Small Bibles for Bad Times - by Atlan Liliane (Paperback)

About the Book

"Liliane Atlan (1932-2011) was a postwar French Jewish writer whose plays, poetry, and prose narratives display innovative literary and oral forms. Winner of international prizes for her theatrical work, Small Bibles for Bad Times introduces, in a bilingual edition, a large body of Atlan's poetry for the first time in English. Thematically Atlan draws upon personal memories--she survived the Holocaust in hiding--as well as testimonials of Holocaust survivors, investigation of historical archives, and Jewish literature. Her work is steeped in the Torah, Talmud, mystical texts, and Jewish history; at the same time, it is inflected with undertones of Hebrew, Ladino, and Yiddish"--

Book Synopsis

FOR LILIANE ATLAN (1932-2012), visionary French writer of plays, poetry, and prose, the creative quest was to "find a language to say the unsayable. . . to [find a way] to integrate within our conscience, without dying in the attempt, the shattering experience of Auschwitz." Having spent the war years as a child in hiding in Auvergne and Lyon, she then studied at the groundbreaking Gilbert Bloch school where she was immersed in Torah, Talmud and Kabbalah, alongside science and contemporary literature. She emerged into a genre-defying writer, a feminist, and a political activist in both France and Israel. Atlan defies easy categorization: she's "a "Jewish writer," "a Holocaust writer," an originator of l'écriture féminine, and a pioneering theatre artist, one of the first (in the early 1980s) to experiment with video, sound, and spatial technology. Her poetry and prose comprise a large, important part of her oeuvre -- the texts in Small Bibles for Bad Times are published here in English for the first time, translated by Marguerite Feitlowitz. In poems and prose, dramatic elements abound: scenes and vignettes; scoring for voices; desires, plots and characters engaged in mortal conflict, sometimes within a single mind. Especially in the poems, much depends on cadence, breath, and beat. Ritual is interrogated even as it is performed; conventional wisdoms are discarded, mocked and mutilated; study is sacred, belief suspect -- genuine lessons exist to be learned the hard way. The mundane and cosmic, devotional and defiant, lyric and political jostle, subvert, and re-create each other. From murderous history, Atlan wrested a body of work that is radiant with life.--Merrill Leffler "Dryad Press"