Download Free Under The Pear Tree Or Little Crosses Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online Under The Pear Tree Or Little Crosses and write the review.

Tracing the dramatic lives, through 500 years, of the old and distinguished family from which he is descended, Victor Perera recreates the history not only of his own people, but of an entire culture. The story begins in 15th-century Spain, where the Inquisition offered Sephardic Jews a choice of conversion, exile or death. It shows a flourishing tradition interrupted by cruel events; a story of persecution, escape and renewal, stretching across Europe to the Holy Land and Central America. The lives shown are emblematic of the Sephardic diaspora: Ana Pereira, a teenage girl who under torture incriminated 15 of her close relations; the fabulously wealthy merchant Abraham Pereira; the beautiful Maria Nunes, abducted to Shakespeare's England, where she rejected the marriage proposals of a duke; Emile and Isaac Pereire, who founded the French railway system. Finally, it is Victor Perera's search for the grandfather he never knew and his quest to uncover his own identity and liberate himself from a generations-old family curse, which come to dominate the book.
Tracing the dramatic lives, through 500 years, of the old and distinguished Sephardic Jewish family from whom he is descended, Victor Perera brilliantly re-creates the history not only of his own people but of an entire culture. The story he tells begins in Spain in the fifteenth century, when the Sephardim are offered a choice of conversion, exile or death. It is the story of a richly flourishing tradition - intellectual, religious, worldly and spiritual - interrupted by massively cruel events; a story of persecution, escape and renewal, carrying us from the Iberian Peninsula across Europe to the Holy Land and Central America. And the Pere(i)ras whose lives we enter are both fascinating in themselves and emblematic of the Sephardic diaspora created by the Inquisition and the Expulsion - some of them, under threat of torture and execution, capitulating to the Cross or becoming Marranos, crypto-Jews who practiced their ancestral religion in secret; others remaining loyal to the pear tree that became their symbol and crest. Among the Marranos: Ana Pereira, a merchant's daughter, a Sephardic convert in Portugal who, at age fifteen, was sentenced to wear penitential raiment and undergo spiritual penances in prison, where, under torture, she incriminated fifteen of her close relations. Among the reclaimed: the fabulously wealthy magnate and author Abraham Israel Pereira, who participated in the excommunication of philosopher Baruch Spinoza; and the beautiful Maria Nunes, who was abducted to Shakespeare's England, and rejected the marriage proposal of a duke and Queen Elizabeth's entreaties on his behalf, marrying instead a cousin in Amsterdam's first Jewish wedding. In nineteenth-centuryFrance we follow the meteoric rise of the brothers Emile and Isaac Pereire, who founded the French railroads and the Credit Mobilier banking system. Over the centuries, the stories of Pereras in all walks of life - among them rabbis and Kabbalistic scholars in the Holy Land - unfold
A revelatory World War II novel about a German prisoner of war fleeing for the border and encountering a variety of Germans, good and bad and indifferent, along his way. Now available in a new English translation. The Seventh Cross is one of the most powerful, popular, and influential novels of the twentieth century, a hair raising thriller that helped to alert the world to the grim realities of Nazi Germany and that is no less exciting today than when it was first published in 1942. Seven political prisoners escape from a Nazi prison camp; in response, the camp commandant has seven trees harshly pruned to resemble seven crosses: they will serve as posts to torture each recaptured prisoner, and capture, of course, is certain. Meanwhile, the escapees split up and flee across Germany, looking for such help and shelter as they can find along the way, determined to reach the border. Anna Seghers’s novel is not only a supremely suspenseful story of flight and pursuit but also a detailed portrait of a nation in the grip and thrall of totalitarianism. Margot Bettauer Dembo’s expert new translation makes the complete text of this great political novel available in English for the first time.
The swallows have always feared Winter. For them it is a time of dying and decay. A time they have always fled from, seeking the warmth and safety of the southlands. But this year is to be different. The swallows' wise and venerable leader, Creakwing, announces that he is now too old and infirm to undertake the epic journey across thousands of miles of land and sea. He intends to remain in the northlands during the cold dark months of Winter and try to survive alone. Knowing that for him this will mean almost certain death, a group of young swallows devise a daring plan to rescue their leader. Many other birds are enlisted to help in the plan. Among them, the thieving jackdaws, a captive yellow bird, a brilliantly ingenious blue tit, a wise old owl who is not as wise as he thinks he is.... and finally, out in the icy wastes of ocean the mysterious storm petrels. There will be triumph and tragedy during the long and dangerous journey, an epic Crossing about which the bardic swallows will tell tales and sing songs for generations to come. 'Creakwing's Crossing' is a stirring tale in a literary tradition stretching from Kenneth Grahame's 'The Wind in The Willows' to 'Watership Down' by Richard Adams in the present day. It is also a tale to remind us that though the boundaries created by Man continue to create tensions and conflict, the natural world observes no frontiers, and the swallows continue to move through the sky as freely as they have always done, in the ancient mystery of migration.