Invisible City

by Julia Dahl

When her editor sends her to get a story at scrap yard where a woman's dead body has been discovered, freelancer Rebekah Roberts finds herself face-to-face with the Hasidic community her mother once ran away from.

Rebekah never knew her mother, Aviva. A year after Rebekah's birth, Aviva abandoned Rebekah and her father to return to the Hasidic world she came from.

As Rebekah digs deeper into the life of Rivka Mendelssohn, the murder victim, the more similarities with Aviva Rebekah  she sees.

Married to the much older owner of the scrap yard, Rivka had four children, one of whom had recently died. She reportedly had been making visits to a house on Coney Island designed to help members of the tightly knit, rigidly observant Hasidic community explore life outside the community. There were rumors as well that she was involved in an extra-marital affair.

The Auschwitz Violinist

by Jonathan Dunsky

In this, the third of Jonathan Dunsky's Adam Lapid mystery series, Lapid sees a man on a Tel Aviv street that he hasn't seen since his imprisonment in Auschwitz.

The man, Yosef Kaplon, had vanished so quickly from the barracks that Lapid believed he had been killed. Kaplon tells him that he survived Auschwitz thanks to his mother: the violin lessons she forced him to take allowed him to become a member of the orchestra that greeted new arrivals to Auschwitz.

Kaplon invites Lapid to come to a cafe and hear him play. It turns into a magical evening for Lapid, filled with bittersweet memories.  Surrounded by people speaking his native Hungarian, eating goulash that rivals that of his own mother and listening to Kaplon's heavenly music, Lapid is reminded of all he lost at Auschwitz.

The Book of Jewish Values

by Rabbi Joseph Telushkin

In the hit HBO series, "Game of Thrones," the Stark family of the north repeatedly says, "Winter is coming!"

When Elul rolls around, we Jews say, "Yom Kippur is coming!"

Every year I reach the end of the High Holy Days inspired to do more -- study more, come to more services, observe more rituals more often -- and be more -- kinder, more charitable, more aware and more grateful.

Yet when Elul comes round again, I'm disappointed in myself. Overwhelmed by the possibilities for improvement, I realize I've defaulted to business as usual on the path of least resistance.

This year, however, I've discovered a book to guide me: Rabbi Joseph Telushkin's The Book of Jewish Values; A Day-by-Day Guide to Ethical Living. The book offers short, readable essays on Jewish values for every day of the year except Shabbats, when Rabbi Telushkin recommends reviewing the previous six days' essays.

Sarah’s Key

 By Tatiana de Rosnay

The event that turns the plot of Sarah’s Key is the July 16 and 17, 1942, mass arrests of Jewish men, women and children in Paris, and their detention in the Vélodrome d’Hiver in Paris.

Decreed by the Nazis, the roundup was executed by French police, using Paris city buses and the “Winter Velodrome” bicycling racetrack and stadium built near the Eiffel Tower by Henri Desgrange, who later organized the Tour de France.

The Vél d’Hiv round up captured 13,152 victims – men, women and 4,051 children. There were no functioning lavatories and just one water tap. The limited food and water available was brought by Quakers, the Red Cross and the few doctors and nurses allowed to enter.

Five days later they were then taken to internment camps at Drancy, Beaune-la-Rolande and Pithiviers, and ultimately murdered in Auschwitz.

Ten Years Gone

by Jonathan Dunsky

Private investigator Adam Lapid is a former detective with the Hungarian police and a decorated soldier who served in the Negev Desert during Israel's War of Independence.

He is also a survivor of Auschwitz, struggling to survive post-war life in Tel Aviv. 

His nights are riddled with nightmares; his days haunted by ghosts; his soul heavy with losses and experiences he cannot share.

When a small, faded, thin woman -- Henrietta Ackerland -- asks for his help finding her son in July 1949, Lapid listens with a sinking heart. He feels, as vividly as he feels the scorching July heat, that this is a futile mission that will end in heart-break.

The Ladies Auxiliary

by Tova Mirvis

The Ladies Auxiliary describes a year in the life of an Orthodox community in Memphis, Tenn.

The year begins in early summer with the arrival of Batsheva Jacobs and her young daughter Ayala. It ends just after Shavuot the following year.

Through that year, the community goes through tumultuous times that lead to two teenagers in the community leaving, separately and under dramatically different conditions.

Bloodlines – Recovering Hitler’s Nuremberg Laws, from Patton’s Trophy to Public Memorial

By Anthony Platt

The physical typescript of the Nuremberg Laws – from their discovery by two Jewish American soldiers in Eichstätt, Germany, in 1945 to their first public exhibition in 1999 at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles – is the focus of Anthony Platt’s riveting book, Bloodlines.

Platt, a professor emeritus at California State University, Sacramento, was on sabbatical with his partner and co-author Cecelia O’Leary doing research at the Huntington Library in 1999.

His curiosity was aroused by the controversy stirred by the Huntington’s announcement that it was loaning an original copy of the Nuremberg Laws to the new Skirball Cultural Center. Received by the library from Gen. George S. Patton, Jr., in June 1945, the documents had been out of sight in the Huntington’s vault 54 years.