The City Beautiful (novel)
''The City Beautiful'' is a Young adult fiction, young adult, historical fantasy novel by Aden Polydoros, about a gay Jewish teenager in 19th century Chicago who is possessed by a dybbuk seeking revenge for its murder. The novel won the Sydney Taylor Book Award, and was nominated for the National Jewish Book Award, the Lambda Literary Award for Children's and Young Adult Literature, Lambda Literary Award, and the World Fantasy Award—Novel, World Fantasy Award. Background and development Polydoros was inspired to write ''The City Beautiful'' after reading an article about real-life serial-killer H. H. Holmes. He wrote the novel as part of an independent study in his undergraduate degree. Synopsis The novel follows Alter Rosen a 17-year-old History of the Jews in Romania, Romanian Jewish immigrant in Chicago in 1893, who works at a Yiddish newspaper to pay his family's passage from Europe. He avoided death as an infant but believes he curses the people around him to die, incl ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Aden Polydoros
Aden ( ar, عدن ' Yemeni: ) is a city, and since 2015, the temporary capital of Yemen, near the eastern approach to the Red Sea (the Gulf of Aden), some east of the strait Bab-el-Mandeb. Its population is approximately 800,000 people. Aden's natural harbour lies in the crater of a dormant volcano, which now forms a peninsula joined to the mainland by a low isthmus. This harbour, Front Bay, was first used by the ancient Kingdom of Awsan between the 7th to 5th centuries BC. The modern harbour is on the other side of the peninsula. Aden gets its name from the Gulf of Aden. Aden consists of a number of distinct sub-centres: Crater, the original port city; Ma'alla, the modern port; Tawahi, known as "Steamer Point" in the colonial period; and the resorts of Gold Mohur. Khormaksar, on the isthmus that connects Aden proper with the mainland, includes the city's diplomatic missions, the main offices of Aden University, and Aden International Airport (the former British Royal ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Yiddish
Yiddish (, or , ''yidish'' or ''idish'', , ; , ''Yidish-Taytsh'', ) is a West Germanic language historically spoken by Ashkenazi Jews. It originated during the 9th century in Central Europe, providing the nascent Ashkenazi community with a vernacular based on High German fused with many elements taken from Hebrew (notably Mishnaic) and to some extent Aramaic. Most varieties of Yiddish include elements of Slavic languages and the vocabulary contains traces of Romance languages.Aram Yardumian"A Tale of Two Hypotheses: Genetics and the Ethnogenesis of Ashkenazi Jewry".University of Pennsylvania. 2013. Yiddish is primarily written in the Hebrew alphabet. Prior to World War II, its worldwide peak was 11 million, with the number of speakers in the United States and Canada then totaling 150,000. Eighty-five percent of the approximately six million Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust were Yiddish speakers,Solomon Birnbaum, ''Grammatik der jiddischen Sprache'' (4., erg. Aufl., Hambu ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Jewish Book Council
The Jewish Book Council (Hebrew: ), founded in 1944, is an organization encouraging and contributing to Jewish literature.About the Jewish Book Council The goal of the council, as stated on its website, is "to promote the reading, writing and publishing of quality English language books of Jewish content in North America". The council sponsors the National Jewish Book Awards, the , the JBC Network, JBC Book Clubs, the Visiting Scribe series, and . It publishe ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Kirkus Reviews
''Kirkus Reviews'' (or ''Kirkus Media'') is an American book review magazine founded in 1933 by Virginia Kirkus (1893–1980). The magazine is headquartered in New York City. ''Kirkus Reviews'' confers the annual Kirkus Prize to authors of fiction, nonfiction, and young readers' literature. ''Kirkus Reviews'', published on the first and 15th of each month; previews books before their publication. ''Kirkus'' reviews over 10,000 titles per year. History Virginia Kirkus was hired by Harper & Brothers to establish a children's book department in 1926. The department was eliminated as an economic measure in 1932 (for about a year), so Kirkus left and soon established her own book review service. Initially, she arranged to get galley proofs of "20 or so" books in advance of their publication; almost 80 years later, the service was receiving hundreds of books weekly and reviewing about 100. Initially titled ''Bulletin'' by Kirkus' Bookshop Service from 1933 to 1954, the title was ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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New York Public Library
The New York Public Library (NYPL) is a public library system in New York City. With nearly 53 million items and 92 locations, the New York Public Library is the second largest public library in the United States (behind the Library of Congress) and the fourth largest in the world. It is a private, non-governmental, independently managed, nonprofit corporation operating with both private and public financing. The library has branches in the boroughs of the Bronx, Manhattan, and Staten Island and affiliations with academic and professional libraries in the New York metropolitan area. The city's other two boroughs, Brooklyn and Queens, are not served by the New York Public Library system, but rather by their respective borough library systems: the Brooklyn Public Library and the Queens Public Library. The branch libraries are open to the general public and consist of circulating libraries. The New York Public Library also has four research libraries, which are also open to the ge ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Gothic Fiction
Gothic fiction, sometimes called Gothic horror in the 20th century, is a loose literary aesthetic of fear and haunting. The name is a reference to Gothic architecture of the European Middle Ages, which was characteristic of the settings of early Gothic novels. The first work to call itself Gothic was Horace Walpole's 1764 novel ''The Castle of Otranto'', later subtitled "A Gothic Story". Subsequent 18th century contributors included Clara Reeve, Ann Radcliffe, William Beckford (novelist), William Thomas Beckford, and Matthew Gregory Lewis, Matthew Lewis. The Gothic influence continued into the early 19th century, works by the Romantic poetry, Romantic poets, and novelists such as Mary Shelley, Charles Maturin, Walter Scott and E. T. A. Hoffmann frequently drew upon gothic motifs in their works. The early Victorian literature, Victorian period continued the use of gothic, in novels by Charles Dickens and the Brontë family, Brontë sisters, as well as works by the American ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Jewish Folklore
Jewish folklore are legends, music, oral history, proverbs, jokes, popular beliefs, fairy tales, stories, tall tales, and customs that are the traditions of Judaism. Folktales are characterized by the presence of unusual personages, by the sudden transformation of men into beasts and vice versa, or by other unnatural incidents. A number of aggadic stories bear folktale characteristics, especially those relating to Og, King of Bashan, which have the same exaggerations as have the ''lügenmärchen'' of modern German folktales. Middle Ages There is considerable evidence of Jewish people bringing and helping the spread of Eastern folktales in Europe.Joseph Jacobs.Folk-Tales entry. In: ''The Jewish Encyclopedia''. Vol. 5. New York and London: Funk & Wagnalls company, 1902. pp. 427-428. Besides these tales from foreign sources, Jews either collected or composed others which were told throughout the European ghettos, and were collected in Yiddish in the "Maasebücher". Numbers of the ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Exploitation Of Labour
Exploitation of labour (also known as labor) is a concept defined as, in its broadest sense, one agent taking unfair advantage of another agent. It denotes an unjust social relationship based on an asymmetry of power or unequal exchange of value between workers and their employers. When speaking about exploitation, there is a direct affiliation with consumption in social theory and traditionally this would label exploitation as unfairly taking advantage of another person because of their inferior position, giving the exploiter the power.Dowding, Keith (2011). "Exploitation". ''Encyclopedia of Power''. SAGE Publications. pp. 232–235. . Karl Marx's theory of exploitation has been described in the '' Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy'' as the most influential theory of exploitation. In analyzing exploitation, economists are split on the explanation of the exploitation of labour given by Marx and Adam Smith. Smith did not see exploitation as an inherent systematic phenomenon in spec ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Antisemitism
Antisemitism (also spelled anti-semitism or anti-Semitism) is hostility to, prejudice towards, or discrimination against Jews. A person who holds such positions is called an antisemite. Antisemitism is considered to be a form of racism. Antisemitism has historically been manifested in many ways, ranging from expressions of hatred of or discrimination against individual Jews to organized pogroms by mobs, police forces, or genocide. Although the term did not come into common usage until the 19th century, it is also applied to previous and later anti-Jewish incidents. Notable instances of persecution include the Rhineland massacres preceding the First Crusade in 1096, the Edict of Expulsion from England in 1290, the 1348–1351 persecution of Jews during the Black Death, the massacres of Spanish Jews in 1391, the persecutions of the Spanish Inquisition, the expulsion from Spain in 1492, the Cossack massacres in Ukraine from 1648 to 1657, various anti-Jewish pogroms in the Russ ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Bereavement In Judaism
Bereavement in Judaism () is a combination of ''minhag'' and ''mitzvah'' derived from the Torah and Judaism's classical rabbinic texts. The details of observance and practice vary according to each Jewish community. Mourners In Judaism, the principal mourners are the first-degree relatives: parent, child, sibling, and spouse. There are some customs that are unique to an individual mourning a parent. Halachot concerning mourning do not apply to those under thirteen years of age, nor do they apply when the deceased is aged 30 days or less. Upon receiving news of the death Upon receiving the news of the death, the following blessing is recited: : :Transliteration: :Translation: "Blessed are You, Lord, our God, King of the universe, the Judge of Truth lt., the Just Judge" There is also a custom of rending one's clothes at the moment one hears news of a death. Another prevalent custom is to tear at the funeral.Klein, Isaac, A Guide to Jewish Religious Practice, Ktav Publishing ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Tugarin
Tugarin (Russian: Тугарин) is a mythical creature in East European bylinas and fairy tales, which personifies evil and cruelty and appears in a dragon-like form. Name forms and origins Tugarin has many different names in East Slavic mythology, such as Zmey Tugarin, Zmey Tugaretin, Zmeishche Tugarishche and others. "Tugarin" as a corruption of "Tugar-Khan" (Tugor-Khan of the Turkic Polovets), has been contested by an etymology from the root ''tug'' "grief". Description Tugarin, although spoken of as a dragon, largely retains an " anthropomorphic" form, and is seen riding a horse. It appears he has wings with which to fly, and he soars to the air during the duel with Alyosha. The flying wings are certainly a dragon-like trait, but some versions explain it away as a contraption made of paper, attached to his horse and not to himself. Tugarin was a great glutton, which is somewhat of a dragon-like trait. He could stuff a whole wheel of bread in each cheek, then deposit a ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Union Stock Yards
The Union Stock Yard & Transit Co., or The Yards, was the meatpacking district in Chicago for more than a century, starting in 1865. The district was operated by a group of railroad companies that acquired marshland and turned it into a centralized processing area. By the 1890s, the railroad capital behind the Union Stockyards was Vanderbilt money. The Union Stockyards operated in the New City community area for 106 years, helping Chicago become known as the "hog butcher for the world," the center of the American meatpacking industry for decades. The yards became inspiration for literature, and social reform. The stockyards became the focal point of the rise of some of the earliest international companies. These refined industrial innovations and influenced financial markets. Both the rise and fall of the district reflect the evolution of transportation services and technology in America. The stockyards have become an integral part of the popular culture of Chicago's history ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |