Kid with a Guitar: The Story of Memphis Minnie by Yale Strom is an inspiring children's biography that tells the story of Lizzie Douglas, a young girl who grew up to become the legendary blues musician Memphis Minnie. The book follows her journey from a childhood surrounded by music in the American South to her rise as a powerful guitarist, singer, and songwriter who helped shape the blues. Through determination, talent, and courage, Minnie overcame obstacles in a male-dominated m...

Klezmer is Yiddish music, the music of the Jews of Europe and America, a music of laughter and tears, of weddings and festivals, of dancing and prayer. Born in the Middle Ages, it came of age in the shtetl (the Eastern European Jewish country town), where "a wedding without klezmer is worse than a funeral without tears." Most of the European klezmorim (klezmer players) were murdered in the Holocaust; in the last 25 years, however, klezmer has been reborn, with dozens of groups, often mixin...

When Ziske's klezmer band is invited to play at a wedding in Pinsk, they arrive to discover many of the people in the town very sick. But tradition says that if two orphans get married in a cemetery a miracle may happen, so Ziske sets his mind to finding the perfect couple.

In striking photography and informative text, this volume both celebrates and mourns Eastern European Jewish life of the early- to mid-twentieth century.From Odessa to Budapest, Warsaw, Prague, and Sarajevo, the Jews of Eastern Europe established thriving, traditional communities . And while there are still proud Jews who keep the Kehilla robust in the region, they are a shadow of their former glory. In The Last Jews of Eastern Europe, Yale Strom and photo...

Renowned Jewish vocalist and writer Elizabeth Schwartz’s first book of fiction, “The Sweet Fragrance of Life & Other Stories” is a meditation on historic European Jewish Culture seen through the lens of a woman’s point of view.As if Sholem Aleichem and Angela Carter had a child, The Sweet Fragrance of Life & Other Horror Stories explores European Jewish history, culture, and real world events through a feminist, shtetl perspective.This is an eerie collection of new Jewish t...

Debs In Canton is original historical audio fiction.On June 16, 1918, America’s leading voice of conscience, Eugene Victor Debs, stepped onto a stage in Canton, Ohio, and gave a soul-stirring speech against American intervention in WWI. He did so knowing the cost would be severe: Debs was charged with violating the Espionage Act of 1917 and sentenced to ten years in a federal penitentiary for sedition. The sixty-three-year-old cofounder of the Socialist Party of America ran for pre...

Shpil: The Art of Playing Klezmer is both a history of this popular form of traditional Jewish music and an instructional book for professional and amateur musicians. Since the revival of klezmer music in the United States in the mid-1970s, Yiddish songs and klezmer dance melodies have served as the soundtrack for a resurgence of interest in Ashkenazic Jewish culture across the globe. Klezmer has taken root not only in America’s major urban centers—New York City, Chicago, San Francisco—but...