Product Description
Set in the 1940s, Elaine Soloways memoir takes its title from the street that Studs Terkel exalts in his classic book, Division Street: America, and from the pet name her father gave her. Soloway lived in a three-room flat above her familys grocery store. In her tale of bookies, poolrooms, sidewalk playgrounds, and relatives who lived down the block, we learn about her loving but embattled parents, her adored older brother, and neighborhood kibitzers. Along with her recollections of a lively, unique community, she also shows the underside of childhood and urban life. Although far from the Holocaust and the war overseas, Soloway faced dangers close to home when a child her age was horribly murdered, and when predators preyed on voiceless little girls. As Soloway struggled to find her own identity, the family store and Division Street waged battles too: for post-war prosperity, television, supermarkets, and suburbia threatened an end to corner storesand to old neighborhoods everywhere.
Customer Reviews:
Delightful and moving.......2006-11-16
I have to echo all the other five star reviews here, added by Soloways or not. This is a well-written, engaging, moving story of a child's life growing up in Chicago. I read it in one gulp.
This book would make a great movie!.......2006-07-16
I read Divison Street Princess and loved every page. SOloway writes wonderfully, and evokes a certain America magically, she has created a very important memoir.
I feel the book is so important in Americana culture and Jewish-Americana cultural archives, that the book should eventually be entered onto an online Internet site, free of charge, so that readers in the future, and I mean the FUTURE, like 500 years from now, can also read this moving memoir! Also, this would make a great movie in the Barry Levinson vein of Hollywoodiana. The murder of the little girl and the arrest of the murderer would make a fantastic 1950s Chicago movie story, with Soloway's memoir bookending the movie on both sides.
Timeless--A Treasure.......2006-06-12
I was drawn into this wonderful book by the details of daily life in 1942 as seen, in the first pages, through the eyes of a four-year-old child. And I stayed with delight to absorb that little girl's increasingly acute awareness of family, friends, neighbors, and the urban neighborhood itself, as she grew into her early teens. The way in which the reader comes to know and ultimately care deeply about the parents, Min and Irv Shapiro, and the future of the family is especially satisfying. While the time and the place are unique, I believe that everyone of any age will find something familiar in this lovely memoir.
UNVARNISHED, WARM. AND LOVING!.......2006-05-15
Author Elaine Soloway remembers Chicago in the 'forties as the best of times and the worst of times. Now in her sixties, she presents an unvarnished, microscopically precise yet warm and loving account of growing up in a supportive Jewish family above her family owned mom and pop grocery story in Chicago's Humboldt Park.
The author remembers/reconstructs every detail--how her parents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and neighbors spoke, dressed, worried, loved, and argued--as the world of their Jewish enclave was dissolved by the drip, drip, drip of postwar mobility. She notes, "Television, suburban backyards, and supermarkets were draining our close-knit block of its friendliness, its familiarity."
Soloway's excellently written account will bring back the past for those of us who shared the same time and place. For those who did not, it will serve as a valued lesson on how we got from Chicago in the 'forties to the Chicago of today and what we gained and at what cost.
--Lowell Streiker
author of The Old Neighborhood: Memories of a Chicago Childhood--1942 to 1952.
A Great Read.......2006-05-15
The book brought back so many memories from the old neichborhood. It is a good book for all ages.
Book Description
The most Jewish of gospels in its contents and yet the most anti-Jewish in its polemics, the Gospel of Matthew has been said to mark the emergence of Christianity from Judaism. Anthony J. Saldarini overturns this interpretation by showing us how Matthew, far from proclaiming the replacement of Israel by the Christian church, wrote from within Jewish tradition to a distinctly Jewish audience.
Recent research reveals that among both Jews and Christians of the first century many groups believed in Jesus while remaining close to Judaism. Saldarini argues that the author of the Gospel of Matthew belonged to such a group, supporting his claim with an informed reading of Matthew's text and historical context. Matthew emerges as a Jewish teacher competing for the commitment of his people after the catastrophic loss of the Temple in 70 C.E., his polemics aimed not at all Jews but at those who oppose him. Saldarini shows that Matthew's teaching about Jesus fits into first-century Jewish thought, with its tradition of God-sent leaders and heavenly mediators.
In Saldarini's account, Matthew's Christian-Jewish community is a Jewish group, albeit one that deviated from the larger Jewish community. Contributing to both New Testament and Judaic studies, this book advances our understanding of how religious groups are formed.
Customer Reviews:
Very disappointing, not a real contribution.......2005-11-01
I am not officially a biblical scholar but it is a hobby of mine and I can say categorically how disappointing a book this is. It is clear to anyone not blinded by religious orthodoxy that the Matthew Gospel is both very Jewish and very hostile to pharisaic Judaism, what later would become rabbinic Judaism. Saldarini tries to show that the thrust of Matthew's venom is not directed against Jews and Judaism but only against a certain kind of Jewish leadership, the one that was becoming in the post 80 AD period increasingly less and less friendly towards Jews who revered Jesus in some way. But he really has no evidence for his chief assertion, he only says ad nauseum that Matthew's animus does not necessarily make him anti-Jewish and that it could also show how must tied up he and his groups were still with Judaism. This is not scholarship, only testing a theory to show that one can be just as critical of a religion from within as from without, in fact perhaps more so from within. This contributes nothing because the fact remains that Matthew and John both demonstrate that Christianity was moving in the last decades of the first century AD and thereafter increasingly towards an anti-Judaism which will become in short order mainstream Christian anti-semitism, a fundamental core of historic Christianity.
I bought this book to learn something new, I have learned nothing. It reads like a Ph.D. thesis which shows only that the author has studied hard and read a great deal. It demonstrates that the author has mastered the field and merits perhaps the Ph.D. but hardly that it gives a readership beyond his professors something to chew on.
Customer Reviews:
Jewish Chicago-a Historical Insight.......2001-01-17
As a former Chicagoan, I found the book to be most informative as well as interesting. The book was thoroughly researched and well presented. Although I grew up in the Jewish community of Chicago, there were many historical facts that I had no prior knowledge of. One story that I found particularly interesting involved the Great Chicago Fire. The fire actually started on the eve of the Jewish Holiday of Simchat Torah. During this holiday, the Torah scrolls are danced with in the streets. The fact that the scrolls were outside when the fire broke out may have actually saved many lives, as well as the Torah scrolls. Cutler's book made me aware of the rich cultural tapestry that formed Chicago's Jewish community. Even non- Chicagoans will find this book enlightening.
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The Mellah Society: Jewish Community Life in Sherifian Morocco (Chicago Studies in the History of Judaism)
Shlomo Deshen
Manufacturer: University Of Chicago Press
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Orientalism
ASIN: 0226143406 |
Book Description
The Mellah Society is a compact yet detailed and fascinating account of Jewish life in precolonial Morocco, based on the voluminous but rarely studied writings of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Judeo-Moroccan sages.
Shlomo Deshen, author of several books on North African Jewish immigrants to Israel, here turns his attention to the past. Taking as his focus the tension between individualism and communal authority—symbolized by the walls of the mellahs, the Jewish quarters—he applies to traditional Moroccan Jewish society questions of concern to sociologists everywhere regarding political organization, economic activity, religion, and the family.
From such documents as private correspondence, archival photographs, and the legal commentaries of rabbis who served in the Jewish community courts, Deshen draws out details of daily life: disputes between spouses, businessmen, craftsmen, and inheritors; the ramifications of marriage contracts; and claims involving community taxes and extortions by Muslim potentates. Linking this material with recent historical and anthropological studies of the Maghreb, Deshen reconstructs a community about which little has been known and places it squarely within the context of traditional Moroccan society.
Individual chapters deal with relations between Muslims and Jews, the material conditions of Jewish life, and the nature of politics within the mellah. Deshen devotes particular attention to the nature of the Moroccan rabbinate, the sociology of the mellah synagogue, lay community leadership, and the historic role of the Sephardic heritage in Morocco after the expulsion from medieval Spain. His close study of the nature of the extended family in traditional Morocco corrects popular misconceptions.
Originally published in Israel in 1983, now translated and expanded by its author, The Mellah Society draws upon Middle Eastern and Jewish history, textual Judaic studies, and social anthropology to make an original contribution that will interest scholars of the Middle East and North Africa as well as anyone concerned with Jewish history and ethnicity.
Customer Reviews:
The Official View.......2007-07-30
Fascinating, but suffers somewhat from being based on rabbinical documents -- unfortunately, the only available source material. The result is a narrow view of life in the mellah, biased towards officialdom.
Book Description
This memoir is about Clancy Sigal's intense attachment to his fast-talking, redhaired, sexy, unwed mother Jennie, a firebrand union organizer, and his roaring Oedipal rivalry with his mostly absent father Leo who carries a gun to social occasions.
In the wide-open, violent Chicago of the Depression and war years, Jennie, in her Cuban heels and flaming lipstick, is a single mother on welfare trying to raise a wild rebellious son in a twilight world between law and lawlessness. She is defiant, vulnerable, sexually alive, high stepping, man-loving, woman-friendly, wisecracking — fearlessly facing down hostile scabs armed with shotguns and clubs. Along with the portrait of Jennie, this book tells a rollicking, profane, and gritty tale of bottom-feeding street life, race riots, riding the rails, and what happens when a gang boy is mistakenly sent to an all-girls’ high school.
Customer Reviews:
Oh, my Mama.......2007-02-02
This book works on many levels:
1. OK, if you just want a good read, Clancy tells the story of his growing up with his long suffering mother, Jennie, in a humorous, compelling, self-deprecating and insightful way. He evokes urban life in the poverty-ridden Depression many would have liked to forget, but which, for Clancy, seems to have been the most alive time of his life. But aside from that -
2. History
(a) A must have for the Chicago Historical Society library. A detailed description of life in one particular Chicago neighborhood in the 1930's Depression and WWII years. Clancy describes life as a working-class, street kid where the neighborhood and his fellow adolescent (by today's standards fairly harmless) gang members are a whole world and all a guy needs.
(b) Also a must for students of Jewish American history. An on-the-ground, day-to-day account of what it was like to be a very secular Jewish American kid at the time and how he, his mother, their friends and their world tried to define their Jewishness.
(c) For political history you get mother, Jennie, and usually absent father, Leo, who are both hard core labor organizers with a commitment forged by the often life or death pre-WWII American labor movement. It is also a reminder of when America had real Socialists and real Communists, who were bigger enemies of each other than of the capitalists.
3. Sociology/Psychology
(a) Jennie, a Russian immigrant, ostracised by her Communist, New York family when she ran off with the faithless socialist, Leo. Single mother of an illegitimate child working as a seamstress and covert union organizer to support herself and her child. Clancy thoughtfully observes and analyzes the stresses and social pressures his mother and similar women of the era suffered and how these shaped Jennie's, and their, characters.
(b) Clancy also tells, again with much self-deprecating humor, the effect all this had on him, not only growing up but how it shaped his future life, and how it is still shaping the next generation, his son. (See also Clancy's novel, Zone of the Interior, based on his experiences with psychiatrist R. D. Laing.)
What a mother, what a son!.......2006-10-03
Clancy Sigal's seeringly honest portrait of his lefty mother, Jennie, and himself brings alive a time now lost forever to Ipods, computers, and cell phones.
Clancy's childhood as the sidekick of a passionate labor organizer mother often working undercover, slipping into town and skulking out when the jig is up is both hair-raising and thrilling. Even when she settles temporarily in Chicago, a secure home life is not an option for his mother, Jennie, and his on-again, off-again father. Jennie's commitment to lifting up the plight of exploited workers while bringing up Clancy is the ultimate juggling act. Lots of dropped balls but a virtuoso performance nevertheless. Clancy was mostly left to his own devices, a street kid whose aspirations were hardly more than rough and tumble fun with his little gang of misfits balanced with an instinct for survival.
Ultimately, Jennie was his salvation even after he left home because she had implanted in him a moral compass more powerful than any microchip that always corrected his course throughout his crazy life journey. He's a lucky boy/man.
This book is a tribute to an extraordinary mother and a rollicking good read at that.
Do yourself a favor and discover this provocative author.......2006-07-28
Clancy Sigal made me fall in love with his mother Jennie in his unsentimental memoir of a sometimes violent and crazy life. She's the mother I wish I had: passionate, irreverent, protective and smart. The pain and love Sigal feels for his mom hits you like a punch in the gut.
Dynamite scenes of young, street-tough Clancy's roller coaster life with his mysterious and powerful mother are punctuated by glimpses of his current relationship with his 10 year old son Joe. Together, they invoke the spirit of Jennie as they visit her grave, throw a baseball around or jog together, and she, in turn, surrounds them with her tough, maternal love. She lives again, through Sigal's gritty and ironic style.
Capone gangsters and cops-on-the-take are a normal part of the lives of this compelling mother-and-child team who, as they travel from city to city, often take false names. Always on the edge of the law, forever skipping out on landlords and creditors, they're a magnificent reminder of what it takes to stay alive in hard times: guts and guile.
This memoir led me to Sigal's other books: Going Away, Weekend in Dinlock, Zone of the Interior (re-released this year - an insanely brilliant semi-fictionalized account of his time with the famous/notorious `anti-psychiatrist' R.D. Laing) and The Secret Defector. Do yourself a favor and discover this provocative author - funny, authentic, political and deeply moving.
Sigal's Best .......2006-07-06
This is Clancy Sigal's best book. His work has always been autobiographical from his novel Going Away (the ultimate 'road' book for my generation of politically aware readers who shunned Kerouac 's egowanderings), to Weekend In Dinlock, his account of Yorkshire miners. In his latest, a memoir, Sigal gives us a funny, moving memory of his relationship with his mother - a fantastic character - set in Depression era America. It's an account of an education that is unsentimental and and profoundly moral. There isn't anything like it around. This is a real book of virtues.
A Great Dame and a Bad Boy and Chicago too.......2006-07-03
A terrific story well told. I don't know when I've ever read such a robust and intimate description of the tensions in a relationship between a strong sexy mother and a hormone-soaked adolescent boy. Although the background is exotic - Chicago in the turbulent shoot-first days when cops, criminals and union activists fought in the bloody streets - anyone who has ever dealt with an teenage boy will recognize the minefield of emotions Sigal reveals. Besides drawing a pungent likeness of a remarkable woman - his mother - he makes his own street gang life accessible to the reader when he talks about why he cherishes his lawbreaking friends from the old neighborhood. It's a vanished world today, and yet it's strikingly here and now. Good writing too - loose, easy and graceful. I'm a long-time fan of Clancy Sigal's memoirs-as-novels (GOING AWAY, ZONE OF THE INTERIOR). This is memoir that just happens to read like a novel.
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Durkheim and the Jews of France (Chicago Studies in the History of Judaism)
Ivan Strenski
Manufacturer: University Of Chicago Press
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The New Durkheim
ASIN: 0226777243 |
Book Description
Ivan Strenski debunks the common notion that there is anything "essentially" Jewish in Durkheim's work. Seeking the Durkheim inside the real world of Jews in France rather than the imagined Jewishness inside Durkheim himself, Strenski adopts a Durkheimian approach to understanding Durkheim's thought. In so doing he shows for the first time that Durkheim's sociology (especially his sociology of religion) took form in relation to the Jewish intellectual life of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century France.
Strenski begins each chapter by weighing particular claims (some anti-Semitic, some not) for the Jewishness of Durkheim's work. In each case Strenski overturns the claim while showing that it can nonetheless open up a fruitful inquiry into the relation of Durkheim to French Jewry. For example, Strenski shows that Durkheim's celebration of ritual had no innately Jewish source but derived crucially from work on Hinduism by the Jewish Indologist Sylvain Lévi, whose influence on Durkheim and his followers has never before been acknowledged.
Book Description
Anyone who has seen Maxwell Street has a story about Maxwell Street. You didn't have to shop there, work there, or eat there. You didn't have to be Jewish. You just had to go there, or merely pass-by, in order to experience something that stuck in your mind forever. Only a few blocks south of Chicago's downtown, Maxwell Street was predominately a Jewish enclave, but you could also hear the Blues, bargain with Gypsies, and find bargain hunters from all walks of life. This book focuses on the stories of the last Jewish generations that lived and worked in the Maxwell Street market area. Beginning in the late 19th century, it was there that thousands of Jewish immigrants first grasped the American dream. The descendents of those first Jewish peddlers absorbed the legacies left them; some went on to be among the most notable and successful personalities of the 20th century. On Maxwell Street, the best merchandise was knowledge.
Book Description
Arnold Eisen here calls for a fundamental rethinking of the story of modern Judaism. More than simply a study of Jewish thought on customs and rituals, Rethinking Modern Judaism explores the central role that practice plays in Judaism's encounter with modernity.
"Fascinating . . . an insightful entrance point to understanding the evolution of the theologies of America's largest Jewish denominations."—Tikkun
"I know of no other treatment of these issues that matches Eisen's talents for synthesizing a wide variety of historical, philosophical, and social scientific sources, and bringing them to bear in a balanced and open-minded way on the delicate questions of why modern Jews relate as they do to the practices of Judaism."—Joseph Reimer, Boston Book Review
"At once an incisive survey of modern Jewish thought and an inquiry into how Jews actually live their religious lives, Mr. Eisen's book is an invaluable addition to the study of American Judaism."—Elliott Abrams, Washington Times
Customer Reviews:
The Best Book You Never Read.......2000-02-26
You should definently read this book. It is one of the best books I have read about Judaism. I am a student at Stanford University, and the author was my professor. He rocks! Chances are, you haven't read this book yet and you aren't going to. Change your mind! It's worth it! This book made me re-evaluate my Judaism and think about where I am going in life.
Recipient of the Koret Jewish Book Award.......1999-04-13
This book is the recipient of the Koret Foundation's Jewish Book Award for achievement in Jewish History ($10,000), awarded April 1999.
Book Description
First published in 1957, Nathan Glazer's classic, historical study of Judaism in America has been described by the New York Times Book Review as "a remarkable story . . . told briefly and clearly by an objective historical mind, yet with a fine combination of sociological insight and religious sensitivity."
Glazer's new introduction describes the drift away from the popular equation of American Judaism with liberalism during the last two decades and considers the threat of divisiveness within American Judaism. Glazer also discusses tensions between American Judaism and Israel as a result of a revivified Orthodoxy and the disillusionment with liberalism.
"American Judaism has been arguably the best known and most used introduction to the study of the Jewish religion in the United States. . . . It is an inordinately clear-sighted work that can be read with much profit to this day."—American Jewish History (1987)
Book Description
The history of Jews in Chicago is a fascinating, complex and largely unknown story. Thanks to the unstinting efforts of Walter Roth, much of this history has been preserved.
Now, for the first time, this material has been distilled into a single volume, chronicling events and people from the late nineteenth century to the end of World War II.
There are six broad themes, each of which includes several essays: the first is "Chicago Jews and the Secular City: Builders, Movers, Shakers," discussing HL Meites' huge 1924 history of Chicago Jews; financier Lazarus Silverman; the University of Chicago Centennial; Jewish participation in the World's Columbian Exposition; Julius Rosenwald and the Museum of Science & Industry, and the Jewish Day Pageant at the Century of Progress in 1933.
The other five themes are "Chicago Jews and Anti-Semitism: Tragedy Abroad—Challenges at Home"; "Chicago Jews and Zionism: Local Idealists"; "Chicago Jews and Zionism: Renowned Visitors"; "Chicago Jews and the Arts: The Page and the Stage" and "Chicago Jews on Both Sides of the Law: Colorful Characters."
Anyone interested in Chicago history, ethnic history, Jewish history, will find Looking Backward a fascinating and informative read.
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- The Life You've Always Wanted: Spiritual Disciplines for Ordinary People (Expanded and Adapted for Small Groups)
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