Showing titles in Jewish

In Ashkenazi Jewish folklore, a golem is a humanoid being created out of mud or clay and animated through secret prayers. Its sole purpose is to defend the Jewish people against the immediate threat of violence. It is always a rabbi who makes a golem, and always in a time of crisis. But Len Bronstein is no rabbi—he’s a Brooklyn art teacher who steals a large quantity of clay from his school, gets extremely stoned, and manages to bring his creation to life despite knowing little about Judaism and even less about golems.

Philip Roth is the most decorated American writer of his generation. In Exit Ghost, this master author crafts what may be the final chapter in the story of his beloved hero Nathan Zuckerman. After 11 years of isolation in his New England mountain refuge, Zuckerman returns to New York City and makes three important connections that threaten his carefully protected sense of isolation.

Beyond the Pale - winner of the Lambda Literary Award - tells the stories of two Jewish women living through times of darkness and inhumanity in the early 20th century, capturing their undaunted love and courage in luminous and moving prose. The richly textured novel details Gutke Gurvich's odyssey from her apprenticeship as a midwife in a Russian shtetl to her work in the suffrage movement in New York.

Perla, a young Jewish woman, was raised in an extreme ultra-orthodox society. When she turns 18, and her parents have a hard time finding a match for her, she is thrown into the arms of a cold, violent man who makes her life unbearable. A forbidden, chance encounter with a man, and the feelings that ensue, make her begin to question everything she has ever known - and even consider that, maybe, she does not have to choose this life that has been thrust upon her. But she knows that once she makes a drastic decision, there will be no way back into the arms of the Jewish community.

Reminiscent of Diane Ackerman’s The Zookeeper’s Wife, this stunning novel draws from true accounts to shine a light on a period of Holland’s darkest history and bravest heroes. 1942. As war rips through the heart of Holland, childhood friends Josie van Rees and Eliese Linden partner with a few daring citizens to rescue Eliese’s son and hundreds of other Jewish children who await deportation in a converted theater in Amsterdam. But amid their resistance work, Josie and Eliese’s dangerous secrets could derail their friendship and their entire mission.

This is a story of love and courage in the face of unrelenting terror as four men in the Lodz Ghetto struggle to document the tightening of the noose under Nazi rule. Written by the son of Holocaust survivors, this stunning novel based on events described in the Chronicle of the Lodz Ghetto (Yale University Press, 1984), asks what you would have sacrificed to be one of the few to survive.

Rachel has an unusual problem: she can't die. Her recent troubles - widowhood, a failing business, an unemployed middle-aged son - are only the latest. She's already put up with scores of marriages and hundreds of children, over 2,000 years - ever since she made a spiritual bargain to save the life of her first son back in Roman-occupied Jerusalem. There's only one other person in the world who understands: a man she once loved passionately, who has been stalking her through the centuries, convinced they belong together forever.

1945. Allied forces liberate Nazi-occupied Brno, Moravia. For Gerta Schnirch, daughter of a Czech mother and a German father aligned with Hitler, it’s not deliverance; it’s a sentence. She has been branded an enemy of the state. Caught in the changing tides of a war that shattered her family - and her innocence - Gerta must obey the official order: she, along with all ethnic Germans, is to be expelled from Czechoslovakia. With nothing but the clothes on her back and an infant daughter, she’s herded among thousands, driven from the only home she’s ever known.

This timeless saga traces the intertwined lives of a group of prosperous Jewish Holocaust survivors in New York City after World War II. A chain of events disrupts the close-knit community as each refugee struggles to reconcile the horrific past with the difficult present and explores both the nature of faith and the nature of love. Marriages and affairs fall apart; age and death take their toll; the wisdom of the scripture and kabbalah and the precepts of the great philosophers and avatars of modern science are passionately debated in extended conversations that seethe with drama.

A moving story, wrapped in humor, about love, loss, and hope in one of history’s darkest hours. 1933. Hitler’s rise to power in Germany marks the beginning of the end for the Jews of Europe. For little newborn Yaakov, this is only the beginning. Hungary, 1944. 11-year-old Yaakov and his parents and younger sister are forced out of their home into the unknown. They find themselves in the ghetto, living under impossible conditions, until they are banished by the Nazis to Bergen Belsen concentration camp through Austria, what might be their final destination.

It’s July 4, 2005, and the Frankel family is descending upon their beloved summer home in the Berkshires. But this is no ordinary holiday. The family has gathered to memorialize Leo, the youngest of the four siblings, an intrepid journalist and adventurer who was killed on that day in 2004, while on assignment in Iraq. Set against the backdrop of Independence Day and the Iraq War, The World Without You is a novel about sibling rivalries and marital feuds, about volatile women and silent men, and, ultimately, about the true meaning of family.

By April 1916, the fervour that accompanied war’s outbreak has faded. In its place is a grim reality. Throughout Germany, essentials are rationed. Hope, too, is in short supply. Anna Zeller, whose fiancé, Bruno, is fighting on the Western Front, works as a nurse at an overcrowded hospital in Oldenburg, trying to comfort men broken in body and spirit. But during a visit from Dr Stalling, the director of the Red Cross Ambulance Dogs Association, she witnesses a rare spark of optimism.

1940, London. A man learns a shocking truth about his past. Warsaw. A mother writes a diary as the ghetto walls go up. From the bombed streets of London, to occupied Warsaw, to the Polish forests bristling with partisans, will their paths cross? Will their pasts be reconciled? And will they survive the deadly assaults on their freedom and their lives?

It is 1522, in Bruges, The Spanish Netherlands. Juan Luis Vives, a renowned academic, born into a Jewish family in Valencia in 1492 has fled Spain to avoid the fires of the Inquisition. Even here, though, he is not safe and he finds that the 'eyes and ears' of the king of Spain are far-reaching. With the net closing in, England's Sir Thomas More offers him the role of tutor to Mary, daughter of Catherine of Aragon and Henry VIII; he eagerly accepts.

Kurz vor der Hochzeit beichtet Robert seiner schwangeren Frau, dass er als SS-Offizier im Konzentrationslager Dachau arbeitet. Doch auch Anneliese hat Robert ein Geständnis zu machen: Ihr Vater ist Jude. Und da ist noch die schwangere Jüdin Esther, die Anneliese im Luftschutzkeller kennenlernt und der sie unbedingt helfen will. Diese Hilfe führt sie ins KZ Ravensbrück.

La publicación de La historia del amor, segunda novela de Nicole Krauss, supuso la confirmación del extraordinario talento de esta joven escritora norteamericana, suscitando el elogio entusiasta de críticos y escritores, entre ellos el Premio Nobel de Literatura, J.M. Coetzee.

Set in the 10th century, The Last Israelite tells the true story of Eldad the Danite who came from Africa and claimed to be from one of the the Lost Ten Tribes of Israel.

At the end of the 19th century, Jewish writers began writing in Yiddish and creating for the first time popular literature that brought alive the small dramas, struggles, and joys of ordinary life. Sholem Aleichem was one of the very few modern writers who spoke for an entire people. This collection of stories includes the title piece and seven other tales.

Told in two intertwining narratives, The Thief of Auschwitz takes readers on a dual journey: one into the death camp at Auschwitz with Jacob, Eidel, Max, and Lydia Rosen; the other into the heart of Max himself, now an aged but extremely vital - and outspoken - survivor. Max is a world-renowned painter, and he's about to be honored with a retrospective at the National Gallery in Washington. The truth, though, is that he's been keeping a crucial secret from the art world - indeed from the world at large, and perhaps even from himself - all his life long.

Tholdi is a romantic. A musical prodigy whose brilliant future is extinguished when the horror unfolding across Europe arrives at his door. One day he's captivated by the beautiful, mysterious Lyuba who he meets on his 16th birthday; the next he wakes to the terrors of war as the Nazi-allied Romanians attack his town of Czernowitz. A ghetto is built to imprison the town's Jews before herding them onto trains bound for the concentration camps of Transnistria. With each passing day, Tholdi and his parents await their turn. And then Fate intervenes, giving them all a reprieve.