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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 Easy Life in Kamusari by Shion Miura Translated into English by Juliet Winters Carpenter

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

From Shion Miura, the award-winning author of The Great Passage, comes a rapturous novel where the contemporary and the traditional meet amid the splendor of Japan’s mountain way of life.

“Fans of all ages should enjoy the author’s blend of the traditional and the contemporary.” Kirkus Reviews

“Shion Miura, award-winning and world renown Japanese author of The Great Passage (2011), delivers yet another fascinating introspection into how the ancient and traditional worlds meet the modern and contemporary way of life in The Easy Life in Kamusari (2021) – the first book in Miura’s new Forest series. Translated into English by superb veteran translator, Juliet Winters Carpenter, this upcoming novel…unravels into a beautiful coming-of-age tale that makes the reader long for a greener life – one without phones, the internet, and where sentences end in ‘naa-naa.’” Asia Media International

Just in time for the holiday season comes, THE EASY LIFE IN KAMUSARI, an uplifting and absorbing story that is both simply told and full of beauty and depth.  Written by the award-winning Japanese author, Shion Miura and translated into English for the first time by Juliet Winters Carpenter, one of the foremost translators of Japanese literature, the novel will be out November 2nd from Amazon Crossing.

The narrator of the novel, Yuki Hirano, is just out of high school when his parents enroll him, against his will, in a forestry training program in the remote mountain village of Kamusari.  No phone, no internet, no shopping. Just a small, inviting community where the most common expression is “take it easy.”

At first, Yuki is exhausted, fumbles with the tools, asks silly questions, and feels like an outcast. Kamusari is the last place a city boy from Yokohama wants to spend a year of his life. But as resistant as he might be, the scent of the cedars and the staggering beauty of the region have a pull.

Yuki learns to fell trees and plant saplings. He begins to embrace local festivals, he’s mesmerized by legends of the mountain, and he might be falling in love. In learning to respect the forest on Mt. Kamusari for its majestic qualities and its inexplicable secrets, Yuki starts to appreciate Kamusari’s harmony with nature and its ancient traditions.

In this warm and lively coming-of-age story, Miura transports us from the trappings of city life to the trials, mysteries, and delights of a mythical mountain forest.

For further information and review copy requests, please contact Rachel Tarlow Gul at Over the River Public Relations: rachel@otrpr.com.

THE EASY LIFE IN KAMUSARI

By Shion Miura

Translated by Juliet Winters Carpenter

Amazon Crossing; November 2, 2021

Literary Fiction | 208 pp. | Paperback: $14.95, ISBN#: 978-1542027168;

Kindle: $4.99, ISBN#: 978-1542027144

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March and April Blog Tour for THE VINES by Shelley Nolden

Release Date: March 23, 2021 from Freiling Publishing

Mark your calendars for this great Blog Tour lineup for Shelley Nolden‘s THE VINES, which is historical fiction and suspense at its best. It’s both a breathtaking novel that explores a long-forgotten place and an ominous thriller that keeps you on the edge of your seat as the story unravels. In this debut—the first book in a planned series—Nolden skillfully weaves together a page turner, spanning over a hundred years, that’s set on New York City’s abandoned North Brother Island.  

ADVANCE PRAISE: “THE VINES weaves beautiful writing around an unsettling mystery:  Who is the strange, scarred woman living on a seemingly uninhabitable island? Shelley Nolden’s debut seems not just prescient – given the world’s current focus on virology and immunizations – but also timeless, as it illustrates in painful detail how mankind seems destined to repeat our cruelest mistakes. Luckily for us readers, there’s a bright thread of hope running through this book as well as the promise of a sequel.”  —Sarah Pekkanen, #1 NYT bestselling co-author of You Are Not Alone

“Highly original and richly drawn, Shelley Nolden’s THE VINES features one of the most fascinating central characters you’ll ever meet. Drawing on both the dark history of North Brother Island and today’s painfully immediate worries about immunity and transmission of deadly disease, this debut transcends genre to combine history, thrills, obsession, medical ethics, and more into the compelling story of three generations of doctors and one remarkable woman.”— Greer Macallister, bestselling author of The Magician’s Lie and The Arctic Fury 

“Eerily timely and profoundly compelling, THE VINES is an unputdownable, unforgettable saga, the journey of a seemingly helpless, persecuted American woman who survives and battles back, against all odds; this first in what promises to be an explosive series signals the arrival of Shelley Nolden’s masterful new voice in hybrid fiction.”— May Cobb, author of The Hunting Wives

SYNOPSIS: In the shadows of New York City’s North Brother Island stand the remains of a shuttered hospital and the haunting memories of quarantines and human experiments. The ruins conceal the scarred and beautiful Cora, imprisoned there by contagions and the doctors who torment her. When Finn, a young urban explorer, arrives on the island and glimpses the enigmatic woman through the foliage, intrigue turns to obsession as he seeks to uncover her past–and his own family’s dark secrets.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: A graduate of the University of Minnesota, Shelley Nolden is an entrepreneur and writer, now residing in Wisconsin. Previously, she lived in the New York City area, where she worked on Wall Street and first learned of North Brother Island. At the age of 31, Shelley was diagnosed with leukemia and completed treatment three years later. The sense of isolation and fear she experienced during her cancer ordeal influenced her spellbinding debut novel, THE VINES

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