In 1940, thirteen-year-old Tommy's routine of school, playing stickball in his Bronx, New York, neighborhood, talking with his Jewish friend Beth, and listening to Dodgers games on the radio changes as his mother's illness and his increasing awareness of the war in Europe transform his world.

In the aftermath of October 7, Ferdinand Draxler walks the streets of London in despair. Everything has changed - the sights, the sound, the spirit. He too is not who he was. Is he at the crossroads of history or is it just a bend in the cul-de-sac of his own gloomy nature? The son of a Holocaust survivor who accuses him of cowardice and the father of a daughter who sees him as complicit in genocide, Draxler fixates on bad news. He shouts at the television. He carries his own tin of paint to cover up graffiti. The staffroom at the primary school of which he is headmaster has become a battlefield of inflamed opinion he does nothing to quiet. His wife, Charmian, is a beacon of calm, but even she isn't sure she can save Ferdie from himself. 'Don't worry about me,' he tells her. 'I don't have what it takes to go mad.' -- Source other than Library of Congress.

"As child, Meryl Frank was the chosen inheritor of family remembrance. Her aunt Mollie, a formidable and cultured woman, insisted that Meryl never forget who they were, where they came from, and the hate that nearly destroyed them. Over long afternoons, Mollie told her about the city, the theater, and, above all else, Meryl's cousin, the radiant Franya Winter. Franya was the leading light of Vilna's Yiddish theater, a remarkable and precocious woman who cast off the restrictions of her Hasidic family and community to play roles as prostitutes and bellhops, lovers and nuns. Yet there was one thing her aunt Mollie would never tell Meryl: how Franya died. Before Mollie passed away, she gave Meryl a Yiddish book containing the terrible answer, but forbade her to read it. And for years, Meryl obeyed. Unearthed is the story of Meryl's search for Franya and a timely history of hatred and resistance. Through archives across four continents, by way of chance encounters and miraculous discoveries, and eventually, guided by the shocking truth recorded in the pages of the forbidden book, Meryl conjures the rogue spirit of her cousin-her beauty and her tragedy. Meryl's search reveals a lost world destroyed by hatred, illuminating the cultural haven of Vilna and its resistance during World War II. As she seeks to find her lost family legacy, Meryl looks for answers to the questions that have defined her life: what is our duty to the past? How do we honor such memories while keeping them from consuming us? And what do we teach our children about tragedy?"--

"Austerity Baby might best be described as an "oblique memoir". Janet Wolff's fascinating volume is a family history - but one that is digressive and consistently surprising. The central underlying and repeated themes of the book are exile and displacement; lives (and deaths) during the Third Reich; mother-daughter and sibling relationships; the generational transmission of trauma and experience; transatlantic reflections; and the struggle for creative expression. Stories mobilised, and people encountered, in the course of the narrative include: the internment of aliens in Britain during the Second World War; cultural life in Rochester, New York, in the 1920s; the social and personal meanings of colour(s); the industrialist and philanthropist, Henry Simon of Manchester, including his relationship with the Norwegian explorer, Fridtjof Nansen; the liberal British campaigner and MP of the 1940s, Eleanor Rathbone; reflections on the lives and images of spinsters. The text is supplemented and interrupted throughout by images (photographs, paintings, facsimile documents), some of which serve to illustrate the story, others engaging indirectly with the written word."--Publisher's description.

"A breathtaking journey across Iran where war and superstition, jealousy and betrayal, and passion and loyalty rage behind the impenetrable walls of mansions and the crumbling houses of the Jewish Quarter. Against the tumultuous background of World War II, Dr. Yaran will find himself caught in the thrall of the anti-Semitic Governor General, the most powerful man in the country. Dr. Yaran falls in love with the Governor General's defiant wife, Velvet, upending not only the life of the doctor's beloved daughter, but the entire community. In his quest to save everything and everyone he loves, Dr. Yaran will navigate the intersections of magic, science, lust, and treachery. His sole ally is the Governor General's servant, an exotic eunuch, who will do anything to aid his mistress in her dangerous quest to attain forbidden love." --

Tristan Brodsky, sprung from the asphalt of the Depression-era Bronx, goes on to become one of the swaggering Jewish geniuses who remake American culture, but slowly suffocates his poet wife, who harbors secrets of her own. Nina Hricek, a driven young Czech photographer, escapes from behind the Iron Curtain with a group of black American musicians, only to find herself trapped yet again, this time in a doomed love affair. And finally, Tris Freedman, grandson of Tristan and lover of Nina, a graffiti artist and unanchored revolutionary, cannibalizes his family history to feed his muse. In the end, their stories converge, and the survival of each requires the sacrifice of another.