From Kraków to Berkeley


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An extraordinary biography that spans global events from the Holocaust to the Cold War, the Free Speech Movement to the women's movement, international incidents to hyper-local political battles.




The School that Escaped the Nazis


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Named one of Book Riot's BEST BIOGRAPHIES OF 2022 The extraordinary true story of a courageous school principal who saw the dangers of Nazi Germany and took drastic steps to save those in harm’s way. In 1933, the same year Hitler came to power, schoolteacher Anna Essinger saved her small, progressive school from Nazi Germany. Anna had read Mein Kampf and knew the terrible danger that Hitler’s hate-fueled ideologies posed to her pupils, so she hatched a courageous and daring plan: to smuggle her school to the safety of England. As the school she established in Kent, England, flourished despite the many challenges it faced, the news from her home country continued to darken. Anna watched as Europe slid toward war, with devastating consequences for the Jewish children left behind. In time, Anna would take in orphans who had given up all hope: the survivors of unimaginable horrors. Anna’s school offered these scarred children the love and security they needed to rebuild their lives. Featuring moving firsthand testimony from surviving pupils, and drawing from letters, diaries, and present-day interviews, The School that Escaped the Nazis is a dramatic human tale that offers a unique perspective on Nazi persecution and the Holocaust. It is also the story of one woman’s refusal to allow her belief in a better world to be overtaken by hatred and violence.




Berkeley's Three Dialogues


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This is the first volume of essays devoted to Berkeley's Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous, a classic of early modern philosophy. Leading experts examine all the central issues in Berkeley's work. The Three Dialogues is a dramatization of Berkeley's philosophy in which the two protagonists Hylas and Philonous debate the full range of Berkeleyan themes: the rejection of material substance, the nature of perception and reality, the limits of human knowledge, and his approach to the perceived threats of skepticism, atheism and immorality. When Berkeley presented his first statement of his immaterialist philosophy in the Principles of Human Knowledge three years earlier he was met with incredulity - how could a sane person deny the existence of matter? Berkeley felt that a new approach was needed in order to bring people over to his novel point of view. This new effort was the Three Dialogues. In the preface to the Three Dialogues Berkeley stated that its aim was to "treat more clearly and fully of certain principles laid down” in the Principles. Esteem for Berkeley's work has increased significantly in recent decades, and this volume will be the starting-point for future research.




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Polish, Hybrid, and Otherwise


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Large Scale Structures of the Universe


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Proceedings of the 130th Symposium of the International Astronomical Union, dedicated to the memory of Marc A. Aaronson (1950-1987), held in Balatonfured, Hungary, June 15-20, 1987




Jewish Poland Revisited


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National Jewish Book Award Finalist: “A fresh and delightful portrait of Jewish renewal in Poland . . . Highly recommended.” —Choice Since the end of Communism, Jews from around the world have visited Poland to tour Holocaust-related sites. A few venture further, seeking to learn about their own Polish roots and connect with contemporary Poles. For their part, a growing number of Poles are fascinated by all things Jewish. In this book, Erica T. Lehrer explores the intersection of Polish and Jewish memory projects in the historically Jewish neighborhood of Kazimierz in Krakow. Her own journey becomes part of the story as she demonstrates that Jews and Poles use spaces, institutions, interpersonal exchanges, and cultural representations to make sense of their historical inheritances.




A Wall of Two


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"Ilona Karmel once wrote of the work of turning 'the cold, old-fashioned, iron key of memory.' These recovered poems of Ilona and her elder sister Henia open the space behind memory's door, and it is on fire with defiant passion -with longing, with terror, and the raw drive to bear witness in the one way possible to the life-in-death of the camps. Henia writes, 'These poems came about when I was still creating myself.' The two sisters here are speaking themselves and each other into existence; and this essential work of claiming our humanity has rarely been so costly, and so moving."—Allen Grossman "The book is a riveting read. The subject, of course, is very compelling and the poems move with great plainness, vividness, and force. The girls survived, though barely, because they were young and strong and because the German war machine needed their bodies. The book is artfully designed to convey the arc of their story from capture to freedom in 1946, and there is, as far as I know, nothing quite like it in the vast literature of the Holocaust. A unique and moving book, of historical significance, rendered into English by one of our most gifted American poets."—Robert Hass




Unfinished Utopia


Book Description

Unfinished Utopia is a social and cultural history of Nowa Huta, dubbed Poland's "first socialist city" by Communist propaganda of the 1950s. Work began on the new town, located on the banks of the Vistula River just a few miles from the historic city of Kraków, in 1949. By contrast to its older neighbor, Nowa Huta was intended to model a new kind of socialist modernity and to be peopled with "new men," themselves both the builders and the beneficiaries of this project of socialist construction. Nowa Huta was the largest and politically most significant of the socialist cities built in East Central Europe after World War II; home to the massive Lenin Steelworks, it epitomized the Stalinist program of forced industrialization that opened the cities to rural migrants and sought fundamentally to transform the structures of Polish society.Focusing on Nowa Huta's construction and steel workers, youth brigade volunteers, housewives, activists, and architects, Katherine Lebow explores their various encounters with the ideology and practice of Stalinist mobilization by seeking out their voices in memoirs, oral history interviews, and archival records, juxtaposing these against both the official and unofficial transcripts of Stalinism. Far from the gray and regimented landscape we imagine Stalinism to have been, the fledgling city was a colorful and anarchic place where the formerly disenfranchised (peasants, youth, women) hastened to assert their leading role in "building socialism"—but rarely in ways that authorities had anticipated.




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