Nine Folds Make a Paper Swan

by Ruth Gilligan

Ruth Gilligan's story about Jewish life in Ireland is as beautiful and haunting as a watercolor.

She tells three tales that intersect as gently as a good-bye kiss.

Ruth Greenberg's family saved for 10 years to go to America, shlepped their belongings across the border from Lithuania to Latvia to Riga, boarded a former cattle ship and set off for Lady Liberty and the city of skyscrapers: New York.

The Weight of Ink

by Rachel Kadish

Author Rachel Kadish bridges nearly four centuries to connect two strong women who have made heavy sacrifices to pursue a life of the mind.

Starchy Helen Watt is in the twilight of a career as a professor and researcher of Jewish history. Facing retirement and in failing health, she has seen much, been disappointed often and expects little from the world.

Her heart and her hopes lift when a former student calls her to evaluate a cache of ancient documents found in cubby hole beneath a staircase in a house he is renovating. When she sees the pages, written in Hebrew, Portuguese and Spanish and dated from 1657 to 1665, she knows the find is significant.

If All the Seas Were Ink

by Ilana Kurshan

This is a collection of eloquent essays about Ilana Kurshan’s seven-and-a-half year journey through the Talmud as a daily participant in Daf Yomi.

As she read Talmud, she kept a journal that evolved into this poignant, funny, spiritual and enlightening commentary on how her modern life resonated – and clashed -- with the writings of rabbinic sages from the beginning of the Common Era.

When she began, she was 27, recently divorced from her rabbinical student husband of less than nine months and living in Jerusalem. She left behind in New York her father, a Conservative rabbi; her mother, an executive with the United Jewish Appeal-Federation of New York; her siblings; her friends and her colleagues in publishing.

Winter Journey

by Diane Armstrong

In 1941, on a sunny July morning, 1,500 Jews living in and around Nowa Kalwaria, Poland, were rounded up, forced into a wooden barn and set on fire. In the town itself, blood puddled in the streets as Jews were pulled out of shops and homes and murdered.

At the opening of this book, the main character, Halina Shore, a forensic dentist affiliated with coroner’s office in Sydney, Australia, knows nothing of Nowa Kalwaria. Although she was born in Poland, she and her mother, Zosia Szczencinska, immigrated to Australia in 1947 when she was nine.

Halina’s seemingly perfect life is falling apart. She ended an eight-year-old relationship with a married lover, Rhys Evans, editor of an influential tabloid, when he published a damaging article about the coroner’s office. Halina, misled about the subject of the article, was quoted. Her boss reprimanded her. Then, testifying in a court case against a man Halina believes to be guilty of torturing and murdering a child, the jury was unconvinced and let him go.

Seeking a break, she decides to accept an invitation from the Institute of National Remembrance in Poland to join a team investigating a mass grave at Nowa Kalwaria. Their objective is to determine if the victims were killed by the Nazis – or by local Poles. As the Polish-born president of the International Association of Odontologists, Halina is the perfect candidate for this team and has experience with similar teams in other areas.

Hunting Eichmann; How a Band of Survivors and a Young Spy Agency Chased Down the World's Most Notorious Nazi

by Neal Bascomb

The movie, "Operation Finale" (2018), has exposed new generations to the search for and daring capture of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Buenos Aires in 1960.

For all of its excellent performances -- notably Ben Kingsley as Eichmann and Oscar Isaac as Peter Malkin -- the movie plays fast and loose with a number of details and fails to do justice to the painstaking planning and great risk  involved in bringing Eichmann to trial in Israel.

While the Nuremberg trials prosecuted some 200 of the leaders of the Nazi party, the Reich Cabinet, Schutzstaffel (SS), the Gestapo and "General Staff and High Command" of the German military, Adolph Eichmann remained at-large 15 years after the war.

The Tin Horse

by Janice Steinberg

Teenage poetry, children's drawings and wartime letters from her late husband confront attorney Elaine Greenstein Resnick as she packs the contents of her Santa Monica house to move to an assisted-living apartment.

More than the mementos or the professional documents being gathered up for archives at the University of Southern California, Elaine finds herself opening memories of her childhood spent in Jewish Boyle Heights decades earlier.

Every box lid she lifts takes her back to the small apartment with her Zayde, her parents, her fraternal twin sister Barbara and her younger sisters Audrey and Harriet. Nearby were her Uncle Leo, who owned a bookstore in Hollywood; his wife Sonya, and her Aunt Pearl, who scandalized her family by divorcing a two-timing husband and refusing to move back home.

History on Trial: My Day in Court with a Holocaust Denier

by Deborah E. Lipstadt, PhD

If you’re planning to see the movie “Denial” (2016), starring Rachel Weisz and Timothy Spall, you must read History on Trial. It’s the book on which the movie is based.

The story is a courtroom thriller based on the 1996 libel suit that author David Irving brought against historian Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books for publishing Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory.

Irving, author of more than 30 books on World War II, including The Destruction of Dresden, Hitler’s War, Churchill’s War and Goebbels: Mastermind of the Third Reich, has repeatedly alleged that because no one can produce a written document from Hitler ordering the extermination of the Jews, there was no formal, organized genocide.

The Spinoza Problem

by Irvin D. Yalom, MD

In alternating chapters, author Irving Yalom tells the stories of Alfred Rosenberg, who put Hitler's theories of racial superiority into words for the masses, and Baruch Spinoza, a philosopher who was excommunicated from the Jewish community of Amsterdam in 1656 for his belief in rationalism.

Rosenberg's ideas helped the Nazis justify genocide and was hung after his conviction at Nuremberg. Spinoza was a rationalist who laid the foundations of the Enlightenment and modern thought.

The historical Alfred Rosenberg removed Spinoza's library from the Spinoza Museum in Rijnsburg, Holland, because, he said, the books were of "great importance for the exploration of the Spinoza problem."

In the Image

by Dara Horn

Dara Horn's Jewish-themed book is lush with images and paradoxes.

Reading In the Image is like walking on a beach. If you focus on the details, you see shells and cabochons of surf-blasted glass. You smell the salty tang of the breeze ruffling your hair. You feel the sand scouring your feet. If you take the long view, you see the pulse of tides and blue-green water that touches every inch of shoreline on every continent. The vast connectedness of it humbles you.

Horn’s many-layered story ripples out from the lives of William Landsmann and Leora, his late granddaughter’s best friend. (The granddaughter, Naomi, was killed in a hit-and run accident in the New Jersey suburbs.) The book looks at Landsmann’s past – and Leora’s present.

Awake in the Dark

By Shira Nayman

Awake in the Dark is a fitting book to read in the darkening days of autumn as the pagans go searching for goblins, ghosts and witches.

You’ll find plenty of monsters in this collection of short stories, but you’ll also find plenty of people surviving the impossible with courage and strength. Every character in these stories is pushed into facing a truth about themselves and their origins that has either been kept secret – or which they have hidden from the world.

An address mumbled by a dying mother, a daughter's insistent questions about her mother's -- and thus her own -- origins or straightforward instructions left following a death, tear away the veil of secrecy and force the main characters in these tales to discover or reexamine who they are.

The Fifth Servant

by Kenneth Wishnia

It’s the eve of both the sabbath and Passover, when the assistant synagogue caretaker (shammes) Benyamin Ben-Akiva is called from sleep by the broken cry of a girl’s name. It’s 1592 and Benyamin is a Talmudic scholar recently arrived in Prague from Poland.

The city is a simmering stew of superstition, ignorance, bitter prejudices and conflict between Catholics and Protestants. Emperor Rudolph II’s tolerance of the Jewish people has allowed a fragile refuge inside the gates of the Jewish ghetto. But with preparations for Passover and Easter happening elbow-to-elbow, tensions are high.

The Golem and the Jinni

by Helene Wecker

Imagine a tall, lightly tanned woman rises out of the shimmering Hudson River and strides into the crowded streets of Manhattan in 1899.

Then, imagine a flawlessly handsome, tall man mysteriously materializes after a surprise explosion in a tinsmith’s shop in lower Manhattan, also in 1899.

There you have the seeds of author Helene Wecker’s richly imagined fantasy about a golem (Chava) and a jinni (Ahmad). The golem, who was called into life just days before her appearance in Manhattan, is the creation of Yehudah Schaalman, 93, a discredited rabbinical student who has spent decades studying the darker arts of the Jewish tradition.

Girl in the Blue Coat

by Monica Hesse

At 18, Hanneke Bakker has the people-bluffing skills of a con artist, a taste for risk and a heart full of grief that should not have been hers for decades.

Her parents believe she works as a receptionist for an undertaker, Mr. Kreuk, which she does. Her more important work, though, is helping Mr. Kreuk with his sideline, acquiring goods using dead people's ration cards that he sells on the black market. Hanneke helps with the shopping and the deliveries. Her blonde good looks and quick wits help her slide by the attentions of Nazi soldiers she runs into on the streets of Amsterdam.

Wandering Stars

Edited by Jack Dann 

Jewish science fiction?!! YES! And why should we be surprised? After all, how much of a stretch is it between Noah collecting paired biological samples and sailing off in an ark to unknown lands following a cataclysmic natural disaster and the Starship Enterprise boldly going where no one has gone before?

Some of the stories in editor Jack Dann’s collection are enduring and familiar; some read like a Yiddish theater group cast to play an episode of “Star Trek.” The authors included range from Bernard Malamud and Isaac Bashevis Singer to Isaac Asimov and Harlan Ellison with contributions from William Tenn, Pamela Sargent, Avram Davidson and Carol Carr.

Waking Lions

By Ayelet Gundar-Goshen

Neurosurgeon Eitan Green gets off a grueling 19-hour shift and impulsively decides to drive away his frustrations by racing in the desert around Beersheba. He's admiring a beautiful moon when he hits something -- an Eritrean man about his own age.

As Eitan steps out of his SUV, he wonders what he will find and is paralyzed with fear “because when he takes that last step, he might discover that the man is no longer a man . . . And if the man lying there is no longer a man, he cannot imagine what will become of the man standing there, shaking, unable to complete one simple step. What will become of him.”

Bethlehem Road Murder

by Batya Gur

When the body of the beautiful and talented Zahara Bashari is found brutally murdered in the attic of an old house in Jerusalem, every secret, every squabble, every tension between neighbors and their diverse communities is exposed by the ensuing investigation.

In the background, relations between the Palestinians and the Jews are simmering into an escalation of the Intifada.

Leading the investigation is Chief Superintendent Michael Ohayon, a handsome, brooding, thoughtful man with an unfinished doctorate in history at Cambridge University.

Anna and the Swallow Man

by Gavriel Savit

How do you explain to a seven-year-old why her father is never coming back? Why she should never use her real name? Why deceiving people sometimes isn't as wrong as her parents told her?

More importantly: how do you keep this Jewish child safe during the Holocaust without leaving her fearful, suspicious and unable to connect with others when it's over.

This is the story of Anna Lania, 7, who is living in Krakow in 1939.  Her father is a linguistics professor and her mother is dead. Every day of the week, Anna and her father speak a different language, and they visit friends who speak those languages on the appointed day.  They speak French with Monsieur Bouchard, Yiddish with Reb Shmulik and German with the pharmacist.

Washing the Dead

by Michelle Brafman

This is a story of mothers and daughters, of secrets radiating across generations, of betrayals and abandonments and of forgiveness and transcendence.

Barbara Pupnik Blumfield is living a satisfying life far from her ultra-Orthodox Jewish roots. She’s a nursery school teacher at a Reform synagogue. She has a wonderful, loving, upbeat husband who is a financial planner. She has a teenage daughter, Lili, who has discovered long-distance running as a way of coping with her attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

The Angel; The Egyptian Who Saved Israel

by Uri Bar-Joseph

What would you say if someone pulled you aside and said they were writing a movie script about how a son-in-law of the late Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser became one of Mossad’s most valuable spies?

Impossible to believe? Guess again. This tale is fact not fiction. The spy in question, Ashraf Marwan, provided Mossad with valuable, accurate information pointing to Egyptian President Anwar Sadat’s growing commitment to attacking Israeli across the Suez Canal in late 1973.

The Far Side of the Sky

by Daniel Kalla 

From 1938 to the early 1940s, nearly 17,000 German and Austrian Jews fled to Shanghai, China. Until August 1938, no visas were required to enter Shanghai. Proof of ship’s passage out of Germany was enough to escape – even from a concentration camp. 

Author Daniel Kalla has set his historical novel, The Far Side of the Sky, in this extraordinary time and place. The book is the first of a trilogy that includes Rising Sun, Falling Shadow and Nightfall over Shanghai. 

Hill of Secrets

By Michal Harstein

The first sentence of Michal Hartstein's mystery novel, Hill of Secrets, reveals two of the most important things you need to know about this story: "A month before Meir Danilowitz got up in the middle of the night to shoot his entire family and then himself to death, I divorced my husband."

The speaker is 33-year-old Hadas Levinger, a dectective with the Israel Police. The husband she divorced was a man she was still in love with. The reason for the divorce was that her husband wanted children and she did not.

Now she finds herself investigating a quiet, hard-working man no one seemed to have any complaints about who kills not only his wife, but his children, ages seven, five and four months. The crime scene evidence shows that Meir Danilowitz was the killer. But what drove him to such a desperate act?