A family is torn apart by fierce belief and private longing in this unprecedented journey deep inside the most insular Hasidic sect, the Satmar.
In 1939, five-year-old Josef witnesses the murder of his family by the Romanian Iron Guard. He is taken in by a Gentile maid, who raises him as her own son. Five years later, Josef rescues a young girl, Mila, whose parents are killed in the wake of Nazi deportations. Josef helps Mila find safety...

"In a delightful new romantic comedy from Elinor Lipman, one woman's trash becomes another woman's treasure, with deliriously entertaining results. Daphne Maritch doesn't quite know what to make of the heavily annotated high school yearbook she inherits from her mother, who held this relic dear. Too dear.The late June Winter Maritch was the teacherto whom the class of '69 had dedicated itsyearbook, and in turn she went on toattend every reunion, scribbling...

Efraim "Fima" Nisan lives in Jerusalem, but feels he ought to be somewhere else. In his life he has had secret love affairs, good ideas, and written a book of poems that aroused expectations. He has thought about the purpose of the universe and where his beloved country lost its way. He has felt longings of all sorts, and the constant desire to pen a new chapter. And here he is now, in his early fifties in a shabby apartment on a gloomy wet morning,...

"What if there was a town that Hitler missed? For over fifty years the tiny Jewish shtetl of Kreskol has existed virtually untouched and unchanged. Spared of the Holocaust and Cold War, Kreskol has enjoyed an isolated peace. But when a marriage dispute spirals out of control, Kreskol is suddenly rediscovered and brought into the 21st Century. Pesha is in a loveless, arranged marriage and summons the courage to escape Kreskol on foot. But when her...

In this Yiddish classic, a luftmentsh (innocent optimist) shlimazl from the shtetl of Kasrilevka tries to succeed in business (he should live so long) in the big-city world of Yehupetz (also known as Kiev). Told in the form of letters exchanged with his dear wife and modest helpmeet Sheine, with vitriolic postscript commentary from his shviger mother-in-law (feh!).

On August 12, 1952, Russia's greatest Jewish writers were secretly executed by Stalin. In this remarkable blend of history and imagination, Paltiel Kossover meets the same fate but, unlike his real-life counterparts, he is permitted to leave a written testament. From a Jewish boyhood in pre-revolutionary Russia, Paltiel traveled down a road that embraced Communism, only to return to Russia and discover a Communist Party that had become his mortal...

It's 1995, and Louise Shapiro has left California to start a new life in rural Michigan with her husband, Richard, and their daughter, Molly. Within weeks, an explosion destroys the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, leaving innocent civilians dead and maimed. As the accusations and conspiracy theories proliferate- about Arabs, Jews, Christians, the FBI, the government- Louise discovers startling secrets about her neighbors, her colleagues,...

"From the internationally acclaimed author of A Woman in Jerusalem, a novel about a musician who returns home and finds the rhythm of her life interrupted and forever changed Noga, 42, a divorcee from Jerusalem, is a harpist with an orchestra in the Netherlands. When her father dies suddenly, she is summoned home by her brother to help make decisions in urgent family and personal matters, among them whether to keep a rent-controlled apartment even...

For most of us, remembering the Holocaust requires effort; we listen to stories, watch films, read histories. But the people who came to be called "survivors" could not avoid their memories. Sol Nazerman, protagonist of Edward Lewis Wallant's The Pawnbroker, is one such sufferer. At 45, Nazerman, who survived Bergen-Belsen although his wife and children did not, runs a Harlem pawnshop. But the operation is only a front for a gangster who pays Nazerman...