Jewish Heritage is one of the world's oldest and most active organizations dedicated to enriching the literary bookshelf with works of literature related to Jewish history and culture.

By partnering with archives to bring unpublished works to a broad readership and supporting contemporary authors Jewish Heritage has helped bring to light many books of great literary and historical significance.

The Last Bright Days

A Young Woman's Life in a Lithuanian Shtetl on the Eve of the Holocaust

Edited by Frank Buonagurio

The Last Bright Days is both a moving portrait of Jewish life during the 1930s in the small Lithuanian shtetl of Kavarsk and the personal story of one of its inhabitants, Beile Delechky.

In 1938, as Europe was about to plunge into the darkness of war and genocide, Beile emigrated to the United States, leaving her family behind but bringing with her hundreds of photographs and dozens of her notebooks. Over one hundred of these compelling photographs, reproduced in The Last Bright Days, give us a fascinating look back in time to a Jewish world that existed within Eastern Europe and was destroyed forever in the Holocaust. Beile's journal entries and poetry give us a window into the emotional life of a young woman coming of age in a small town as the problems of the wider world close in around her.

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The International Initiative in the Literature of the Holocaust
In 1999, under establishing grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, the Lowe II Foundation and the Strochlitz Foundation, Jewish Heritage launched an intensified effort to bring the most worthy memoirs written by Holocaust survivors to publication. Mentors working under Jewish Heritageís auspices have assisted hundreds of authors, most of them Holocaust survivors, to bring their books to the light of print.

The project emphasizes cross-generational assistance which puts professionally accomplished young writers and editors to work assisting authors from the heroic generation which brought Jewish culture to America. Our mentors work with authors to organize, edit and complete book-length memoirs documenting the Jewish immigrant experience and Jewish cultureís roots in Europe.

Publishing House and Literary Agency
In addition to providing editorial assistance, the Jewish Heritage functions as both a publishing house and a specialized, not-for-profit literary agency, enriching the Jewish bookshelf around the world by bringing significant literary, cultural and historical works to the light of print in the existing literary marketplace.

Jewish Heritage's recent releases include the very widely acclaimed Regions of the Great Heresy: Bruno Schulz by Jerzy Ficowski, published by WW Norton, Drohobycz, Drohobycz, True Tales from the Holocaust and Life After by Henryk Grynberg, published by Penguin, winner of the 2002 Koret Jewish Book Prize in fiction, and under the project's own imprint, the Holocaust memoirs, My Shadowlife by Richard Bugajer and Judaism is Indestructible, a Rabbiís Holocaust Memoir by Isidore Greengrass, as well as the beautiful collection of art reproductions and midrashic interpretations of Scripture, Biblical Visions, by Janet Shafner.

Publishers
Over the years Jewish Heritage has developed close working relationships with editors at many publishing houses, including Random House, Harcourt Brace, St. Martin's Press, Norton, Viking/Penguin, Oxford University Press, the University of Illinois, the University of Michigan Press, the University of Calgary Press, Southern Illinois University Press, the University of Michigan Press.

Partnering Organizations Jewish Heritage works very closely with the directors of education, survivor affairs and academic publications at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, with the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the Museum of Jewish Heritage, and with the Association of Holocaust Organizations and its many member organizations. Since November 2002 Jewish Heritage has co-sponsored a series of prestigious international literary events at the Center for Jewish History.

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