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Coming May 17, 2022

From the Award-Winning Author of Rashi’s Daughters and 50 Shades of Talmud

Comes a Powerful Romance with a Purpose

The Choice: A Novel of Love, Faith, and the Talmud
by Maggie Anton, author of Rashi’s Daughters, Banot Press, ISBN: 978-0-9763050-3-3, $16.99

It’s Brooklyn, New York, and the year is 1955. Dr. Robert Salk discovers a vaccine for polio. The Dodgers play the Yankees in the World Series. The McCarthy hearings deport communists while the new state of Israel takes shape in the Middle East. Young Rabbi Nathan Mandel hears a knock at the door.

Expecting journalist H. M. Covey, he is shocked to find attractive Hannah Eisin on the other side. Hannah reveals that Covey was her birth name before her father died and her mother married Samuel Eisin. She uses an ambiguous byline because she’s writing for a Yiddish newspaper where female columnists are rare.

After the interview, Hannah convinces Rabbi Mandel to teach her Talmud, something forbidden by Jewish law that could cost him his job if discovered. Things start innocently enough, but soon the gloves come off as “Annie” and “Nate” discover they are passionate about much more than Talmud.

Maggie Anton has written a powerful love story with a purpose: to expose the many ways the Torah and Talmud have been interpreted unfavorably toward women. Anton is fearless in the subjects her characters tackle during their weekly sessions:

  • Niddah & Mikveh. Rules regarding sex and menstruation.
  • The Minyan & The Drash. Why Jewish women are excluded from services.
  • The Shanda of Mesirah. A rabbi refuses to turn a pedophile over to police.

Anyone interested in the role of women in Judaism will find Maggie Anton’s The Choice an unforgettable story that sets the record straight!

ABOUT MAGGIE ANTON:

Maggie Anton is an award-winning author of both fiction and nonfiction and a Talmud scholar with a deep understanding of Jewish women’s history. Her research into the great Jewish scholar Rashi, who had no sons, led to the award-winning trilogy Rashi’s Daughters, followed by a two-book series, Rav Hisda’s Daughter, a National Jewish Book Award finalist and a Library Journal pick for Best Historical Fiction. She lives in Los Angeles, California.

ADAVANCE PRAISE FOR THE CHOICE:

“Maggie Anton gives evocative voice to the generation of our mothers, whose questions and bold solutions, especially about the most intimate of subjects, laid the foundation for the contemporary transformation of women’s status in Jewish learning and law.” —Rabbi Susan Grossman, DHL, Senior Rabbi, Beth Shalom Congregation, Columbia, Maryland, and coeditor of Daughters of the King

“The Choice takes us into the Jewish world of love and learning and the love of learning. One can only be grateful for such an intriguing and engaging work. Maggie Anton’s combination of history, imagination, and feminist reading of classical Jewish texts is impressive.” —Rabbi Laura Geller, Rabbi Emerita, Temple Emanuel of Beverly Hills, and coauthor of Getting Good at Getting Older

“Maggie Anton utilizes her characters’ authentic voices to address social justice while still entertaining the reader with an engaging romance.” —Jackie Ben-Efraim, Special Collections Librarian, American Jewish University

“Maggie Anton’s new novel embeds issues concerning the intersection of modernity, belief, and ritual practices within a lively, intellectually engaging romance. . . . Best of all, the romantic relationship of Hannah and Nathan evolves in sync with their scintillating discussions of various Talmudic passages, from both traditional and critical perspectives, leaving us wondering just how much more enriched Jewish life would be today had women been participants in the Talmudic dialectic all along.” —Stuart S. Miller, Professor of Hebrew History and Judaic Studies, University of Connecticut at Storrs, and author of At the Intersection of Texts and Material Finds

WHAT THEY’RE SAYING ABOUT MAGGIE ANTON’S NOVELS:

“True to her mission as a historical novelist, Maggie Anton offers a woman’s take on what has been a mostly male enterprise.” —Jonathan Kirsch, Los Angeles Jewish Journal

“Maggie Anton demonstrates just how sex-positive Judaism is.” —Rabbi Elliot Dorff, Rector and Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, American Jewish University

“Anton delivers a tour de force . . . [Readers] will fly through the pages and come away wishing for more.” —Library Journal (starred review)

“A compelling combination of drama, suspense, and romance.”—Lilith magazine

For further information, review copy requests, or to schedule an interview with Maggie Anton, please contact Rachel Tarlow Gul at Over the River Public Relations: rachel@otrpr.com.


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Coming April 26, 2022

PILLAR OF SALT

A Daughter’s Life in the Shadow of the Holocaust

by Anna Salton Eisen with Aaron Eisen

“Anna Salton Eisen’s PILLAR OF SALT is a profoundly moving tale of generational trauma and healing between father and daughter. Through her travels with him to Poland, and her relentless search through personal keepsakes and Nazi archives, she discovers her own history and in doing so grapples with questions in the hearts of all of us. Her writing is straightforward and present, effortlessly whisking the reader along for the journey, into the beast of the past, to emerge into a new light. I am grateful to be working with such wonderful source material as PILLAR OF SALT for a feature length documentary film.” –Jacob Wise, filmmaker of In My Father’s Words (fall 2022, JWise Productions)  

“Anna Salton Eisen’s important exploration of her Holocaust heritage is about building community, building connection, through history, through your family, through your story.”
–Deb Liu, CEO Ancestry.com

As the daughter of Holocaust survivors, Anna Salton Eisen breaks the silence that was intended as a protective shield against the unspeakable past in her new memoir, PILLAR OF SALT: A Daughter’s Life in the Shadow of the Holocaust (Mandel Vilar Press Trade Paperback Original; April 26, 2022; $19.95). A new voice in Holocaust literature, Anna begins this heart-wrenching memoir as she looks back to her own youth when she discovers two hidden watercolor paintings depicting the horrors of the Holocaust and sets out to uncover the truth of her father’s past. Her quest leads her on a journey to unlock a history sealed in silence and buried by time. With her father as her guide, she travels through the picturesque Polish countryside pockmarked by the remnants of former concentration camps and sites of desolate Holocaust memorials. Together with her family, they return to the ghetto where her father’s imprisonment in ten concentration camps over three years began. They also find their way back to his boyhood town and into his childhood home where painful memories exist, but strangers now live. Through her keen observations and open heart, Anna combines the meticulous work of an archaeologist with the compassionate perspective of a daughter.

“Writing PILLAR OF SALT has allowed me to tell the story of looking back and sharing how I was changed and made incredible connections when I took on the legacy of the second generation. I found my father when I tried to help him carry the pain and memories of the Holocaust.” -Anna Salton Eisen

PILLAR OF SALT is a second book for Anna Salton Eisen, who co-wrote The 23rd Psalm: A Holocaust Memoir with her father, George Salton, which will be released in a new expanded edition in Fall 2022 (Mandel Vilar Press).

ABOUT THE AUTHORS: Anna Salton Eisen was a founding member and the first president of Congregation Beth Israel in Colleyville, Texas. She has conducted extensive research into the Holocaust and spoken on that topic to school and community groups. She served as a docent for the Dallas Memorial Center for Holocaust Studies (now the Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum) and conducted Holocaust survivor interviews for the USC Shoah Foundation. Anna is an Ambassador to #everynamecounts, a digital initiative of the Arolsen Archives, the world’s most comprehensive archive on the victims and survivors of Nazi persecution. A licensed social worker, Salton Eisen formerly practiced as a therapist, specializing in mental health and trauma. She lives in Westlake, Texas.

Aaron Eisen is a third-generation Jewish writer. Along with co-authoring PILLAR OF SALT, he is an important part of the upcoming documentary film project, In My Father’s Words. A graduate of the University of Virginia, Aaron is working on a non-fiction book about the impact of the Holocaust on the humanities in contemporary America.

On sale in time for Holocaust Remembrance Day on April 28, 2022.

More praise for PILLAR OF SALT:

“A vividly colored, elegant study of family dynamics as two generations eventually came to terms with a tragic Holocaust past.”

—Richard Breitman, author of The Berlin Mission: The American Who Resisted Nazi Germany from Within

“Navigating her way through the ruins of memory, Anna bears eloquent witness to the scope of the Holocaust that continues to cast its shadow over generations…. Anna found the courage to pen these powerful words [and] we must find the courage to read them and be transformed into witnesses.”

—David Patterson, Hillel A. Feinberg Distinguished Chair in Holocaust Studies, University of Texas at Dallas

“A true and beautiful story of a daughter’s quest to understand her parents’ haunted past, and to discover … the indissoluble nature of love and family. A powerful and poignant read.”

—Jennifer Rosner,author ofThe Yellow Bird Sings,a National Jewish Book Award Finalist

For further information, review copy requests, or to schedule an interview with Anna Salton Eisen, please contact Rachel Tarlow Gul at Over the River Public Relations: rachel@otrpr.com, 201-503-1321.

ISBN 9781942134824, 190 text pages plus 8 pages of photos, artwork, and map, 6 x 9, $19.95

E-ISBN 9781942134831, 190 text pages plus 8 pages of photos, artwork, and map, 6 x 9, $9.99

For more information, visit https://www.mvpublishers.org/.

Individuals can order on Amazon.com, Independent Booksellers at Bookshop.com or at www.mvpublishers.org.

Trade Distribution: Consortium Book Sales and Distribution | 800.283.3572 | Sales.Orders@cbsd.com

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Coming May 17, 2022…

OUR LAUNDRY, OUR TOWN

My Chinese American Life from Flushing to the Downtown Stage and Beyond

by ALVIN ENG

Powerful, funny at times, and consistently inspiring, Our Laundry, Our Town turns one artist’s journey into the story of AAPI communities and emergence of a movement over the past half-century. Alvin Eng’s engaging memoir looks back on the past to envision a better future.” 

—David Henry Hwang, Tony Award-winning playwright of M. Butterfly

Second-generation Asian American youth always feel like they’re the first to not belong. How liberating, then, to encounter Our Laundry, Our Town. The book tells a moving tale of the distances that separate you from your immigrant parents, as well as a Toisanese labor history set in a laundry, but there’s a surprising twist. The protagonist is a young punk who hates math, loves The Who, and finds himself navigating the late-twentieth-century multicultural bohemia of rock and hip hop, Asian American film and theater, and avant-garde queer performance. In this humorous, amiable, and deeply heartfelt memoir, Eng seems to have achieved the Asian American dream: honoring his mother and father before him while also creating a community where he can be his whole self and finally belong.” 

—KEN CHEN, Associate Director of Creative Writing at Barnard College; former Executive Director, Asian American Writers’ Workshop 

Alvin Eng’s fascinating, funny, aching, searching, loving memoir derives its power from that key element of New York City’s dynamism and magic:  that behind every apartment door and scrappy storefront, in every far-flung outer-borough neighborhood, lie vast worlds, sweeping histories, and epic tales of questing souls melding the old ways into something meaningful and new.” 

—LISA KRON, playwright, actor and Tony Award-winning bookwriter/lyricist of Fun Home

Playwright, performer, acoustic punk rock raconteur, and educator Alvin Eng grew up in Flushing, Queens, a neighborhood of that singular universe that was New York City in the 1970s – back then, his was one of the few immigrant Chinese families to live there. His parents had an arranged marriage and ran a Chinese Hand Laundry. In OUR LAUNDRY, OUR TOWN: My Chinese American Life from Flushing to the Downtown Stage and Beyond (Fordham University Press| Empire State Editions, May 17, 2022, $27.95), fans of memoirs that speak to the immigrant experience – such as Beautiful Country and Sigh, Gone – will delight in Eng’s illuminating time capsule of the Chinese-American experience, from the Chinatowns of the U.S to China’s motherland. Eng explores issues of identity, race, and societal expectations with marvelous humor, introspection and tenderness. 

Says Eng, “In some ways, my parents’ arranged marriage was the ultimate tragic opera in that I never once saw them dance or engage in any amorous way that went one breath or gesture beyond the bare-bones necessities of running our laundry and our family. In another sense, theirs was an unmitigated immigrant success story in that they both ventured to the other side of the world, at a time when our race was legally blocked from becoming U.S. citizens for almost an entire century, and prospered. Against mountains of societal, institutional, and legal obstacles, they raised five children and maintained a successful Mom-and-Pop Chinese hand laundry business for three decades, as well as two homes.”

Eng reconciles the push and pull of an insular home life with the turbulent yet inspiring street life around him – from faux martial arts TV stars to punk rock and theater. In the 1970s, NYC, like most of the world, was in the throes of regenerating itself in the wake of major social and cultural changes resulting from the Counterculture and Civil Rights movements. These same systemic conflicts form the core of our current global reckoning on representation and identity. 

By the 1980s, Chinese culture began to flourish in Flushing. Yet, Eng remained an outsider of sorts because he was one of Flushing’s few Chinese citizens who could not speak fluent Chinese. As a theatre practitioner and professor in the 21st century, discovering the under-chronicled Chinese influence on Thornton Wilder’s seminal Americana drama, Our Town, became the unlikely catalyst for a psyche-healing pilgrimage. 

At City University of Hong Kong, Alvin and his wife, director/dramaturg Wendy Wasdahl, led a Fulbright Specialist devised theatre residency on the Chinese influence on Our Town. From this residency, the US Consulate Guangzhou invited Alvin to perform his Our Town-inspired solo, The Last Emperor of Flushing, in his family’s ancestral Guangdong Province of southern China. Learning to proudly tell his own story on stage helped to make him whole.

ALVIN ENG is a native NYC playwright, performer, acoustic punk rock raconteur, and educator. His plays and performances have been seen Off-Broadway, throughout the U.S., as well as in Paris, Hong Kong, and Guangzhou, China. Eng is the editor of the oral history/play anthology, Tokens? The NYC Asian American Experience on Stage (Temple, 2000). His plays, lyrics, and memoir excerpts have also been published in numerous anthologies. His storytelling and commentary have been broadcast and streamed on National Public Radio, among others. www.alvineng.com

OUR LAUNDRY, OUR TOWN:
My Chinese American Life from Flushing to the Downtown Stage and Beyond
by Alvin Eng
Fordham University Press | Empire State Editions; Hardcover and e-book; May 17, 2022
(Memoir | Asian American Studies | Theater & Performing Arts; $27.95; ISBN#: 978-1531500368; 224 pages, with 25 b&w images)

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DEATH TANGO: Ariel Sharon, Yasser Arafat and Three Fateful Days in March

by Yossi Alpher

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Contact: Rachel Tarlow Gul, rachel@otrpr.com 

ADVANCE PRAISE:

“Anyone seeking to understand how Israelis and Palestinians traded the hopes of Oslo for something approaching hopelessness is well-advised to read this book. With penetrating analysis and elegant prose, Yossi Alpher has told the gripping story of three days nearly two decades ago that continue to haunt would-be peacemakers. Yossi’s faithful readers will not be disappointed with his latest effort.”

— Ambassador Frederic C. Hof, Bard College

 “A riveting account of the crucial days in March 2002 when the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was profoundly changed for the worse. The peace camp has never recovered from those wrenching days, and we live now without any hope of a just settlement. Alpher is a highly respected expert who has spent decades studying this conflict from both sides.”

— Bruce Riedel, director of the Brookings Intelligence Project

“A critical assessment of a key period in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict never before presented in such detail. The best and most capable players at the executive and political levels proved unable to forge any resolution, final or partial, because both parties continued to maintain an insurmountable gulf between themselves. This is a MUST read for anyone daring to tackle the future of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and of Israel-Arab relations in general.”

— Efraim Halevy, former Head of the Mossad (1998-2002)

In his latest book, DEATH TANGO: Ariel Sharon, Yasser Arafat, and Three Fateful Days in March, Yossi Alpher, a former Mossad official and one of Israel’s foremost analysts of Israeli strategic issues, traces the current fraught relationship between Israel and Palestine to three dramatic events that occurred in March 2002. First, there was a bloody suicide bombing at the Park Hotel in Netanya, Israel on March 27th at a Passover celebration. Then, the Arab League met in Beirut on March 28th and approved the Arab Peace Initiative. Finally, on March 29th, Israel reinvaded the West Bank in Operation Defensive Shield. Taken together, Alpher argues, these three events were a catalyst for extensive change in the Middle East.

Based on many interviews and the author’s unique experience and inside knowledge, DEATH TANGO is filled with thorough and thoughtful analysis that has never before been published. Rowman & Littlefield will release Alpher’s new book on February 15th (Hardcover, 978-1538162071, $36; Ebook, 978-1538162088, $34).

Why write this book twenty years after the events took place? “It took time for the significance of these events to sink in, and for me to recognize their strategic impact on Israel and the region,” Alpher explains. “The chronological distance was helpful in understanding what went on in late March 2002 among Israel, the Palestinians, the Arab world and the United States. Taken alone, each of the three major events described in the book is not so exceptional. When viewed as a three-day continuum, however, something exceptional is seen to have happened—even in Middle East terms.”

DEATH TANGO is about the interaction among these three critical events, and the key personalities involved. It moves from Israel’s Prime Minister’s Office where Ariel Sharon rants against Yasser Arafat, to Washington, DC where the US fumbles and misunderstands the dynamics at work, to the Jenin refugee camp, the “suicide capital of Palestine,” where Israeli soldiers win a bloody military battle but lose in the war of public opinion.  The book also includes:

  • An exclusive interview with New York Time’s commentator Tom Friedman, in which he explains how he sold the Saudis a peace plan.
  • Why Sharon invited himself to the Arab League meeting in Beirut and why the Arabs, who saw him as Genghis Khan incarnate, turned him down.
  • A blow-by-blow account of the worst terrorist attack in Israel’s history.
  • What Sharon and Arafat had in common and what they did not.
  • Why the Arab Peace Initiative of March 2002 delivered a measure of stability and co-existence, but not peace.
  • Why there won’t be a two-state solution anytime soon between Israel and the Palestinians – but there won’t be all-out war either.

Alpher concludes that the new Arab-Israel and Palestinian-Israeli realities forged by these three pivotal events are here to stay. The combination of Palestinian overreach, Israeli security concerns and territorial greed, and Arab state indifference ensures that a two-state solution will not happen. In parallel, the Arabs need Israel as a partner against Iran and militant Islam. When pressured on any of these issues, their leaders fall back on the Arab Peace Initiative as the authoritative legitimizer of the status quo. Palestinians and Israelis, like Arafat and Sharon in their day, are dancing “a kind of death tango.”

A must read for anyone interested in history, Middle East politics, Israel, the United States in the Middle East, and international strategic affairs.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Yossi (Joseph) Alpher is a consultant and writer on Israel-related strategic issues. He is the author of the prize-winning Periphery: Israel’s Search For Middle East Allies and No End Of Conflict: Rethinking Israel-Palestine (Rowman & Littlefield, 2015 and 2016, respectively). His latest book is Winners and Losers in the ‘Arab Spring’: Profiles in Chaos (Routledge, 2020), which won the Chaikin Prize in 2021.

Born in Washington, DC, Alpher served in the Israel Defense Forces as an intelligence officer in the late 1960s, followed by service in the Mossad in the ‘70s.  From 1981 to 1995 he was associated with the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University, ultimately serving as director of center.  From 1995 to 2000 he served as director of the American Jewish Committee’s Israel/Middle East Office in Jerusalem. In July 2000 (during the Camp David talks) he served as Special Adviser to the Prime Minister of Israel. From 2001 to 2012 he was coeditor, with Ghassan Khatib (until recently vice-president of Bir Zeit University) of the bitterlemons.net family of internet publications.

DEATH TANGO:

Ariel Sharon, Yasser Arafat, and Three Fateful Days in March

By Yossi Alpher

Rowman & Littlefield; February 15, 2022

(Hardcover, 978-1538162071, $36, 224 Pages; Ebook, 978-1538162088, $34)

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THE TENDEREST OF STRINGS

by Steven Schwartz

“Schwartz (Madagascar, 2016), whose long career includes both novels and story collections, delivers the rare plot-driven domestic drama. The mystery of who killed Tom bubbles under the surface as the characters deal with heavy emotions and difficult decisions. The smooth writing and quick pace will appeal to readers of Jessica Strawser and Jodi Picoult.” – Booklist

“Steven Schwartz’s tightly written story tells of a family in crisis…Schwartz brings an understanding of ordinary people to this engrossing story of a fractured family that strives to heal itself through love and understanding.” – The Denver Post

https://www.overtheriverpr.com/2021/11/15/3120/

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