Here are 100 books that The Way Back fans have personally recommended if you like
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I teach Jewish studies to Jewish teens and have devoted my life to helping young people find meaningful the legacy that’s been given to us—and building bridges to the future; this is in the classroom as well as on the page. My book is a distillation of everything I love about being Jewish—wrapped in a story that many readers find deeply familiar. At the same time, I believe in planting the universal in the specific—and any reader ready to go on a journey can find themselves in Will Levine’s shoes.
I loved this book for its blend of suspense, family dynamics, and coming-of-age. Set in 1970s Atlantic City, we meet 13-year-old Joey Goodman, who spends the summer at his family’s hotel on the boardwalk. When he gets caught up with a group of mobsters, Joey faces new challenges and temptations that test his morals and courage.
Nockowitz beautifully captures Joey’s struggle between loyalty to his family and the allure of adventure and independence. He portrays the competing values of family and self-determination, all focused around Ski-Ball as a central metaphor. The novel’s historical setting is vividly brought to life, making Joey’s journey feel like a trip in time—to a nostalgic yesteryear many young readers won’t know but soon will fall in love with.
A young teen falls in with the mob, and learns a lesson about what kind of person he wants to be
In The Prince of Steel Pier, Joey Goodman is spending the summer at his grandparents’ struggling hotel in Atlantic City, a tourist destination on the decline. Nobody in Joey’s big Jewish family takes him seriously, so when Joey’s Skee-Ball skills land him an unusual job offer from a local mobster, he’s thrilled to be treated like “one of the guys,” and develops a major crush on an older girl in the process. Eventually disillusioned by the mob’s bravado, and…
I teach Jewish studies to Jewish teens and have devoted my life to helping young people find meaningful the legacy that’s been given to us—and building bridges to the future; this is in the classroom as well as on the page. My book is a distillation of everything I love about being Jewish—wrapped in a story that many readers find deeply familiar. At the same time, I believe in planting the universal in the specific—and any reader ready to go on a journey can find themselves in Will Levine’s shoes.
I love this book for its humor, voice, and vivid and lovable characters. Goldie reminds me of the grandma I never had—determined, dry-witted, and unafraid to get involved in her granddaughter Maxie’s love life. Set in an assisted living facility full of quirky characters, this element of aging—the loneliness and the desperation—is both hilarious and universally tragic.
Maxie’s story, meanwhile, follows a delightful rom-com arc that mirrors and breaks the repetition of her grandmother’s adventure in love as she meets T-Jam, her grandmother’s eccentric driver. This book charmed me—brilliantly balancing comedy with themes of heritage, love, and legacy, l’dor v’dor.
Hilarious and surprising, this unapologetically Jewish story delivers a present-day take on a highly creative grandmother trying to find her Ph.D granddaughter a husband who is a doctor-with a yarmulke, of course.
Goldie Mandell is opinionated, assertive, and stuck in an Assisted Living Facility. But even surrounded by schleppers with walkers, pictures of sunrises, fancy fish tanks, and an array of daily activities to complement the tepid tea and stale cookies on offer, her salt-free plate is full. She's got a granddaughter to settle, an eager love interest named Harry to subdue, and precious memories of her happy marriage to…
I teach Jewish studies to Jewish teens and have devoted my life to helping young people find meaningful the legacy that’s been given to us—and building bridges to the future; this is in the classroom as well as on the page. My book is a distillation of everything I love about being Jewish—wrapped in a story that many readers find deeply familiar. At the same time, I believe in planting the universal in the specific—and any reader ready to go on a journey can find themselves in Will Levine’s shoes.
I loved this book, which made me both cry and laugh. It is a touching exploration of grief, friendship, and coming-of-age. The story follows Noah and his best friend, Dash, two b’nai mitzvah boys obsessed with comedy, especially the classic Three Stooges.
When Dash’s father dies by suicide—presented sensitively and honestly—their friendship faces strain as Dash withdraws and Noah struggles to understand his friend’s pain. Perl’s writing captures the desperate need for friendship characteristic of adolescence.
The book thoughtfully addresses mental illness and death—but also loyalty and friendship, making it relatable to adult and middle-grade readers. Humor becomes both a way of pushing away and engaging, highlighting the essential role of laughter in growth and healing.
SYDNEY TAYLOR BOOK AWARD HONOREE FOR OLDER READERS! WINNER OF THE NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARD FOR CHILDREN'S LITERATURE!
An unforgettable coming-of-age story about comedy, loss, and friendship for fans of Jennifer L. Holm and Gary D. Schmidt.
Spoiler alert: This book is not about the Three Stooges. It's about Noah and Dash, two seventh graders who are best friends and comedy junkies. That is, they were best friends, until Dash's father died suddenly and Dash shut Noah out. Which Noah deserved, according to Noa, the girl who, annoyingly, shares both his name and his bar mitzvah day.
I teach Jewish studies to Jewish teens and have devoted my life to helping young people find meaningful the legacy that’s been given to us—and building bridges to the future; this is in the classroom as well as on the page. My book is a distillation of everything I love about being Jewish—wrapped in a story that many readers find deeply familiar. At the same time, I believe in planting the universal in the specific—and any reader ready to go on a journey can find themselves in Will Levine’s shoes.
I loved this book for its unique blend of history and adventure. The novel transports readers to three friends in two eras, joined by a mystical radio—connecting the two generations: one before WWII and one many years later. The novel masterfully layers the past and present, weaving together humor and tragedy, secrets that refuse to stay buried.
The atmosphere is haunting and believable, capturing the weight of how few steps it could take to turn our world into a familiar nightmare. Westallen is a beautifully written, thought-provoking story that explores time travel, friendship, courage, and forgiveness.
We didn't mean to change the past. Now we have to win the war. A stunning 'what if?' story by a bestselling author about two groups of 12-year-olds - one in World War Two, one in the present day.
Henry, Frances and Lukas are neighbours, and they used to be best friends. But in middle school Frances got emo, Lukas went to private school and Henry just felt left behind. When they come together again for the funeral of a pet gerbil, the three ex-friends make a mind-blowing discovery: a radio, buried in Henry's garden, that allows them to talk…
I have always straddled between the worlds of fiction and poetry. I received my MFA in poetry in 2016, but during my time in the program, I was often told my poems were too narrative. Sometimes in my fiction workshops in undergrad, I was told my stories were too poetic. So when I finally jumped into the world of verse, I really fell in love with the intersection of poetry and story. Finally, there was a medium that felt “just right!” There are so many fantastic novels in verse out there—with so many more to come—but I hope you’ll enjoy these five favorites of mine!
The book uses verse to create a modern-day fairy tale, mixing magic with contemporary Prague. This makes magic feel so close and tangible for us as readers.
Because of this, we believe our protagonist Ilana and sympathise with her as she makes friends with the ghost of a Jewish boy from decades ago, and fights the hold of the strange and charismatic Wasserman, who has the ability to make the memory of children disappear.
Despite its magical appearance, this story still tackles compelling real-world issues of racism, war, and diaspora in a compelling way.
A brilliantly original tale for fans of The Bear and the Nightingale and The Hazel Wood about embracing your power, facing your monsters, and loving deeply enough to transcend a century.
Inspired by the author's experiences restoring Jewish cemeteries in Eastern Europe.
"A must-read for lost souls everywhere." —Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review
Magic will burn you up.
Sent to stay with her aunt in Prague and witness the humble life of an artist, Ilana Lopez—a biracial Jewish girl—finds herself torn between her dream of becoming a violinist and her immigrant parents’ desire for her to pursue a more stable career.…
As an American, a Jew, and a novelist—though not necessarily in that order—I’ve always been interested in Jewish-American literature, and the Jewish-American experience in general. What was it like for the first Jews in America? What accounted for their success? What were the costs of assimilation? And where are they—we—headed? These books are a great starting point for anyone looking for answers to these questions. But be warned: in keeping with the Jewish tradition, they often answer those questions with more questions. Not, to quote the Jewish sage Jerry Seinfeld, that there’s anything wrong with that.
If you’ve read all 783 pages of World of Our Fathers and are still looking for more about early Jewish-American life in New York—or just something more immediate—this is the book for you.
An autobiographical fever-dream of a novel, Jews Without Money is a vivid, violent, look at the life of the Jewish slum kids whose parents emigrated to America. A lifelong communist, Gold only wrote one novel, but it anticipates the hallucinatory fiction of writers like Denis Johnson by half a century.
At once entirely Jewish and entirely American, Jews Without Money gives an unvarnished first-person glimpse into the surreal world of turn-of-the-century New York.
As a writer and political activist in early-twentieth-century America, Michael Gold was an important presence on the American cultural scene for more than three decades. Beginning in the 1920s his was a powerful journalistic voice for social change and human rights, and Jews Without Money--the author's only novel--is a passionate record of the times. First published in 1930, this fictionalized autobiography offered an unusually candid look at the thieves, gangsters, and ordinary citizens who struggled against brutal odds in lower East Side Manhattan. Like Henry Roth's Call It Sleep and Abraham Cahan's The Rise and Fall of David Levinsky, Jews…
I’m a historian of Muslim – non-Muslim relations in medieval Islam. In all of my publications I've been concerned with the social intersections of different religious communities in the medieval Islamic world, whether through human agency or via institutional arrangements. My goal has been to de-center Islamic history by approaching it from its margins. Hence the choice to study the role of women as agents of religious change in my last monograph Female Power and Religious Change in the Medieval Near East. In this book I address two historical questions which I've always been passionate about, namely the Islamization of the Near East and the place of women in pre-modern Near Eastern societies.
Krakowski's Coming of Age in Medieval Egypt offers not only offers a sophisticated critique of scholarship on medieval kinship arrangements, but also casts light on the social agency of young women during the few years between the age of their formal maturity and their matrimonial engagement.
Krakowski's wonderful achievement is made possible thanks to her exceptional familiarity with the documents of the Cairo Geniza and her ability to take a step back and observe the broad social picture they reflect.
Much of what we know about life in the medieval Islamic Middle East comes from texts written to impart religious ideals or to chronicle the movements of great men. How did women participate in the societies these texts describe? What about non-Muslims, whose own religious traditions descended partly from pre-Islamic late antiquity?
Coming of Age in Medieval Egypt approaches these questions through Jewish women's adolescence in Fatimid and Ayyubid Egypt and Syria (c. 969-1250). Using hundreds of everyday papers preserved in the Cairo Geniza, Eve Krakowski follows the lives of girls from different social classes-rich and poor, secluded and physically…
I’m a New Englander by birth, a Canadian by circumstance, and a Nova Scotian by choice. For as long as I can remember, I’ve told stories, first to my little sister—a captive audience—then to my children, then at my book readings, and now on my podcast, Kate and Friends, which I’m lucky enough to record with two professional musicians. For me, the ultimate test of a story is whether it can be told without visual aids. While I love picture books, and the way an artist can deepen a child’s experience of a story, I gravitate to satisfying, stand-alone tales with a good twist. They’re difficult to write, easy to remember, and great fun to tell!
A deft, charming re-telling of a Jewish folk tale, and winner of the Ruth Schwartz Award. In this gentle story, young Joseph grows up in a shtetl in a warm and loving home. His grandfather, a tailor, makes him a beautiful blanket at birth. As he grows, the blanket becomes worn, but Grandpa can always rejig the fabric into something new. At last, however, the sad day arrives when nothing is left of the blanket… until Joseph realizes that what’s left is a wonderful story.
I nominate this book as a storyteller’s delight because of its comforting, cyclical nature, and surprise ending. While Gilman’s glowing pictures augment the story perfectly, with their warm, humorous depiction of family life, the story can easily be memorized, told, and enjoyed when no pictures are available.
Phoebe Gilman's beloved classic celebrates its 20th anniversary!
Joseph's grandfather made him a beautiful blanket when he was a baby, but now it's frazzled and worn, and Joseph's mother says it is time to throw it out. Joseph doesn't want to part with his special blanket, and he's sure that his grandfather can fix it. Sure enough, Grandfather miraculously alters the blanket into useful items again and again. But when Joseph loses the final item, even Grandfather can't make something from nothing. But maybe Joseph can?
Based on the Yiddish folktale "Joseph's overcoat," Phoebe Gilman's gorgeous artwork charts the transformation…
I’m a writer in Toronto, Canada. My novel Call Me Stan is weird historical fiction. Probably not as weird as the books below, but still weird. Its initial inspiration was the stunning cognitive dissonance between composer Richard Wagner’s vile anti-Semitism and his fascination with the Buddha. If I’d stuck with just that idea, I might’ve ended up with a fairly conventional historical novel. But a second idea collided with it and gave it energy: the legend of the cursed immortal referred to as the Wandering Jew. That gave me a present-day narrator who could carry us through a vast sweep of history in a jarringly anachronistic way. Which was exactly weird enough for me.
Gary Barwin had to make this list. He’s a Prospero of historical weirdness. I was torn between this book and his more recent novel Nothing the Same, Everything Haunted: The Ballad of Motl the Cowboy, which follows its titular character on a harrowing journey across Nazi-infested Europe to retrieve his shot-off-by-a-Dadaist testicles from a Swiss glacier. But Yiddish for Pirates wins the toss because it’s narrated by a parrot.
Aharon, a Yiddish-idiom-spouting 500-year-old ship’s parrot, traces the life of his Captain, Moishe, from a shtetl near Vilnius through Torquemada’s Inquisition and Columbus’ brutal conquest of the Caribbean to an eventual erratic career in piracy, with a couple of quests along the way. What makes Barwin’s work sing is the tragic humanity within the swirl of its jaw-dropping narrative ridiculousness.
Shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and nominated for the Governor-General's Award for Literature, a hilarious, swashbuckling yet powerful tale of pirates, buried treasure and a search for the Fountain of Youth, told in the ribald, philosophical voice of a 500-year-old Jewish parrot.
Set in the years around 1492, Yiddish for Pirates recounts the compelling story of Moishe, a Bar Mitzvah boy who leaves home to join a ship's crew, where he meets Aaron, the polyglot parrot who becomes his near-constant companion. From a present-day Florida nursing home, this wisecracking yet poetic bird guides us through a world of pirate…
Beardstown is my ancestral home. I grew up, sitting on my grandfather’s knee and listening to stories of great floods, huge winter storms, steamboat trade up and down the river, and even ancient tales of the Iroquois annihilating the Mascouten and the long-forgotten Indian mounds. It has been such a joy to be able to compile all those ancient memories into one pretty good story.
Michener’s fifty-year-old novel focuses on a natural spring that becomes a tell – one civilization stacked on top of another from the beginning of time. It is the spring that makes life. If it is life that creates civilization and then destroys it and then comes back to the water to create yet another. The eternal and lasting thing is the water. Michener makes a beautiful story of the civilizations that come and go and stack on top of one another.
The town is a new civilization created, the founder believes, from wilderness. But it is not so. The spot he choose was previously occupied by indigenous natives and they took it from the natives there before them. How could I not love Michener’s story? It is the same as mine just 5,000 years earlier.
In his signature style of grand storytelling, James A. Michener transports us back thousands of years to the Holy Land. Through the discoveries of modern archaeologists excavating the site of Tell Makor, Michener vividly re-creates life in an ancient city and traces the profound history of the Jewish people—from the persecution of the early Hebrews, the rise of Christianity, and the Crusades to the founding of Israel and the modern conflict in the Middle East. An epic tale of love, strength, and faith, The Source is a richly written saga that encompasses the history of Western civilization and the great…
