Invisible City by Julia Dahl
Just months after Rebekah Roberts was born, her mother, an Hasidic Jew from Brooklyn, abandoned her Christian boyfriend and newborn baby to return to her religion. Neither Rebekah nor her father have heard from...
Tagged: jewish books
The Wall: And Other Stories by Jurek Becker
Jurek Becker was one of the giants of postwar German literature. The novel for which he is best-known, Jacob the Liar, won wide acclaim, was awarded the Heinrich-Mann and Charles Veillon Prizes, and was made...
JRB Israel, in celebration of Israel’s 66th birthday
Here at the Jewish Review of Books our job is to read books, not make them, but we’ve been looking back at the last 18 issues and looking forward to celebrating Yom Ha’atzmaut, and we find,...
The Golden Age Shtetl: A New History of Jewish Life in East Europe by Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern
The shtetl was home to two-thirds of East Europe’s Jews in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, yet it has long been one of the most neglected and misunderstood chapters of the Jewish experience. This...
A Life of Her Own by Joan G. Hauser
This moving story of a girl’s quest for independence begins in a shtetl in Russia. After a tragedy, Minna Ruben and her family decide to flee to der goldener medina—the golden land—America—to seek safety, freedom, and success....
Running from Giants: The Holocaust through the Eyes of a Child by Margareta Ackerman
Combining prose with powerful imagery, Running from Giants follows a young boy’s struggle to survive in Nazi occupied Europe, from the forests where he and his brothers once happily played, to the horrors of...
Uncle Sol’s Women by Simeon J. Maslin
“Uncle Sol’s Women” opens in Vilnius around the time of the Russo-Japanese War with the murders that motivate Sol’s father to leave the old country with his pregnant wife. The two children born to...
The Glad Hand of God Points Backwards by Rachel Mennies
In this poetry collection, Mennies examines survival and assimilation, subjects bound together by complex, if sometimes compromised, ties to the speaker’s Judaism. Through wit and careful prosody, The Glad Hand of God Points Backwards...
My Guardian Angel by Sylvie Weil
The streets are eerily empty, and everyone in the Jewish community is terrified of Peter the Hermit. His men, the Crusaders, are moving through the town on their way to the Holy Land. They...
Tracing your Jewish Ancestors: A Guide For Family Historians by Rosemary Wenzerul
This fully revised second edition of Rosemary Wenzerul’s lively and informative guide to researching Jewish history will be absorbing reading for anyone who wants to find out about the life of a Jewish ancestor....
