THROUGH THE GREAT WAR AND THE DEPRESSION, THE SANDBERGS REACH OUT FOR THE BITTER AND THE SWEET OF LIFE--THE ALMONDS AND THE RAISINS.

"After a tragic event, Adam Friedman sets out to change the world with small acts of heroism as Mitzvah Man"--Provided by publisher.

This novel holds within its pages an unusual love story that spans three decades and three continents. When Max first meets Esther, she is a young Australian girl filled with passion for life and boundless enthusiasm. His love for her continues through all the changes that take place in her life - her move from London, where they meet, to Jerusalem where she explores the Judaism that until then was just on the fringe of her life; the literary prize she wins that brings her back into his orbit; her commitment to Israel that breaks their relationship; and then finally, a coincidental meeting in the middle of a war in Lebanon. Max never stops loving Esther, even as she matures from a naive girl to a woman of depth and wisdom. Love takes many forms, and readers will experience all the complexities of emotion as they discover the ties that bind a man to a woman.

Deena Metzger brings us a novel of mysterious and deep insight. Twelve years in the writing, this novel is written in the voice of a woman astronomer. It is a profound self-examination and mediation on the nature of the darkness we have called down into this century and a lyrical vision of the possibilities of light that are opening to each of us now.

Text: English, Yiddish (translation)

I bring you up to believe that nothing is good enough for you, and you grow up to be good for nothing. Thus, Mrs. Bindle, on learning that Ben, her only-begotten son, has decided to be a Rabbi; what is more, a Rabbi in a small provincial town in Scotland. Her anxiety proves to be not unjustified, although Ben's chosen career has its compensations-perhaps Helen, the promiscuous teenage daughter of his housekeeper; perhaps Simmy, the young wife of an elderly parishioner; perhaps the whole incident-prone pace of the pawky Scottish town in which this richly-human story is set. Chaim Bermant's third novel has all the wit, warmth and colour of its critically-acclaimed forerunners.

As the author of this gripping narrative, Rabbi Abraham J. Twerski, M.D. makes his debut as a novelist par excellence. World renowned for his self-help books, in Light at the End of the Tunnel he departs from this mode to create characters that are compelling, vulnerable, witty, curious - and most of all, palpably human. The story revolves around a secular Jew, Alan Silverman, a successful lawyer, whose professional life has earned him wealth, prestige and a reputation for invincibility. Everything is going well for him, until a dreaded disease threatens to upend his carefully built personal empire. Suddenly faced with the prospect that his life may soon end, he searches for answers to questions he had never asked before. In the process, he discovers a new element in his life - a neshamah, an eternal soul. A world closed to him in the past - an eternal world of spiritual meaning - slowly unfolds as he relentlessly pursues the purpose of his life. Challenged and enthralled by the mystical teachings of Judaism, he explores the idea of an Afterlife and, most surprisingly, discovers the fulfillment of a life well lived. With the talent of a novelist, the deep insight of a master psychologist and the Torah wisdom of his heritage, Rabbi Dr. Twerski has achieved a powerful literary breakthrough. This one-of-a-kind book is an illuminating and uplifting masterpiece.

In That's Life, William Herrick's view of humanity is unsparing yet compassionate. He sees life as commitment--to ideals, friends, family--but no one, least of all Herrick, said it was going to be easy. His portraits of the members of a distinctly American family--a novella, five short stories, and a group of five letters--comprise not quite a novel but more than a collection of stories. "I think of it as a co-operative structure," the author says, "in which each character owns and occupies his or her own place, yet it is the entire family which operates the building. To simplify matters, I call the book a fiction." And so we learn the past and present of each of the Millers: Max and Rebecca, Rebecca's mother Ruth (in an old folks' home), and the three Miller children--Eli, an obsessive artist, Peter, an amateur student of life as he bums rides across the country, and teen-ager Nina, a not-so-innocent working-class child away at prep school on a scholarship. But we learn about them in counterpoint and mosaic as Herrick turns our attention, and our allegiance, first to one member of the family and then another. There are few books where human weaknesses are so fully displayed and yet where human endurance and capacity for joy are so palpably present.

A novel based loosely on the life of the Turkish-born 17th-century Jew, Shabbatai Zevi. Hailed as the Messiah, forced to convert to Islam, five times married, he is an eccentric and exotic character. In 1970 the author won the Booker Prize for her fourth novel, The Elected Member.

Two novellas of young men embracing a mystical past In “Dorchester, Home and Garden,” a thirty-year-old adolescent, Maishe, returns to a burnt-out Jewish district on Blue Hill Avenue. He is swept up by angels and dropped among the bums of the Boston Common, in a city through which Isaiah and the Greek philosophers wander. “Onan’s Child” recasts this narrator as the biblical Onan, who refused to sleep with his wife, Tamar. It is a tale of a Kabbalistic world where angels go astray and the clay of the earth, still warm, cries out for human seed.

"Through airtight prose which allows no overtones of pity, Nissenson has written a relentless assessment of the martyr's way in religion's less-than-grand designs". -- Kirkus Reviews Set in the year 1912, this is the dramatic portrayal of Jake Brody, an orphaned fifteen-year-old immigrant; of Hannele Isaacs, the rabbi's daughter; and of the Jewish pimp Schlifka, who ruthlessly makes her one of his girls. In the struggle to save Hannele, Jake comes of age abruptly, discovering violence, perversity, and mysticism in the bitter reality of life in a turn-of-the-century American ghetto. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

In William Herrick's Kill Memory, erasing the past is just what seventy-one-year-old Elizabeth cannot do. A woman who has had many lovers, a ruthless revolutionary, a courageous underground courier during World War II, and now a disengaged exile waiting out a solitary existence in Paris, Boishke (as Elizabeth has always been called) gives her primary attention the the rituals of living-- eating, dressing, walking, realistically facing up to old age, trying to sleep--and to her memories.

Growing up, Daniel seemed like a model son: a student activist blessed with easy charm and a fluid intelligence, who believed that he was heir to a better and brighter future. When that dream faded, he drifted from his family and into a rootless life, marked by wasted possibility.Bearing the Body begins when Daniel’s younger brother, Nathan, a medical resident in Boston, learns that Daniel has died in San Francisco. The circumstances are unclear, and the police are involved. Nathan, who suffers from chronic anger and uncontrollable compulsions, travels to New York to inform their father, Sol, of Daniel’s death. Sol is an Auschwitz survivor who has spent most of his adult energy compiling an archive of the fates of Hitler’s victims. Due in part to this obsessive research, he has lost touch with his sons. He nevertheless decides to join Nathan on a trip to the West Coast, where both men hope to learn more about Daniel’s untimely death. In San Francisco they meet Abby and her son, Ben, who were Daniel’s companions in a life that his family never knew about or shared.A moving study of isolation and its costs, Bearing the Body is a book about history and memory, about family and loss. Most of all, it is a book about the past, which, far from receding quietly, weighs ever more heavily on those who hope to leave it behind