When Marek Halter was five years old, he and his family fled the Warsaw Ghetto in the hope of fighting for the freedom of Poland. When his family was caught with hundreds of others at Malkinia and told to separate into Poles and Jews, Marek was saved by a Pole who pulled him under a wagon; he and his family escaped by running through open fields amidst the shots of German guns. A split second decision by a Catholic Pole saved Marek's life and the family continued on to Moscow. In 1994, Marek Halter began his search for the men and women who risked their own lives to save the live of Jews during World War II. He begins his journey in his childhood home of Warsaw, from which he has been away for over 40 years. By interviewing Jewish survivors of the holocaust, Halter developed a list of what he calls the "Good and Just" - the people who, according to the Talmud, must exist in each generation in order to save the world from destruction. Our protagonists range from simple peasants on the Polish border to Willy Brandt, the ex-Chancellor of Germany, to a Japanese Consul who disobeyed his government. Eventually, his journey leads him through the Netherlands, Sweden, Bulgaria, Lithuania, Japan, Tunisia - 14 countries in all. Halter was looking for personal stories with happy endings and the people who made those endings possible. Written as a series of conversations with the heroes and those they rescued, interspersed with the author's own memories, "Stories of Deliverance" offers glimpses of the hope and strength we find even in the darkest of times of our history. Halter uses this collection to convince us of two things: that there will always be good people in the world who will give us hope and sustain us in times of oppression; and to warn us that it is only with the memories of good deeds that we will be able to adequately deal with evil.

When Marek Halter's award-winning international bestseller The Book of Abraham was published here in 1986, it was greeted with unanimous praise and compared with Roots, War and Peace, and the works of James Michener. That epic portrayal of a Jewish family through history -- based in large part on the records of the Halters themselves -- ended in the midst of World War II, with the destruction of the Warsaw ghetto. Here the author picks up the thread of the family saga in the postwar period. Like most of European Jewry, the Halter family is decimated and dispersed: Sidney and his family in New York; the Lerners in Moscow; Don Israel and Dona Regina in Buenos Aires; Mordecai and his family in Israel. At the heart of the new epic is Hugo Halter, an elusive and haunting figure who, as a young man in the late 1930s, had warned of the coming Holocaust. Most had not listened and perished in the conflagration. As this book opens, Hugo and his German wife, Sigrid, are driving from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem in March 1961. Hugo parks to gaze in wonder at the magic city spread before him. Suddenly a military truck approaches, and as it passes submachine-gun fire erupts from it, killing both Hugo and Sigrid. Why were they assassinated in cold blood, presumably by Arab terrorists? Who exactly was Hugo: an agent? A double agent? Working for whom and to what ends? In Paris, Marek Halter, the self-appointed family scribe, sets out to find the answer. At the same time, another cousin, an officer in the Israeli secret service, begins his own official investigation. Their paths, and lines of inquiry, sometimes cross, often diverge, as different versions of the same episode appear in oddly varying lights. The result is a suspense novel of high intrigue, but also a panorama of contemporary Judaism, with its conflicts and contradictions, its struggles and achievements, its heady victories and discouraging defeats. - Jacket flap.

The ancient world through the eyes of a young Jewish woman—Mary of Nazareth. Mary was born into a Palestine oppressed by Herod the Great; she is accustomed to living with uncertainty and unrest. But when her beloved father is wrongly imprisoned by the Romans, she takes action. She calls upon a well-known rebel by the name of Barabbas, and together they set out to save her father. A daring escape is planned. And against staggering odds, Mary’s father is saved from crucifixion. Barabbas—flush with his success—is intent on leading a full-scale rebellion against Herod and the Romans. But as he speaks before Jewish leaders, Mary feels great frustration as the men endlessly debate morality, rebellion, and God's will. She has almost lost her father, but she is nevertheless compelled to speak out against violence. To her surprise, one man listens: Joseph. He makes Mary an offer that will change her life—and the history of the Jewish people—forever.