From Szatmar to the New World is the story of Max Wohlberg's odyssey from a yeshiva in Hungary to the pinnacle of the American cantorate. Wohlberg's influential career as a cantorn and educator is depicted against a background of social and cultural ferment. Readers are given a behind-the-scenes tour of rarely explored areas of American Jewish musical life; cantorial organizations at war with one another, demeaning auditions, the adulation of cantorial "superstars," and the controversy over the investiture of women as cantors. Wohlberg;s long career paralleled the development of cantorial...

Synopsis: Here is a vivid, poetic, and evocative story of the painter Vincent van Gogh's struggle to become his true self. The author listens in on Vincent's most intimate, frequently startling thoughts on a host of topics, drawn from three volumes of his correspondence and his 900 extant paintings. What emerges is the portrait of an artist whose spiritual vision was borne of an agonizingly prolonged experience of the "dark night of the soul" through which his art dared to envisionthe triumph of joy over sorrow, of resurrection over suffering and death. Readers will discover that in many ways...