Books published by publisher Academy Chicago Publishers

Cleverly elucidating the somber diaspora of Iraqi Jews, this collection of stories explores the little-publicized migration of a people escaping oppression, only to be confronted with the difficult realities of new nations and customs. Sadka's work spans Iraq, Israel and the U.S. with beautiful, laconic prose, magnifying the everyday adversity of immigrants.These moving, impressive stories are based on historic fact inasmuch as they deal with the destruction of the world's oldest Jewish community. It is estimated that there were 150,000 Jews in Iraq in 1948; Israel has absorbed some 132,000. At the moment, there are about eight Jews remaining in Iraq, half over eighty years old.

In these new domestic reminiscences, Shirley Jackson carries on her tale of dubious parental equilibrium in the face of four children, assorted dogs and cats, and the uncounted heaps of small intrusive possessions which pile up in corners everywhere.Because of the increasing pressure of possessions, animals, and children, a bigger house is necessary to hold everything. The unending bewilderment of moving gives way to the healthy challenges of small repairs, new roofs, and bookcases, and the heady enthusiasms for horses, Little League, trumpet playing and magic.Shirley Jackson uses her great talent to picture the rich and varied day-to-day living of an unusual but not really so different American family.

These stories are a brilliant evocatin of a narrow, close-knit community—that of the streets of London's East End in the 1890s. Having lived and worked there, he knew that his East Enders were not a race apart, but ordinary men and women, scraping by perhaps, but neither criminals nor paupers. He chronicled their adventures and misadventures, their wooings and their funerals, with sympathy, humor and a sense of both the tragedies and comedies to be found in the "mean streets, " from Lizerunt's disastrous marriage to Scuddy Lond's plausible but imperfect conversion and "Squire" Napper's quickly dispersed fortune.

"In 1939," Julian Padowicz says, "I was a Polish Jew-hater. Under different circumstances my story might have been one of denouncing Jews to the Gestapo. As it happened, I was a Jew myself, and I was seven years old." Julian's mother was a Warsaw socialite who had no interest in child-rearing. She turned her son over completely to his governess, a good Catholic, named Kiki, whom he loved with all his heart. Kiki was deeply worried about Julian's immortal soul, explaining that he could go to Heaven only if he became a Catholic. When bombs began to fall on Warsaw, Julian's world crumbled. His beloved Kiki returned to her family in Lodz; Julian's stepfather joined the Polish army, and the grief-stricken boy was left with the mother whom he hardly knew. Resourceful and determinded, his mother did whatever was necessary to provide for herself and her son: she brazenly cut into food lines and befriended Russian officers to get extra rations of food and fuel. But brought up by Kiki to distrust all things Jewish, Julian considered his mother's behavior un-Christian. In the winter of 1940, as conditions worsened, Julian and his mother made a dramatic escape to Hungary on foot through the Carpathian mountains and Julian came to believe that even Jews could go to Heaven.

In this delightful and witty novel, Laura Willowes rebels against pressure to be the perfect "maiden aunt." Not interested in men or the rushed life of London, Laura is forced to move there from her beloved countryside after the death of her father. Finally, she strikes out for the countryside on her own, selling her soul to an affable but rather simpleminded devil. First written in the 1920s, this book is timely and entertaining. It was the first selection of the Book of the Month Club in 1926.