The fast-day of Yom Kippur, known in English as the Day of Atonement, is the holiest in the Jewish calendar. In the sister volume to this book, "A Myrtle Among Reeds," David Prashker explored the history and nature of Jewish prayer through the daily service of worship. Now he continues that journey, exploring the rites and ceremonies, the poetry and legends, that comprise one of the world's oldest known religious practices. This book is essential reading for every Jew, and for all who are interested in Judaism, or the act of prayer in any form. No religious school classroom should be without...

"A Myrtle Among Reeds" is a highly personal account of the nature and history of Jewish prayer, rooted in the author's 25 years of experience as a head of Jewish schools, and as a regular prayer-leader. From getting out of bed until the end of Shacharit, Prashker takes the reader on a journey through the whys and hows and whats of every Jewish prayer: their origins, their practices and their different purposes. This scholarly commentary is driven by one guiding question: if the Judaism that has existed for the past 2,000 years was consciously established as a "substitute for the time of...

"The Book of the Ring" is a prose narrative version of Wagner's "Ring-Cycle," presented here in the form of a novel, in the style and tradition of the greatest romances known to the world. If you have loved the tales of Snow White and Sleeping Beauty, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, King Arthur and the Dragon, Jason and the Golden Fleece, Tristan and Isolde, you will want to read "The Book of the Ring." All these, and many more of the greatest myths and legends of all time, have their echoes, often their sources, in the Nibelungensaga, a mixture of Germanic and Norse mythology that...

This book is a life of the great composer Richard Wagner, recounted by him, to me, in a conversation that obviously couldn't have taken place, unless you believe in time-travel. But Wagner had already played the trick, so why shouldn't I? In 1839, he wrote an essay-in-the-form-of-a-novel which he called "Eine Pilgerfahrt zu Beethoven - A Pilgrimage to Beethoven"; an entirely imaginary and symbolic pilgrimage of course, given that Beethoven had been dead twelve years already. But what better way to get inside a great man's mind than to invent a dialogue with him and root out from your own guts...

"Welcome To My World" contains a selection - more than one hundred and fifty poems - from the pen of novelist, songwriter, short story writer, scholar and artist David Prashker. Forty years after penning his first poem, David Prashker's "journey into the hinterland" has taken him through traditional forms of verse to explorations of Hebrew and Japanese poetry, poems as biography and dramatic monologue, poems as tributes paid in the coinage of language, as well as experiments in new forms. The poems selected here bring together work from nine volumes published privately between 1981 and 2013:...