her forties is a victim of a suicide bombing at a Jerusalem market. Her body lies nameless in a hospital morgue. She had apparently worked as a cleaning woman at a bakery, but there is no record of her employment. When a Jerusalem daily accuses the bakery of "gross negligence and inhumanity toward an employee," the bakery's owner, overwhelmed by guilt, entrusts the task of identifying and burying the victim to a human resources man. This man is at first reluctant to take on the job, but as the facts of the woman's life take shape-she was an engineer from the former Soviet Union, a non-Jew on a religious pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and, judging by an early photograph, beautiful-he yields to feelings of regret, atonement, and even love.At once profoundly serious and highly entertaining, A. B. Yehoshua astonishes us with his masterly, often unexpected turns in the story and with his ability to get under the skin and into the soul of Israel today.

A finales de los años cincuenta, en Nueva York, dos chicos: Hoo y Ricky, y una chica, Mellie, se conocen mientras trabajan en la redacción de la revista literaria de su instituto. Allí forjarán una amistad que durará años y condicionará el resto de sus vidas. Décadas después, Hoo, convertido en catedrático de filosofía, rememora su relación con Ricky y con Mellie, y también el trasfondo cultural y social de la época que les tocó vivir: los coletazos del macarthismo, la liberación de los años sesenta o las protestas contra la guerra de Vietnam. Conforme avanza la historia se van revelando las razones que le han llevado a escribir el relato de esa amistad; que es, en realidad, una maravillosa carta de amor a Mellie. En ¡Melisande! ¿Qué son los sueños? la sabia mirada de un hombre maduro sobre su vida y sobre aquello que le da sentido convierte este libro en un canto al amor y a la amistad, en una invitación al perdón. Una de las novelas de amor más extraordinarias de los últimos años que nos habla del poder de la literatura y la memoria.