Nora, a sturdy Holocaust survivor, arrives in Palestine in 1949 and lands in an "absorbtion camp" where everyone is in training to become a good Israeli. By the author of The Confession of Jack Straw. 20,000 first printing.

Louisa

Literature & Fiction

Zelitch, Simone

Genre Fiction

G.P.Putnam's Sons

This award-winning novel takes readers to postwar Israel, introducing them to a mother and daughter-in-law with an unusual relationship and offering a unique perspective on Jewish identity and experience.

Berkley Trade

Simone Zelitch has created an amazing alternate history in Judenstaat. On April 4th, 1948 the sovereign state of Judenstaat was created in the territory of Saxony, bordering Germany, Poland, and Czechoslovakia.
Forty years later, Jewish historian Judit Klemmer is making a documentary portraying Judenstaat's history from the time of its founding to the present. She is haunted by the ghost of her dead husband, Hans, a Saxon, shot by a sniper as he conducted the National Symphony. With the grief always fresh, Judit lives a half-life, until confronted by a mysterious, flesh-and-blood ghost from her past who leaves her controversial footage on one of Judenstaat's founding fathers--and a note:
"They lied about the murder."
Judit's research into the footage, and what really happened to Hans, embroils her in controversy and conspiracy, collective memory and national amnesia, and answers far more horrific than she imagined.

Judenstaat: A Novel

Literary

Tor Books

The Confession of Jack Straw

The Confession of Jack Straw is both a political novel and a literary novel of great style and humanity. Taking the form of a confession of one of the leaders of the English Peasant Revolt of 1381, the novel accompanies the peasants as they travel through southern Englan, gathering followers, opening prisons, killing lawyers and telling stories. Simone Zelitch's first novel, it marks her as a writer already of the first rank.

United States

Black Heron Press

Ursula LeGuin said about this book: "In most novels about the Middle Ages, the deck is all face cards. Jack Straw is rare and admirable in its uncompromising, unpatronizing identification with a peasant―an intelligent, vulnerable man caught up in the dream of equality that flared into the Peasant Revolt. The novel lets the reader stand at that crossroads of politics and mysticism and see 1776, 1848, 1917, Tiananment Square―the same dream, the same betrayal. A very moving, honest book."Kirkus Reviews: "A fast-paced, intriguing account of the failed Peasant Revolt in 14th Century England: First-novelist Zelitch provides a rendering that is evocative and plausible as well as convincing in its historical sweep...Zelitch offers a satisfying variety of incident, with enough texture and historical detail―costume, festivity, songs―to evoke the medieval milieu. The Middle Ages are rendered not on silver plattersor thrones but on the dusty roads and straw beds of peasants, who are given center stage here, not limited to comic relief."The Confession of Jack Straw won the Hopwood Award for Major Fiction.

Moses in the Sinai rewrites the books of Exodus and Numbers by way of The Arabian Nights, Nikos Kazantzakis, and Cecil B. DeMille. It makes generous use of myth and history, ancient and contemporary. The Hebrews of the novel are a varied mob of outlaws, magicians, sorcerers, aristocrats, and idolators, all content with being slaves. Moses must lead them into the Sinai against their will in the hope of serving a God whose very identity he doubts. The Hebrews of this historical and imaginative novel inhabit a world where children are born in cooking pots, meat rains from the sky, fish talk, and prophecies come true. It is a world where human emotion can take miraculous forms. Moses in the Sinai is full of such miracles.

Moses in the Sinai

Fiction. African American Studies. Jewish Studies. As Beth Fine would tell her daughter years after Freedom Summer, back in 1964, she was the girl who did everything wrong. She takes part in a wade-in to desegregate a public pool, and almost drowns. When she joins Northern volunteers to staff Freedom Schools and register voters in Mississippi, she speeds down a highway, hits a cow, and ends up in jail for prostitution. Beth believes in questioning authority, and her courage and commitment to social justice both define her and lead to her undoing. Alienated from her family, she still finds herself as an outsider in a movement that exposes the limitations of her good intentions. As she strives to transcend these limitations, her commitment deepens, her questions change, and the nature of authority and justice become harder to determine. "There has been surprisingly little fiction about the endlessly fascinating, necessary history of the civil rights movement, but WAVELAND is a compelling addition to that short bookshelf. In a variety of voices, Simone Zelitch has caught the complexity, the satisfactions, and the contradictions of those urgent times, and she's quite remarkably given us more than a little of the generations before and after. Brave actions have consequences and this moving novel does honor to those who bore them."--Rosellen Brown, author of Half a Heart and Civil Wars, winner of the Janet Kafka Prize

Waveland

The Head & The Hand Press

Simone Zelitch has created an amazing alternate history of a Jewish nation in post-World War II Europe inJudenstaat. On April 4th, 1948 the sovereign state of Judenstaat was created in the territory of Saxony, bordering Germany, Poland, and Czechoslovakia. Forty years later, Jewish historian Judit Klemmer is making a documentary portraying Judenstaat's history from the time of its founding to the present. She is haunted by the ghost of her dead husband, Hans, a Saxon, shot by a sniper as he conducted the National Symphony. With the grief always fresh, Judit lives a half-life, until confronted by a mysterious, flesh-and-blood ghost from her past who leaves her controversial footage on one of Judenstaat's founding fathers--and a note: "They lied about the murder." Judit's research into the footage, and what really happened to Hans, embroils her in controversy and conspiracy, collective memory and national amnesia, and answers far more horrific than she imagined.

Judenstaat (Spectacular Fiction)

PM Press

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Zelitch, Simone. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Zelitch, Simone

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Zelitch, Simone. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Louisa

Louisa

Judenstaat: A Novel

The Confession of Jack Straw

The Confession of Jack Straw

Moses in the Sinai

Waveland

Judenstaat: A Novel

Judenstaat (Spectacular Fiction)