Arthur Szyk Preserved

An essential reference guide for learning where Arthur Szyk's public works reside Arthur Szyk (pronounced "Shick") was born in Lód ́z, Poland, in 1894 and died in New Canaan, Connecticut, in 1951. He was considered the greatest miniaturist and painter-illuminator of his era, and the leading political artist in America during World War II. He was internationally recognized and celebrated, and his works of art continue to be exhibited worldwide. This catalogue of institutional holdings of Arthur Szyk's art was created to provide the best jumping off point for those interested in surveying his originals for the purpose of research, scholarship, and curatorial possibilities. Arthur Szyk Preserved illustrates where Szyk's work can be found today. Ultimately, this catalogue recognizes and celebrates the public institutions that serve as vital caretakers of Arthur Szyk's art and legacy. It is hoped that this publication will encourage them to more fully promote public awareness of Szyk's art and the breadth and beauty of his works in multiple and creative ways.

An indispensable and timely publication on the life and work of the great Polish-Jewish-American artist-activist Arthur Szyk.

Tracking an underground language and the outcasts who depended on it for their survival. Centuries ago in middle Europe, a coded language appeared, scrawled in graffiti and spoken only by people who were "wiz" (in the know). This hybrid language, dubbed Rotwelsch, facilitated survival for people in flight—whether escaping persecution or just down on their luck. It was a language of the road associated with vagabonds, travelers, Jews, and thieves that blended words from Yiddish, Hebrew, German, Romani, Czech, and other European languages and was rich in expressions for police, jail, or experiencing trouble, such as "being in a pickle." This renegade language unsettled those in power, who responded by trying to stamp it out, none more vehemently than the Nazis. As a boy, Martin Puchner learned this secret language from his father and uncle. Only as an adult did he discover, through a poisonous 1930s tract on Jewish names buried in the archives of Harvard’s Widener Library, that his own grandfather had been a committed Nazi who despised this "language of thieves." Interweaving family memoir with an adventurous foray into the mysteries of language, Puchner crafts an entirely original narrative. In a language born of migration and survival, he discovers a witty and resourceful spirit of tolerance that remains essential in our volatile present.

Not since The Diary of Anne Frank has there been such a book as this: The joyful but ultimately heartbreaking journal of a young Jewish woman in occupied Paris, now being published for the first time, 63 years after her death in a Nazi concentration camp. On April 7, 1942, Hélène Berr, a 21-year-old Jewish student of English literature at the Sorbonne, took up her pen and started to keep a journal, writing with verve and style about her everyday life in Paris — about her studies, her friends, her growing affection for the “boy with the grey eyes,” about the sun in the dewdrops, and about the effect of the growing restrictions imposed by France’s Nazi occupiers. Berr brought a keen literary sensibility to her writing, a talent that renders the story it relates all the more rich, all the more heartbreaking. The first day Berr has to wear the yellow star on her coat, she writes, “I held my head high and looked people so straight in the eye they turned away. But it’s hard.” More, many more, humiliations were to follow, which she records, now with a view to posterity. She wants the journal to go to her fiancé, who has enrolled with the Free French Forces, as she knows she may not live much longer. She was right. The final entry is dated February 15, 1944, and ends with the chilling words: “Horror! Horror! Horror!” Berr and her family were arrested three weeks later. She went — as was discovered later — on the death march from Auschwitz to Bergen-Belsen, where she died of typhus in April 1945, within a month of Anne Frank and just days before the liberation of the camp. The journal did eventually reach her fiancé, and for over fifty years it was kept private. In 2002, it was donated to the Memorial of the Shoah in Paris. Before it was first published in France in January 2008, translation rights had already been sold for twelve languages.

A collection of twentieth century political cartoonist, Szyk.

A compelling and candid memoir from Mindy Weisel, internationally-acclaimed artist and author, with huge resonance and appeal particularly across Jewish interest genres.

Brings together over 300 all-new cartoons from the WWII era, including over 100 by Dr Seuss, 50 by The New Yorker's Saul Steinberg and works by Al Hirschfeld, Carl Rose and Mischa Richter. The cartoons and commentary cover the five years of the war and are divided into five chapters exploring the years leading up to the war, Hitler and Germany, Hitler's Allies, The Home Front and Germany's defeat.

This book explores responses to The Merchant of Venice by Jewish writers, critics, theater artists, thinkers, religious leaders and institutions.