I'm a lifelong reader who has always been interested in the period of WWII. Stories of courage under fire are my favorites. As a little girl, I attended a one-room school without a library. Luckily, my enlightened teacher contracted with a Bookmobile, a travelling library. The first time I got inside the Bookmobile, I decided I’d like to live there and was only removed forcibly by the bus driver. I'm an educator turned author who worked for thirty-five years at the medical school at Michigan State University. Luckily, my circle of family and friends includes doctors, lawyers, and police officers who are consulted regularly for advice on my mysteries.
This is a 750+ page book and a tour de force. I have profound sympathy for the Jewish people, and the horrors they endured under Nazi rule. None of the things I have suffered in my life, including living with a violent alcoholic father, came even close to the fears and degradation experienced by the people in this book. My own survival techniques included hiding and avoidance of anything that would trigger my father’s anger. As the eldest, I also tried to shield my younger siblings. Thus, I was as unobtrusive as possible, a survival technique minorities have used for centuries.
This story begins in 1937 with a young Hungarian Jewish man
who goes to Paris to study architecture. Asked to deliver a letter to a woman’s
nephew, he falls into a complicated relationship with the letter’s recipient
and eventually, despite her own dark secrets, they fall in love. As…
Paris, 1937. Andras Levi, an architecture student, has arrived from Budapest with a scholarship, a single suitcase, and a mysterious letter he has promised to deliver to Clara Morgenstern a young widow living in the city. When Andras meets Clara he is drawn deeply into her extraordinary and secret life, just as Europe's unfolding tragedy sends them both into a state of terrifying uncertainty.
From a remote Hungarian village to the grand opera houses of Budapest and Paris, from the despair of Carpathian winter to an unimaginable life in forced labour camps and…
I’m a German History professor who focuses on the Holocaust, but I’ve been educating myself on the topic since 5th grade, when a friend suggested some children’s literature on the Holocaust. So, I guess this is a topic that has interested me for some thirty years now. I can’t stop asking why, I can’t stop reading, and I can’t stop educating, especially as Holocaust denial and antisemitism are on the rise. History, in general, can teach us so much about who we are and who we have the potential to become. The Holocaust is a prime example of what happens when humanity fails to achieve its potential.
With a narrative of just over 650 pages, this is thebook for the reader out there who wants it all: the names, the dates, the facts, the figures, the individual experience, and the analysis, all wrapped up in an engrossing, readable narrative. Friedländer’s impeccable scholarship speaks to the historian in me, but, more importantly, it speaks to the humanity in me. When I sat down to read this second volume, I wasn’t struck by how thick it was. I was struck by the magnitude of tragedy that the book represented. For the reader who has read widely on the Holocaust, in particular, this book will answer many of your questions. What appeals to me most, though, is the historical data never obscures the victims or their experiences.
A magisterial history of the Jews in Nazi Germany and the regime's policies towards them in the years prior to World War II and the Holocaust. Written by arguably the world's leading scholar on the subject.
Himself a survivor, Friedlander has been a leading figure in Holocaust studies for decades and this book represents a definitive summing up of his research and that of hundreds of other historians.
NAZI GERMANY AND THE JEWS: THE YEARS OF PERSECUTION is perhaps the richest examination of the subject yet written, and, crucially, one that never loses sight of the experiences of individuals in…
I’m an accidental historian, one that stumbled over a love of history in spite of myself. In school, history was all just dates and places—not the kind of thing to inspire a kid that loved stories about people, not dusty old battles. But then a funny thing happened on the way to an English degree. A few history electives suddenly seemed way more appealing than another round of Austen, and led me to a BA History with Distinction. The first half of the twentieth century is a favorite period, but I say bring on the Renaissance and Viking ships too!
Sarah’s Keykeeps us hoping in spite of ourselves—and despite the terrible odds facing a Jewish family in Paris, 1942. When the police come knocking one night, ten-year-old Sarah has no idea that her family is being rounded up for transport to an internment camp. She locks her little brother in a closet to save him, certain she’ll return the next day. That fateful choice will echo from WWII into the present, where the apartment’s new occupant uncovers long-ago choices and secrets in her own family. For me, though, the real question isn’t whether Sarah can rescue her brother. It’s about the many ways we justify our own ‘us’ and ‘them,’ and the hope that we can learn from history’s lessons.
Paris, July 1942: Sarah, a ten year-old girl, is arrested with her family by the French police in the Vel' d'Hiv' roundup, but not before she locks her younger brother in a cupboard in the family's apartment, thinking that she will be back within a few hours. Paris, May 2002: On Vel' d'Hiv's 60th anniversary, journalist Julia Jarmond is asked to write an article about this black day in France's past. Through her contemporary investigation, she stumbles onto a trail of long-hidden family secrets that connect her to Sarah. Julia finds herself compelled to retrace the girl's ordeal, from that…
This is a picture book created to help children learn how to determine Shabbat, the Jewish Sabbath, in countries where the summer sun remains high in the sky.
Tova travels with her mother to Alaska during the summer solstice. In the Land of the Midnight Sun, she is uncertain how to tell time because the sun never rises or sets. Tova wonders how she will know when the Sabbath begins or ends. Eventually, she talks to a wise orca. The whale shares her secret to understanding time with a circular sun and reminds Tova of the magic of Shabbat is more than telling time.
A Whale of a Tale: A Sabbath Summer Solstice Story
A Whale of a Tale: A Sabbath Summer Solstice Story is a picture book created to help children learn how to determine Shabbat, the Jewish Sabbath, in countries where the summer sun remains high in the sky. Tova travels with her mother to Alaska during the summer solstice. In the Land of the Midnight Sun, she is uncertain how to tell time because the sun never rises or sets. Tova wonders how she will know when Sabbath begins or ends. Eventually, she talks to a wise orca. The whale shares her secret to understanding time with a circular sun and…
I have always known that my parents survived the Holocaust. I often listened in when they, my aunt, uncle, and their survivor friends would sit and talk of their lives during the Holocaust. I am the past president for the Phoenix Holocaust Survivor’s Association (now called the Phoenix Holocaust Association) and am on its Board and the Chair of its Education Committee. During this year of Covid, I have been instrumental in hosting numerous writers from around the world who have spoken, in Zoom, about their Holocaust writings and research.
No one can truly know what life was like for Jews under the Nazis. We cannot feel the constant terror and inhumanity imposed upon their Jewish victims. We cannot hear their constant pleas, moans, and screams. We cannot smell the stench of filth, sickness, and death. Nevertheless, Joseph Gershowitz manages to take us as close as we can to his suffering in his absolutely riveting first-hand account of life in the Nazi’s concentration camps. On the Borderline of Extermination is a must-read for understanding the cruelty, barbarism, and inhumanity of the Germans and their all too willing helpers.
A true story of strategy and survival as told by Joseph Gershkowitz (AUSCHWITZ HÄFTLING 99310). With this inspiring story of innate knowledge and determination, Mr. Gershkowitz paints a vivid picture of the atrocities of the Holocaust as seen through his eyes. With that, 100% of the proceeds will be split and donated to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in tribute of Joseph Gershkowitz to ensure the memory of the Holocaust is never forgotten & the Women for Women International organization that works to support marginalized women in countries that have been severely affected by conflict and war.
I was 12 years old when, in Amsterdam on a family holiday, I was taken to see the Anne Frank House. Until then I knew very little about WW2, the Nazis, and the Holocaust. After viewing the ‘secret annexe’ my father bought me The Diary of Anne Frank, which was on sale there, and I started reading it in the car as we drove off. The book sparked my deep lifelong interest in that chapter of history. Many years later I discovered that my own mother also had an extraordinary wartime story. By then I was a journalist and knew I’d have to write a book about it—Deadly Carousel.
Anyone who wants to know what a real-life, daring British secret agent looks like (hint: nothing like James Bond) should read about Frank Foley. The son of a West Country railway worker, only 5’2” tall, he wore a tweed jacket and owlish spectacles. Not very sexy. Officially a ‘passport control officer’ at the British embassy in Berlin, in fact he was the ringmaster of a spy network. Following Hitler’s rise to power he focused on saving Jews. As time was of the essence, he dispensed with cumbersome bureaucracy: "I pounded on the desks until I got what I wanted." As well as issuing thousands of life-saving visas, he hid in his own home Jews fleeing the Gestapo and helped them acquire forged documents. With no diplomatic immunity, he could have been arrested as a spy and shot. So often in life the unassuming ‘little guy’ is the greatest hero of…
As the horror of Nazism tightened its grip on Germany, Jews found themselves trapped and desperate. For many, their only hope of salvation came in the form of a small, bespectacled British man: Frank Foley. Working as a Berlin Passport Control Officer, Foley helped thousands of Jews to flee the country with visas and false passports, personally entering the camps to get Jews out, and sheltering those on the run from the Gestapo in his own apartment. Described by a Jewish leader as 'the Pimpernel of the Jews', Foley was an unsung hero of the Holocaust.But why is this extraordinary…
I loved this propulsive and darkly comic novel about an American history professor who encounters Benzion Netanyahu (father of Benjamin) at a New England college in the 1950s. I was moved by the narrator’s reflections on Jewish life and identity in the USA.
The book is witty and surprising throughout. As an academic, I found the author’s skewering of academia’s pretentions to be sharply funny.
In light of the war in Gaza and ongoing debates about antisemitism on college campuses, I’ve been reflecting on this book because it confronts profound questions around Jewish identity and faith in diaspora. I plan to read it again soon, because I’m sure it will resonate differently in our current political context.
"Absorbing, delightful, hilarious, breathtaking and the best and most relevant novel I’ve read in what feels like forever." —Taffy Brodesser-Akner, The New York Times Book Review
Corbin College, not quite upstate New York, winter 1959–1960: Ruben Blum, a Jewish historian—but not an historian of the Jews—is co-opted onto a hiring committee to review the application of an exiled Israeli scholar specializing in the…
I took my bicycle to ride across northern Spain last summer and brought along some Spanish-oriented novels.
Noah Gordon’s book follows the path of a young man whose father and brother are murdered when Queen Isabella decides that all the Jews must be expelled from the country. Fifteen-year-old, Yonah Toledano, sets off on a journey through various parts of Spain, trying to keep one step ahead of the priestly authorities, who, if they catch him, will burn him at the stake.
It's an adventure story. But I also learned a great deal about the operations and cruel applications of the Inquisition. At the Prado Museum in Madrid, I viewed Francisco Goya’s paintings depicting various Inquisition scenes, which drove the novel’s points home even harder.
In the year 1492, the Inquisition has all of Spain in its grip. After centuries of pogrom-like riots encouraged by the Church, the Jews - who have been an important part of Spanish life since the days of the Romans - are expelled from the country by royal edict. Many who wish to remain are intimidated by Church and Crown and become Catholics, but several hundred thousand choose to retain their religion and depart; given little time to flee, some perish even before they can escape from Spain.
Yonah Toledano, the 15-year-old son of a celebrated Spanish silversmith, has seen…
My father never talked about his experiences during the war. After he died at 67, we found his handwritten itinerary of three years and ten days in the Army Signal Corps. Plotting it on a map sparked a passion that continued for years, taking me twice to sites in Europe and through hundreds of records and books. I am amazed at all he never told us—the Queen Mary troopship, his radar unit’s landing on Omaha Beach (D+26), the Normandy Breakout, Paris after liberation, fleeing Bastogne, and so on. I grew up on WWII films but never grasped till now what my dad may have seen.
This is an extraordinary memoir. Arianna’s father, Hans, came from a family with 34 family members living in Czechoslovakia before WWII; by 1945, 25 would have been murdered by the Nazis. He experienced unspeakable horrors, but he did not speak of them to his family. Having grown up in Venezuela, Arianna knew nothing of his past—not even, in fact, that Hans’ family was Jewish. Upon his death, Hans left her a box crammed with letters, diary entries, and memorabilia, including an identification card that had his picture but bore a different name. Investigating the various threads of his life, this book tells the story of her search for her father and his family, while uncovering the devastating details of life and death in Nazi Germany.
In this astonishing story that “reads like a thriller and is so, so timely” (BuzzFeed) Ariana Neumann dives into the secrets of her father’s past: “Like Anne Frank’s diary, it offers a story that needs to be told and heard” (Booklist, starred review).
In 1941, the first Neumann family member was taken by the Nazis, arrested in German-occupied Czechoslovakia for bathing in a stretch of river forbidden to Jews. He was transported to Auschwitz. Eighteen days later his prisoner number was entered into the morgue book.
Of thirty-four Neumann family members, twenty-five were murdered by the Nazis. One of the…
The author of more than a dozen books and hundreds of magazine and newspaper pieces, I taught writing for many years as a lecturer at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. My passion for learning to write is lifelong, beginning in a musical childhood that led me from notes to words. A voracious reader, I set my ambition early-on to create stories that worked like the music I love, articulated most fully in recent books that take off from the many years I spent traveling with the iconic jazz musician Wynton Marsalis, with whom I also collaborated on Jazz in the Bittersweet Blues of Life. My focus in both learning and doing is the intersection of memory and experience in a process that is ongoing in the intertwining of life and work.
Where to begin? Proust’s gigantic masterpiece is the proverbial gift that keeps giving, none more so than in its explication and then repeated “demonstration” of the very thing it describes, the sensory triggers of what Proust calls involuntary memory but that here become the emotional propulsion for this book about writing the very beautiful book (or books—it comes in six volumes) you are reading.
As a writer, I’ve been tempted many times to stop writing. After all, it’s hard. Will anyone ever read this? Maybe I don’t know what I’m doing after all. Then I read stories like the ones I’ve mentioned here. Four of them are about real women who would not give up, even in the face of much adversity. I admire people who have that conviction and strength. It gives me the courage to keep trying-just like they did.
I love reading about women who break the mold-who do something everyone says they can’t.
Hedy Lamar was a famous actress, but she said herself, “People seem to think because I have a pretty face...I’m stupid.” She wasn’t! Among her many inventions was a glow-in-the-dark dog collar. Her most famous scientific work came from designing a frequency hopping system, that is still used in many electronics today.
To her adoring public, Hedy Lamarr was a glamorous movie star. But in private, she was something more: a brilliant inventor. Now Laurie Wallmark and Katy Wu, who collaborated on Sterling's critically acclaimed picture-book biography Grace Hopper: Queen of Computer Code, tell the inspiring story of how, during World War Two, Lamarr developed a groundbreaking communications system that still remains essential to the security of today's technology.
'Even readers who don't know Hedy Lamarr, 'the world's most beautiful woman,' will become fans after learning how she balanced her fame as a 1930s movie star with a passion…
