A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR TIME Magazine・NPR・Library Journal・The Globe and Mail・Lilith・Forward Magazine・Toronto Star・The New Yorker "A testament to the power of imagination and an investigation of empathy."--Vogue "Stunning."--Leslie Camhi, The New Yorker "A can't-miss novel."--Chicago Review of Books "Compelling."--The Washington Examiner Anne Berest's The Postcard is among the most acclaimed and beloved French novels of recent years. It is at once a gripping investigation into family trauma, a poignant tale of mothers and daughters, and a vivid portrait of twentieth-century Parisian intellectual and artistic life. January, 2003. Together with the usual holiday cards, an anonymous postcard is delivered to the Berest family home. On the front, a photo of the Opéra Garnier in Paris. On the back, the names of Anne Berest's maternal great-grandparents, Ephraïm and Emma, and their children, Noémie and Jacques--all killed at Auschwitz. Years after the postcard is delivered, the heroine of this novel is moved to discover who sent it and why. What emerges is a moving saga of a family devastated by the travails of the twentieth century and partly restored through the power of storytelling.

ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES’ 100 BEST BOOKS OF THE 21ST CENTURY “A master novelist's haunting parable about our troubled modern moment." —The Wall Street Journal “By turns unnerving, hilarious, and sad. . . . It is a book that shows how the public zeitgeist can shape, even destroy, an individual's life." —The New York Times “The best novel he has written.” —The Times Literary Supplement It is 1998, the year in which America is whipped into a frenzy of prurience by the impeachment of a president, and in a small New England town, an aging classics professor, Coleman Silk, is forced to retire when his colleagues decree that he is a racist. The charge is a lie, but the real truth about Silk would have astonished even his most virulent accuser. Coleman Silk has a secret, one which has been kept for fifty years from his wife, his four children, his colleagues, and his friends, including the writer Nathan Zuckerman. It is Zuckerman who stumbles upon Silk’s secret and sets out to reconstruct the unknown biography of this eminent, upright man, esteemed as an educator for nearly all his life, and to understand how this ingeniously contrived life came unraveled.

In the fifth and final book in the All-of-A-Kind Family series, Ella, the eldest child of the family, has been offered a stage career by a Broadway talent scout. While Ella wants to sing more than anything else in the world, she finds herself torn between Jules, her beloved fiancé who has just returned from World War I, and what's sure to be a tough uphill climb to stardom. Once again, the loving all-of-a-kind-family provides the support needed for Ella to make the right decision. Born in 1904 on New York's Lower East Side, Sydney Taylor was one of the first authors of children's books centered on Jewish characters, and is especially known for the immensely popular All-of-a-Kind Family series. The Sydney Taylor Book Award is given each year by the Jewish Association of Libraries to a book for young people that authentically portrays the Jewish experience.

"The unforgettable story of a Jewish teenager who survives World War II and embarks on a long and dangerous journey to a new land ... and new life. A poignant, inspirational novel about the inner strength of children, and how other children find their place in the world" Cf. Our choice, 1997-1998

Friends from different backgrounds come together in a heartwarming picture book that is perfect for Passover, from beloved children's book author Patricia Polacco. Larnel doesn't know his neighbor, Mrs. Katz, very well, until he asks her to adopt an abandoned kitten. Mrs. Katz agrees on one condition: that Larnel helps her take care of the kitten she names Tush. When Larnel starts spending more and more time with Mrs. Katz to help with Tush, Mrs. Katz tells him stories about coming to America from Poland and about the good times she spent with her late husband. As Larnel grows to love Mrs. Katz, he also learns about the common themes of hardship and triumph in each of their cultures.

On the first night of Hanukkah, Rabbi Judah has too much to do and too little time to do it. Before the rabbi leaves to visit the emperor, he tells his housemaid Basha that she can ask the golem to help. While the golem makes latkes, Basha decides to visit a friend. Basha is having so much fun with her friend, she doesn't realize that latkes are pouring out of the rabbi's house, sending people running! Will Rabbi Judah come up with a solution to control the golem before it's too late? Illustrated with lively acrylic on wood, the book includes an Author's Note about the tale's origins.

O, The Oprah Magazine, Time Magazine, Financial Times, Esquire, Bustle, Lit Hub, Electric Literature, Library Journal, Brooklyn Based, Avenue BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR New York Times Editors' Choice "Superb. . . . Krauss's depictions of the nuances of sex and love, intimacy and dependence, call to mind the work of Natalia Ginzburg in their psychological profundity, their intellectual rigor. . . . Krauss's stories capture characters at moments in their lives when they're hungry for experience and open to possibilities, and that openness extends to the stories themselves: narratives too urgent and alive for neat plotlines, simplistic resolutions or easy answers." --Molly Antopol, New York Times Book Review "From a contemporary master, an astounding collection of ten globetrotting stories, each one a powerful dissection of the thorny connections between men and women. . . . Each story is masterfully crafted and deeply contemplative, barreling toward a shimmering, inevitable conclusion, proving once again that Krauss is one of our most formidable talents in fiction." --Esquire In one of her strongest works of fiction yet, Nicole Krauss plunges fearlessly into the struggle to understand what it is to be a man and what it is to be a woman, and the arising tensions that have existed from the very beginning of time. Set in our contemporary moment, and moving across the globe from Switzerland, Japan, and New York City to Tel Aviv, Los Angeles, and South America, the stories in To Be a Man feature male characters as fathers, lovers, friends, children, seducers, and even a lost husband who may never have been a husband at all. The way these stories mirror one other and resonate is beautiful, with a balance so finely tuned that the book almost feels like a novel. Echoes ring through stages of life: aging parents and new-born babies; young women's coming of age and the newfound, somewhat bewildering sexual power that accompanies it; generational gaps and unexpected deliveries of strange new leases on life; mystery and wonder at a life lived or a future waiting to unfold. To Be a Man illuminates with a fierce, unwavering light the forces driving human existence: sex, power, violence, passion, self-discovery, growing older. Profound, poignant, and brilliant, Krauss's stories are at once startling and deeply moving, but always revealing of all-too-human weakness and strength.

"In his final book before his death, Primo Levi returns once more to his time at Auschwitz in a moving meditation on memory, resiliency, and the struggle to comprehend unimaginable tragedy. Drawing on history, philosophy, and his own personal experiences, Levi asks if we have already begun to forget about the Holocaust. His last book before his death, Levi returns to the subject that would define his reputation as a writer and a witness. Levi breaks his book into eight essays, ranging from topics like the unreliability of memory to how violence twists both the victim and the victimizer. He shares how difficult it is for him to tell his experiences with his children and friends. He also debunks the myth that most of the Germans were in the dark about the Final Solution or that Jews never attempted to escape the camps. As the Holocaust recedes into the past and fewer and fewer survivors are left to tell their stories, The Drowned and the Saved is a vital first-person testament. Along with Elie Wiesel and Hannah Arendt, Primo Levi is remembered as one of the most powerful and perceptive writers on the Holocaust and the Jewish experience during World War II. This is an essential book both for students and literary readers. Reading Primo Levi is a lesson in the resiliency of the human spirit."--Publisher description.

In 'the stifling heat of equatorial Newark', a terrifying epidemic is raging, threatening the children of the New Jersey city with maiming, paralysis, life-long disability, even death. This is the startling and surprising theme of Roth's wrenching new book: a wartime polio epidemic in the summer of 1944 and the effect it has on a closely-knit, family-oriented Newark community and its children. At the centre of Nemesis is a vigorous, dutiful, twenty-three-year old playground director, Bucky Cantor, a javelin thrower and a weightlifter, who is devoted to his charges and disappointed with himself because his weak eyes have excluded him from serving in the war alongside his contemporaries. Focusing on Cantor's dilemmas as polio begins to ravage his playground - and on the everyday realities he faces - Roth leads us through every inch of emotion such a pestilence can breed: the fear, the panic, the anger, the bewilderment, the suffering, and the pain. Moving between the smouldering, malodorous streets of besieged Newark and Indian Hill, a pristine children's summer camp high in the Poconos - whose 'mountain air was purified of all contaminants' - Roth depicts a decent, energetic man with the best intentions struggling in his own private war against the epidemic. Roth is tenderly exact at every point about Cantor's passage into personal disaster and no less exact about the condition of childhood. Through this story runs the dark question that haunts all four of Roth's late short novels, Everyman , Indignation , The Humbling , and now, Nemesis : what choices fatally shape a life? How powerless is each of us up against the force of circumstances?

The memoir of a woman who leaves her faith and her marriage and sets out to navigate the terrifying, liberating terrain of a newly mapless world Born and raised in a tight-knit Orthodox Jewish family, Tova Mirvis committed herself to observing the rules and rituals prescribed by this way of life. After all, to observe was to be accepted and to be accepted was to be loved. She married a man from within the fold and quickly began a family. But over the years, her doubts became noisier than her faith, and at age forty she could no longer breathe in what had become a suffocating existence. Even though it would mean the loss of her friends, her community, and possibly even her family, Tova decides to leave her husband and her faith. After years of trying to silence the voice inside her that said she did not agree, did not fit in, did not believe, she strikes out on her own to discover what she does believe and who she really is. This will mean forging a new way of life not just for herself, but for her children, who are struggling with what the divorce and her new status as "not Orthodox" mean for them. This is a memoir about what it means to decide to heed your inner compass at long last. To free the part of yourself that has been suppressed, even if it means walking away from the only life you've ever known. Honest and courageous, Tova takes us through her first year outside her marriage and community as she learns to silence her fears and seek adventure on her own path to happiness.

Frankel has compiled the classic stories and tales of 4,000 years of Jewish legend, and made them accessible without necessitating hours of Talmudic study. There's Lot's Wife, The Witches of Ashkelon, and 298 more, culled from the Bible, the Talmud, and Diaspora lore. The writing is simple enough to read aloud to children, the font's large enough to invite the tired eye, and the selection's interesting enough to read to yourself after bedtime stories are over. Well-referenced so you can look up the Giant Og when you want, it's the sort of book that becomes a family favorite.

During the struggle to create the state of Israel in 1947, Ruth Mendolsohn, who helped young refugees flee Poland in "After the War", is a member of the Haganah, a group of Israeli fighters that believes only in self-defense. Her brother thinks that terrorism is necessary to get results. War seems inevitable and both will have to fight. Will they find the security of a place they can call home?

Welcome to Rome. It is the summer of 1978, and the Krasnansky family, bickering, tired and confused, are supposed to be passing through. Alongside thousands of other Soviet Jewish refugees – among them criminals, dissidents and refuseniks – they await passage to their new homes in the West. But escaping Communism is not so easy, especially when some of the Krasnanskys insist on bringing it with them, and even more so when their sponsor in the USA lets them down and they find that they’re no longer passing through at all. On the contrary, they’re stuck.Welcome, then, to the waiting room of your life, and to a tragic but comic tale of reckless brothers and long-suffering sisters, ailing parents and innocent children, of love affairs and criminal liaisons, of a wonderfully troubled family and a perpetually wandering people, and their epic search for a home: somewhere, anywhere – or Canada, as it turns out.The Free World is the glorious debut novel by David Bezmozgis, whose collection of stories was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award, and who was recently included in the New Yorker’s prestigious ‘20 under 40’ list.

“As far as the education of children is concerned,” states Natalia Ginzburg in this collection of her finest and best-known short essays, “I think they should be taught not the little virtues but the great ones. Not thrift but generosity and an indifference to money; not caution but courage and a contempt for danger; not shrewdness but frankness and a love of truth; not tact but a love of one’s neighbor and self-denial; not a desire for success but a desire to be and to know.” Whether she writes of the loss of a friend, Cesare Pavese; or what is inexpugnable of World War II; or the Abruzzi, where she and her first husband lived in forced residence under Fascist rule; or the importance of silence in our society; or her vocation as a writer; or even a pair of worn-out shoes, Ginzburg brings to her reflections the wisdom of a survivor and the spare, wry, and poetically resonant style her readers have come to recognize. “A glowing light of modern Italian literature . . . Ginzburg’s magic is the utter simplicity of her prose, suddenly illuminated by one word that makes a lightning streak of a plain phrase. . . . As direct and clean as if it were carved in stone, it yet speaks thoughts of the heart.” — The New York Times Book Review

Set in Chicago's Jewish neighborhood of West Rogers Park, this is the story of three families--adults and children alike--coming of age during the tumultuous, turbulent days of the Iran hostage crisis. At the close of the 1970s, the Rovners, the Wasserstroms, and the Wills-Silvermans will have to shed their pasts to cross into that new, shining decade of hope: the 80s.

Read Visible City . Tova Mirvis s graceful yet vigorous New York novel is about the half-inadvertent window-peeping that city life enables, and where it can lead. New York Magazine After chaotic days of wrangling and soothing her young children, Nina spends her evenings spying on the quiet, contented older couple across the street. But one night, through her same window, she spies a young couple in the throes of passion. Who are these people, and what happened to her symbol of domestic happiness? Soon, Nina crosses paths with both couples on the streets of her Upper West Side neighborhood and, as anonymity gives way to different forms of intimacy, all begin to confront their own desires and disappointments. Shrewdly and artfully, Mirvis explores the boundaries between our own lives and the lives of others. From its lavish ghost subway stations to its hidden stained-glass windows, Visible City conjures a New York City teeming with buried treasures. An utterly perfect, deeply moving evocation of contemporary Manhattan [that] reminded me of Paula Fox and Laurie Colwin, and also those master chroniclers of the privileged classes, Wharton and Fitzgerald . . . Brilliant. Joanna Smith Rakoff, Salon.com Mirvis s meticulously choreographed novel surprises and moves us. New York Times Book Review TOVA MIRVIS is the author of The Outside World and The Ladies Auxiliary , a national bestseller. Her essays have appeared in various anthologies and newspapers, and her fiction has been broadcast on NPR. She is a recipient of a Massachusetts Cultural Council Fiction Fellowship and lives in Newton, Massachusetts, with her three children. Author photograph (c) Nina Subin"

In Russia, Molly and her mother didn't celebrate birthdays the way they do in America. When Molly's invited to a birthday party, she's excited to be able to taste a pink and white cake. Then something happens at Emma's party that Molly won't ever forget. She knows it's the week of Passover and she knows she shouldn't eat the cake. What should Molly do?

A witch who can turn children into diamonds, a prince who thinks he's a rooster, a giant who hitches a ride on Noah's ark--they're all here in this compilation of Jewish folktales, a rich mix of magic and mysticism, prophets, wise men, and fools.

The practical, inspiring guide for all Jewish people expecting a baby. Expanded, updated, and revised. A complete resource to the traditions and rituals for welcoming a new child to the world and into the Jewish community, and for commemorating this joyous event in family life--whatever your family constellation. Provides ceremonies you can copy for handouts so that guests are an even greater part of the experience. Special section for interfaith families helps make the celebrations inclusive, comfortable, and joyous for all. Ceremonies for girls, as well as for boys. "Drawn from the wealth of mythic, historic, religious, culinary, and literary traditions that surround the arrival of a new Jewish baby, and informed by contemporary insight and practice, The New Jewish Baby Book describes the many ways that new parents can celebrate the arrival of a child, the newest member of your extended families, and a unique and precious chapter in the on-going saga of the Jewish people." --from the Introduction

Cousins Carlie and Mitch always have been close. When Mitch makes plans to stay in Israel to study at an Orthodox yeshiva, Carlie and her aunt fly to Israel to try to make him change his mind. The trouble is, Carlie is beginning to understand why Mitch must stay. This book can provoke lively discussions about religious faith.