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New by Abraham Rothberg:
How The Burning Bush Burns:
A Trio of Short Novel
244 pages pages, 6" x 9", perfect binding,
Order $14.95
The brilliant narrative in the Hebrew
Bible, the Book of Exodus, tells how the Israelites were freed from
bondage in Egypt. The story begins with Moses tending the flock of his
father-in-law in the wilds of Midian where he comes to Mt. Horeb, "the
mountain of God,"
... the Angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire out of the
midst of a bush; and he looked and behold, the bush burned with fire but
was not consumed. And Moses said, 'I will turn aside now, and see this
great sight, why the bush is not burnt.
with this miracle, Moses is chosen by God to lead his people out of Egypt,
the burning bush which is not consumed becomes in the centuries following
a central metaphor for the Jewish people burned by genocide, persecution,
hatred, prejudice, but not consumed. Hence the title of this volume of
three short novels about Jews in the post-Holocaust 20th century
struggling to survive not only the murder of six million of their brethren
but their efforts to keep that burning bush greening and revived even
after German murderousness has set it burning.
The title story, "How the Burning Bush Burns," tells of a family of Polish
Jews who have lost everything in the Shoah, family, friends, professions,
property, native land and language, and how they try to survive
transplanted in New York City and Israel. The second novel, "The
Preservers," tells how a rabbi and his wife, both of whom have devoted
their lives to synagogue congregations, are obsessed with collecting and
preserving whatever artifacts of Jewish life and religion they can find
from many countries and many eras in the face of how much has been
destroyed over time. The last, "The Pinkas Wall," tells of an American
Jewish foreign correspondent in post-World War II Czechoslovakia who not
only visits the Altneuschul and Pinkas Synagogue in Prague but also the
preserved Nazi concentration camp of Terezin (Tereisinstadt)as well as the
Czech city of Lidice, which the Germans utterly destroyed for resisting
Nazi occupation and oppression, all the while experiencing the
contemporary oppression of another anti-Semitic regime under Stalinism.
Buy The How the Burning Bush Burns
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