Plunkett Press: 164 books

Ben Shahn was born in Lithuania in 1898 and emigrated to New York with his family in 1906. Trained as a lithographer, Shahn created social realist paintings of controversial subjects such as Sacco and Vanzetti. He worked as an assistant to Diego Rivera on Rivera’s Rockefeller Center mural, and...

When The World Was Whole: Three Centuries of Memories by Charles Fenyvesi (76,000 words, 40 illustrations) In this family memoir, Charles Fenyvesi brings back to life his ancestors who loved and improved the poor soil they tilled in northeastern Hungary, kept the countless rules of their Jewish...

Netanel Lorch, who fought as an officer in Jerusalem during Israel’s War of Independence and later founded the Israel Defense Forces’ Historical Section, offers a detailed military history of the years 1947-49. The book begins with the tensions of the British Mandate period in Palestine, including...

Prophets Without Honour: Freud, Kafka, Einstein, and Their World by Frederic V. Grunfeld (with an introduction by Michael Brenner; 134,000 words, 16 illustrations) Prophets Without Honour is a collective biography set in an extraordinary epoch of cultural history sometimes called “the Weimar...

Trial and Error: The Autobiography of Chaim Weizmann (Book One) by Chaim Weizmann (introduction by Abba Eban) Chaim Weizmann’s autobiography is a highly personal account of his life in the Zionist movement. Book One, completed in 1941, covers the years 1874-1917 and Book Two covers the...

A great folk hero in American history, Edison is viewed by the public as a facile inventor, the electrical wizard and the perfect symbol of the self-made and practical creator. But he was also a paradoxical figure: deaf, impoverished and with no formal education as a youngster, Edison nevertheless...

“Superb… The first critical analysis of Israel written from within... It's a deliberate act of self-awareness, exploring how a people got where they are.” — ***Time*** “The most illuminating, even-handed, candid appraisal of the contemporary Jewish condition yet to appear” — ***Newsweek*** “[A]...

Born in Budapest to a well-to-do assimilated Jewish family, Theodor Herzl (1860-1904) and his family moved to Vienna when he was 18. He studied law before he began writing plays and pieces of journalism. Herzl became the Paris correspondent for Vienna’s leading newspaper, the Neue Freie Presse,...

“Mr. Fosdick has written a biography in its formal meaning — fully documented, chronologically precise — and not simply a personal tribute to a friend of more than forty years’ standing. The book, in consequence, is both biography and history, satisfying all the rigorous canons of personal...

Children of the Holocaust: Conversations with Sons and Daughters of Survivors by Helen Epstein (123,000 words; with a 30th anniversary preface by the author) A blend of memoir, reportage and oral history, Children of the Holocaust was the first book to examine the inter-generational transmission...

Where She Came From: A Daughter's Search for Her Mother's History by Helen Epstein (106,000 words) A sequel to the groundbreaking Children of the Holocaust, Where She Came From is a daughter’s memoir of her mother’s family. Drawing on her journalistic training, Helen Epstein demonstrates...

Looking Back is the unusual memoir of a Holocaust survivor and physician who became prominent in American psychoanalysis and a leader of the psychoanalytic Self Psychology movement. “Paul Ornstein's remarkable life has taken him from a cheder in a Hungarian town, to the Budapest Rabbinical...

Memoir: How I Read, Write and Use It by Helen Epstein (3,400 words) This is an essay for students of memoir. Making meaning in writing memoir is similar to creating narrative in psychotherapy. What differentiates memoir from that work is the public nature of the literary product, its aim to...

Joe Papp: An American Life by Helen Epstein (228,000 words, 116 photographs and theater posters by Paul Davis) Joseph Papp (1921-1991), theater producer, champion of human rights and of the First Amendment, founder of the New York Shakespeare Festival and Public Theater, changed the American...