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.

The Book Smugglers: Partisans, Poets and the Race to Save Jewish Treasures from the Nazis

by David Fishman

This is story is as exciting as a spy thriller. But instead of smuggling information across enemy lines, this tale is about how dedicated band of scholars, writers and teachers in the Vilna Ghetto who saved priceless books, letters, artwork, Torah scrolls and Judaica from destruction by the Nazis.

Among the treasurers they saved were the record book of the Vilna Gaon's kloyz (house of prayer) covering events from 1768 to 1924; early chapters of Zionist Theodor Herzl's diary; letters and manuscripts by writers Leo Tolstoy, Maxim Gorky, Sholem Aleichem and poet Hayim Bialik; a drawing by Marc Chagall; and sculptures by Ilya Gintsburg.

Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love

by Dani Shapiro

Based on a DNA test she took because of her husband's interest in genealogy, Dani Shapiro discovered the man she grew up believing was her father actually wasn't.

This book is the telling of her search for answers: How did this  happen? Why did her parents never tell her? Who is her biological father? Who is she now that everything she believed has changed?

With both parents dead, she can no longer get answers directly. She instead dissects memories,  slowly making connections. She realizes why she never felt like she belonged in her family, with blond hair and blue eyes that were so unlike her relatives.

The Yiddish Policemen’s Union

By Michael Chabon

If Raymond Chandler had sat down with Isaac Bashevis Singer over a bottle of schnapps, they might have produced The Yiddish Policeman’s Union.

The Yiddish Policemen’s Union combines a noir murder mystery with Jewish messianic beliefs in a “what if . . . “ context that springs from an actual historical fact.

Chabon’s starting point is the 1940 Slattery Report that recommended that Alaska be used for temporarily resettling European Jews fleeing the Nazis. Ultimately, Alaska Territory Delegate to the U.S. House of Representatives Anthony J. Dimond prevented a vote on the Slattery recommendation from ever taking place.

Everyday Holiness: The Jewish Spiritual Path of Mussar

by Alan Morinis

Mussar is the spiritual discipline of becoming a mensch.

Alan Morinis’ book, Everyday Holiness: the Jewish Spiritual Path of Mussar, brings this 1,000-year-old tradition to life for modern audiences.

Mussar practice – a blend of study, meditation, introspection and action – was originally passed from student to teacher. The practice virtually died out with the Holocaust.

Morinis himself discovered Mussar at one of the lowest points of his life. Working as a filmmaker, writer and producer, he was riding a comet of success – until a film failed. He was forced to confront the fact that the man he had become was far, far from the man he had planned to become.

In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin

By Erik Larson

At the start of one of the most critical periods in U.S.-German relations, President Franklin D. Roosevelt found himself unable to find a candidate willing to accept the role of ambassador to Germany in 1933.

Germany was volatile and the assignment oxymoronic: do what you can to protest Nazi treatment of Jews in Germany unofficially while maintaining cordial official diplomatic relations.

Wiser, more experienced men than Professor William E. Dodd, who ultimately accepted the position, turned the post down.

Triangle

By Katharine Weber

On March 25, the 108th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire will be observed. The fire, which broke out near closing time on a Saturday afternoon, killed 146 workers, mostly women, many of whom jumped to their deaths to escape the flames. It was the 9/11 of its time.

The tragedy spurred major reforms in working conditions in New York City’s sweatshops and helped unions gain acceptance.

Triangle tells the story in three voices. Esther Gottesfeld, the last living survivor of the fire at 106, is heard from only indirectly through interviews and trial transcripts. She has kept key secrets for a lifetime. Ruth Zion is a self-serving feminist researcher with a nose for missing information and an astute ability to suggest what fits into the blanks. Internationally renowned composer George Botkin marries Esther’s granddaughter, Rebecca, a genetic researcher.

Giving Up America

By Pearl Abraham

The first thing Deena and Daniel do in their new house in Brooklyn is take down the smoked mirrors that cover the windows and living room doors. The former owners said they were needed for privacy. The next morning Deena comes down the stairs and sees a triangle of light – sun shining through a leaded glass window.

The next six months shed new light on her seven-year marriage to Daniel. Deena’s father, a Hassidic rebbe said the marriage was doomed by the gematria of their names. Deena recalculated the equations stemming from the numbers linked to the letters of their names to justify why Daniel was just the man for her.

The Zookeeper’s Wife: A War Story

By Diane Ackerman

Diane Ackerman has skillfully woven Antonina Zabinska’s writings about her time at the Warsaw Zoo before and during World War II into a book that both terrifies and delights.

Antonina, her zookeeper husband Jan, and their son Ryszard lived in a villa on the zoo grounds.

“Each morning, when zoo dawn arrived, a starling gushed a medley of stolen songs, distant wrens cranked up a few arpeggios, and the cuckoos called monotonously like clocks stuck on the hour.

Sacred Trash; The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza

By Adina Hoffman and Peter Cole

Imagine Rabbi Solomon Schechter cast in a role like Harrison Ford’s in the movie “The Raiders of the Lost Ark” and you’ll get the flavor of this true life, swashbuckling history of the treasures of the Cairo Geniza.

The Cairo Geniza, located in the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Fustat (or Old Cairo), contained nearly 1,000 years of documents and manuscripts from one of the wealthiest and most centrally located medieval Jewish communities.

Among its 300,000 manuscript fragments are scraps handwritten by Maimonides and renowned poet and thinker Rabbi Yehuda Halevi, both of whom lived in ancient Cairo during this period.

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.

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.