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Америка

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Переведенная с идиша еще в 1964 г., но так и не изданная, повесть классика еврейской литературы Шолома Аша "Америка" наконец публикуется на русском языке. В ней рассказывается о семье еврейских эмигрантов, переехавших из России в Америку в поисках лучшей жизни. Родители и старшие дети, кто легко, а кто - пройдя через душевные муки, сумели приспособиться к новому укладу. Однако младший ребенок, Иоселе, оказался не в силах изменить религиозным традициям и привыкнуть к новым условиям жизни...
В книгу включены также рассказы Шолома Аша.

206 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1911

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About the author

Sholem Asch

258 books38 followers
Polish-American writer Sholem Asch (also written Shalom Ash, Yiddish: שלום אַש, Polish: Szalom Asz) sought to reconcile Judaism and Christianity in his controversial novels, such as The Nazarene (1939). Sholem Asch composed dramas and essays in the Yiddish language.

Frajda Malka bore Asch and nine other children to Moszek Asz, a cattle-dealer and innkeeper. Asch received a traditional Hasidic eduction and later obtained a more liberal education at Włocławek, where he supported himself by writing letters for the illiterate townspeople. He moved to Warsaw and met and married Mathilde Shapiro, the daughter of Menahem Mendel Shapiro.

The Haskalah or Hebrew enlightenment initially influenced Asch. His earliest writing was in Hebrew, but Isaac Leib Peretz convinced him to switch to Yiddish. The plot of God of Vengeance , his drama of 1907. features a lesbian relationship in a brothel. He traveled to Palestine in 1908 and to the United States in 1910, finally emigrating to the latter in 1914. He sat out World War I in the United States and was naturalized as a citizen in 1920.

His Kiddush ha-Shem (1919), one of the earliest historical novels in modern Yiddish literature, concerns the anti-Semitic uprising of Khmelnytsky in mid-17th century Ukraine. In 1920, in honor of his 40th birthday, a committee of his fans published a 12-volume set of his collected works (up to that time).

When his play God of Vengeance was performed on Broadway in 1923, authorities arrested and successfully prosecuted the entire cast on obscenity charges. (However, the convictions were overturned on appeal.) But in Europe, the play was popular was popular enough to be translated into German, Polish, Russian, Hebrew, Italian, Czech, Romanian, and Norwegian.

His trilogy Farn Mabul or Before the Flood , translated into English as Three Cities 1929-31), describes early 20th century Jewish life in Saint Petersburg, Warsaw, and Moscow. In 1932, the republic of Poland awarded him the decoration of Polonia Restituta, and in the same year he was elected honorary president of the Yiddish PEN Club.

He later moved to France and visited Palestine again in 1936. His Dos Gezang fun Tol ( The Song of the Valley ), about the halutzim or Zionist pioneers in Palestine, reflects that visit. His next work, Bayrn Opgrunt (1937), translated into English as The Precipice , is set in Germany during the hyperinflation of the 1920s. In 1939, he returned to the United States.

His trilogy The Apostle (1939), The Nazarene (1943) and Mary (1949), which dealt with figures from the New Testament, offended many Jews. The Forward , the leading Yiddish language newspaper of New York, dropped him as a writer and openly attacked him for supposedly promoting Christianity.

Asch spent most his last two years in Bat Yam near Tel Aviv, Israel but died in London. His house in Bat Yam now houses his namesake museum. Yale University holds the bulk of his library, which contains rare books and manuscripts, including some of his own works.

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Profile Image for Jonathan Bogart.
96 reviews30 followers
November 14, 2017
A sentimental (at least in a translation replete with thous) Yiddish novel about a Jewish family's emigration to the big alien metropolis of New York. Asch wrote it in Poland in 1911, having traveled to America the two previous years; he would spend the next twenty years moving between Europe and North America, until World War II made it expedient to remain on the western side of the Atlantic. As an early example of his conventional, pious, and often sharply-observed fiction (he would be famous by the end of the decade, and was a best-seller in multiple languages into the 1950s), it's distinguished primarily by its lightness and brevity: midcentury fiction would expend a thousand pages on more or less the same plot.
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