Best of
European-Literature
1995
Against the Odds: Survival on the Russian Front 1944-1945
John Stieber - 1995
Caught there by the outbreak of the Second World War, he was unable to return to his parents for seven years. In due course, he was called to serve in an anti-aircraft battery and in the National Labour Service. Just after his eighteenth birthday, he was sent to the Russian Front with the elite Paratrooper and Tank Division, Hermann Göring. He lived through an amazing series of events, escaping death many times and was one of the few survivors of his division when the war ended. In this narrative of his early life, John Stieber describes how he went from a carefree childhood through increasing hardships, until every day of his life became a challenge for survival.
Forbidden Places
Penny Vincenzi - 1995
It is a story of three woman and one family.One is married and widowed within five years. She is free to start again. Or is she? The second has a perfect husband she thinks she loves. He becomes a grotesque parody of what he once was. Is that love real? The third becomes trapped in a nightmare marriage. Can the war free her?
A Woman in Amber: Healing the Trauma of War and Exile
Agate Nesaule - 1995
This beautifully written book makes us reckon anew with the deep costs of war."—Eva Hoffman.
Warning: When I am an Old Woman I Shall Wear Purple
Jenny Joseph - 1995
Found in schoolbooks from Alaska to Singapore, the poem has been stitched, stamped, quilted, set to music, printed on cards, written on cakes and made into films.Here 'Warning: When I am an old woman I shall wear purple' appears as a beautifully illustrated gift book, the perfect gift for a friend or relative who wants to grow older with joy.
Shallow Graves in Siberia
Michael Krupa - 1995
He ran away before taking his final vows and joined the army. Soon afterwards, the German tanks rolled into Poland and easily defeated her antiquated forces - the Polish cavalry were armed with sabres. Krupa survived Hitler's invasion, but was arrested in Soviet-occupied eastern Poland and accused of spying. After enduring torture in Moscow's notorious Lubianka prison, he was sentenced to ten years' corrective labour and deported to the Pechora Gulag. Most prisoners there were worked and starved to death within a year. But Krupa managed again to escape, and in the chaos following the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union made one of the most extraordinary journeys of the war - from Siberia to safety in Afghanistan. Krupa's Jesuit training had given him an inner strength and resilience which enabled him to survive in the face of appalling brutality and cruelty. Luck and the kindness of strangers helped him complete his epic journey to freedom. The story of the suffering inflicted on millions in Stalin's camps has been told before - but Krupa's story is remarkable and uni
Essential Cavafy
Constantinos P. Cavafy - 1995
As ironist and realist, his vision is readily translatable into the language of contemporary experience; and the commitment to hedonism, to political skepticism, and to honest self-awareness... anticipates the prevailing aura of our times.
Leopardi: Selected Poems
Giacomo Leopardi - 1995
In spite of this reputation, and in spite of a number of nineteenth-and twentieth-century translations, Leopardi's poems have never "come over" into English in such a way as to guarantee their author a recognition comparable to that of other great European Romantic poets.By catching something of Leopardi's cadences and tonality in a version that still reads as idiomatic modern English (with an occasional Irish or American accent), Leopardi: Selected Poems should win for the Italian poet the wider appreciative audience he deserves. His themes are mutability, landscape, love; his attitude, one of unflinching realism in the face of unavoidable human loss. But the manners of the poems are a unique amalgam of philosophical toughness and the lyrically bittersweet. In a way more pure and distilled than most others in the Western tradition, these poems are truly what Matthew Arnold asked all poetry to be, a "criticism of life." The translator's aim is to convey something of the profundity and something of the sheer poetic achievement of Leopardi's inestimable Canti.
A Partisan's Memoir: Woman of the Holocaust
Faye Schulman - 1995
Faye was an ordinary teenager when the Nazis invaded her town on the Russian-Polish border. She had a large, loving family, good friends and neighbours, most of whom were lost soon after the horrors of the Holocaust began. But Faye survived, and the photographs she took testify to her experiences and the persecution she witnessed. Decorated for heroism, Schulman uses her biography to tell an extraordinary story not just of survival, but of struggle and resistance against oppression. She talks about escaping from the Nazis, finding a partisan unit and proving her worth. The photographs she took speak eloquently of her experience of surviving for years in the woods with the partisans. There she learned to nurse the ill and wounded, and took up arms against those who had decimated her world.
Poetry of the First World War
Marcus Clapham - 1995
'Who will remember, passing through this Gate, The unheroic Dead who fed the guns?' was Siegfried Sassoon's anguished cry for those whose sacrifice seemed futile. Yet eighty years later it is because of Sassoon and his fellow poets - Owen, Rosenberg, Sorley and many others - that we do remember.This new anthology will serve as an introduction to the poetry of that great conflict, and the inclusion of a number of rarely anthologised poets, many from the ranks, as well as anonymous poems and songs, serves to bring a quality of freshness to the selection.