But nothing in Martin's vast experience could prepare him for the evil hiding in Benoît's past. Martin's new girlfriend also has something to hide. As does Galit Stein, a Mossad agent obsessed with hunting down the world's most notorious Nazi war criminals.From the streets of Lyon, France - when the Vichy government helped the Nazis ship Jews to concentration camps - to the suburbs of New York City five decades later, The Night, The Day is a thrilling journey from darkness to light as these lives collide on a path of discovery, justice, love and redemption.In his riveting third novel, Kane has drawn upon years of research and a lifetime of personal conviction to deliver his most compelling work yet.

    From the courageous struggle of the Hungarian revolution, to the dramatic strife of the civil rights movement in Mississippi…from Israel’s heroic fight for freedom, to the eve of the Six-Day War…Leah’s children confronted their own convictions and desires in an ever-changing world fraught with danger, idealism, and betrayal. Their uncompromising search for love and fulfillment carried them into dangerous emotional territory—where only the strength, courage, and imagination inherited from their mother could lead them to their own triumphant destinies.

    They each face hard trials and tribulations of their own, many of which stem from growing up as children of Holocaust survivors. Haley is a peacemaker who yearns to please even at the expense of her own happiness. Abby is an angry rebel on the road to self-destruction. And, Mark, Dovid’s only son, carries a heavy burden of guilt and secrets. He wants to please his father, but he cannot. Each of the Levi children must find a way to navigate their world while accepting that the lessons they have learned from the parents, both good and bad, have shaped them into the people they are destined to become.

     Hard times are forcing Maude Fields to take in her estranged mother, Bea, whose secrets date to World War II. Bea arrives with a hand-embroidered recreation of La Tapisserie de la Reine Mathilde, the iconic 11th century Bayeux Tapestry. The replica contains clues to the identity of Maude’s father and the mythical Dream Stitcher, Goldye, a Jewish freedom fighter who helped launch the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. With the help of her pregnant daughter Rosie, Maude is determined to unravel decades of family deception to learn the truth about her parentage. With Poland on the brink of invasion by Nazi Germany, Goldye discovers—with the guidance of imaginary friend Queen Mathilda—that she can embroider dreams that come true. She becomes an apprentice at Kaminski Fine Fabrics, where she gains a reputation for creating wedding dresses for Aryan brides that bring their dreams to reality. She becomes known as the Dream Stitcher. Goldye meets and falls in love with Lev, a freedom fighter who wants to unite Jews and Poles to fight the Germans. Goldye sews images to help him. And she creates a powerful symbol for the resistance of the common people: a stitched hummingbird that spreads hope. Goldye leaves the ghetto to live with her sewing mentor, Jan Kaminski, who gains identity papers for Goldye as his Aryan niece. A Nazi commandant takes Jan and Goldye on a dangerous trip to France to decipher the symbols in The Bayeux Tapestry. The Nazis hope images in the Bayeux will reinforce Germany’s right to world domination. In California, Maude’s quest for the truth leads to family she didn’t know she had, and perhaps, love.

    What we cannot lose.A sweeping masterwork of love and loss, secrets and survival, On the Sickle's Edge is told through the voices of three characters who lay bare their family's saga: the endearing, scrappy South-African born Lena, transported to Latvia and later trapped in the USSR; her granddaughter Darya, a true Communist whose growing disillusionment with Soviet ideology places her family at mortal risk; and Steven, a painter from Boston who inadvertently stumbles into the tangled web of his family's past. Against the roiling backdrop of twentieth-century Russia and Eastern Europe, the novel delivers equal parts historical drama, political thriller and poignant love story.On the Sickle's Edge takes the reader on a roller-coaster ride through some of the most tumultuous events of the 20th century. Instantly immersed in seven generations of the Shtein family, we witness their exhilarating celebrations and provocative controversies, and gain an intimate understanding of the pivotal events in South Africa, Latvia and the Soviet Union. Neville Frankel's ability to combine historical insight and human passion is spellbinding. I couldn't put it down. --Pamela Katz, The Partnership: Brecht, Weill, Three Women, and Germany on the BrinkIn the hands of a masterful storyteller, On the Sickle's Edge pits the weight of an oppressive regime against individual tenacity and profound personal courage. Inspired by Frankel's own family history, this multi-generational epic holds up a mirror to a universal truth: all immigrants face the powerful tension between assimilation and cultural identity. We have--all of us--lived life on the edge of the sickle. --Rabbi Andrew Baker, Director of International Jewish Affairs, American Jewish Committee

     Naomi—whose husband left her for a man, crushing her small amount of self-confidence—is stuck with a dead-end job and a big house in a neighborhood filled with couples. She hates the loneliness of weekends and the empty side of the king-size bed. Miriam, an only child of parents who were also only children, struggles with the fact that she has no blood relatives besides her children. She recognizes that it’s siblings who connect the past, the present, and the future, and the closest thing she has to sisters are Becky and Naomi. Then a dusty discovery delivers a potentially lethal blow to their friendship. While two of the women fight to save the relationship, one desires nothing more than its demise.

    Once notorious, this Judengasse--Jews Lane--a passionate place infused with love and hate, with frustration, ambition and desire, has been largely forgotten. Now, in this dramatic, moving and at times wildly comic novel, Robert Mayer brings to vivid life in fictional form what is essentially a true story: how a 16-year-old girl named Guttle Schnapper married a 26-year-old coin dealer named Meyer Rothschild, bore him ten living children--and how, incredibly, from this sordid ghetto, emerged the richest family in the history of the world, before or since.

    Then she meets Roger Ashkenazi, a mathematician studying fractals and starting to question his own atheist ideas. Their insights into the world’s repeating patterns cannot prepare them for the coming disaster of their marriage—or its impact on their daughters, one an average child and the other a genuine genius. The rivalry between Judith Ashkenazi and her wildly successful sister Josie, who invents a software program to catalog every kind of memory, will fuel the page-turning plot of Dara Horn’s critically acclaimed novel A Guide for the Perplexed.String Theory takes its readers to the farthest edges of knowledge and the limits of freedom, on a journey from doubt to faith and back again. In its double helix of free will and fate, it anticipates the terrifying consequences, borne out in A Guide for the Perplexed, of asking children to fulfill their parents' dreams.

    Yonatan is a marginal writer, a fifty-year-old widower left to raise his child alone. When he meets Shira, a bestselling author paralyzed by stage fright, the thaw begins as man, woman, and girl enter a halting romance, alternately tender and belligerent, generous and withdrawn. To the accompaniment of a full chorus of voices-of friends, neighbors, ex-lovers, parents-speaking from the past as well as the present, this family in the making gropes its way toward the comfort of love while navigating through ordinary pains: a dying father, angry children, wounding moments, and a distressing difference in the writers' levels of success which they wish would vanish even as it grows. An ensemble story marked by Yael Hedaya's exquisite sensitivity, "Accidents" follows its cast through fragility, vulnerability, and joy, accruing the small events of unremarkable days to produce a grand vision of the shared life. Rarely has the fictional world of family been plumbed with such knowingness, humor, and love.

    Here sisters Ada, Vivie, and Bec assemble at their beloved family cottage, with children in tow and weekend-only husbands who arrive each Friday in time for the Sabbath meal.During the weekdays, freedom reigns. Ada, the family beauty, relaxes and grows more playful, unimpeded by her rule-driven, religious husband. Vivie, once terribly wronged by her sister, is now the family diplomat and an increasingly inventive chef. Unmarried Bec finds herself forced to choose between the family-centric life she's always known and a passion-filled life with the married man with whom she's had a secret years-long affair.But when a terrible accident occurs on the sisters' watch, a summer of hope and self-discovery transforms into a lifetime of atonement and loss for members of this close-knit clan. Seen through the eyes of Molly, who was twelve years old when she witnessed the accident, this is the story of a tragedy and its aftermath, of expanding lives painfully collapsed. Can Molly, decades after the event, draw from her aunt Bec's hard-won wisdom and free herself from the burden that destroyed so many others?Elizabeth Poliner is a masterful storyteller, a brilliant observer of human nature, and in As Close to Us as Breathing she has created an unforgettable meditation on grief, guilt, and the boundaries of identity and love.

    Vividly reimagined with startling contemporary clarity, Michal Lemberger’s debut collection of short stories gives voice to silent, oft-marginalized biblical women: their ambitions, their love for their children, their values, their tremendous struggles and challenges. Informed by Lemberger’s deep knowledge of the Bible, each of these nine stories story recasts a biblical saga from the perspective of a pivotal woman.Michal Lemberger’s nonfiction and journalism have appeared in Slate, Salon, Tablet, and other publications, and her poetry has been published in a number of print and online journals. A story from After Abel, her first collection of fiction, was featured in Lilith Magazine. Lemberger holds an MA and PhD in English from UCLA and a BA in English and religion from Barnard College. She has taught the Hebrew Bible as Literature at UCLA and the American Jewish University. She was born and raised in New York and now lives in Los Angeles with her husband and two daughters.“Original and thought-provoking.” —KIRKUS REVIEWS“Lemberger imbues her characters with a consciousness that, although taking place in ancient times, seems contemporary, because she brings such empathy to her characters… It is this act of empathy that shines through…. an alternative dialogue that reminds us that it is the stories that we tell that are civilization’s true heritage.” — FORBES“Fresh and engaging.” —PUBLISHERS WEEKLY“Appeals to readers with even the most basic introduction to the Biblical canon, but especially those whose imaginations are piqued by the mystery of an untold story.” —JEWISH BOOK WORLD“Reminiscent of Anita Diamant’s The Red Tent. . . . These beautifully written stories feel like meeting Eve, Lot’s wife, and many other compelling characters for the first time.” —LAUREL CORONA, author of The Mapmaker’s Daughter and The Four Seasons: A Novel of Vivaldi’s Venice“Stunning.” —MOLLY ANTOPOL, author of The UnAmericans“Gorgeous and captivating.” —DARA HORN, author of A Guide for the Perplexed and The World to Come“Marvelous.” —MICHELLE HUNEVEN, author of Off Course and Blame“What struck me most about these stories is their clear, assured confidence—as if Michal Lemberger had pulled apart some of the lines in the old story, spied a new story tucked in there way off in a corner, shimmied in a fishhook and pulled it out.” —AIMEE BENDER, author of The Color Master and The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

    The story of Elizabeth and her mother Jenny is remarkable for its fullness of details: the pieces of family silver the grandmother mails to Jenny, piece by piece, over the years; Jenny's vivid memories of her uncle's viola d'amore lessons; the smell of the wood floors in the family's Vienna home. It's an emotional story of what is inherited from one generation to the next.

    Initially, Paul lives with his mother–a secular, assimilated schoolteacher, who he adores until she “betrays” him by marrying the gentile André. He is then sent to live with his father–once an admired avant-garde artist, but now reviled by the critics as a “decadent Jew,” who drowns his anger, pain, and humiliation in drink. Paul searches in vain for stability and meaning in a world that is collapsing around him, but his love for the earthy peasant girl who briefly takes care of him, the strange pull he feels towards the Jews praying in the synagogue near his home, and the fascination with which he observes Eastern Orthodox church rituals merely give him tantalizing glimpses into worlds of which he can never be a part.The fates that Paul’s parents will meet with Paul as terrified witness–his mother, deserted by her new husband and dying of typhus; his father, gunned down while trying to stop the robbery of a Jewish-owned shop–and his own fate as an orphaned Jewish child alone in Europe in 1938 are rendered with extraordinary subtlety and power, as they foreshadow, in the heart-wrenching story of three individuals, the cataclysm that is about to engulf all of European Jewry.

    Moving between Lev's and Josephine's points of view, the first part of the novel focuses on Lev's experiences on the Eastern Front — both in war and in love — which render his life at home a pale aftermath by comparison. The second part of the novel takes us to Berlin, 1927–28. Now young adults, the Perlmutter children grapple with their own questions: Franz, drawn into the Nazi brown shirt movement, struggles with his unexpressed homosexuality; Vicki, seduced by the Jazz Age and everything new, bobs her hair and falls in love with a young man who wants to take her to Palestine.Unlike many historical novels of its kind, The Empire of the Senses is not about the Holocaust but about the juxtaposition of events that led to it, and about why it was unimaginable to ordinary people like Lev and his wife. Plotted with meticulous precision and populated with characters who feel and dream to the fullest, it holds us rapt as the tides of cultural loss and ethnic hatred come to coexist with those of love, passion, and the power of the human spirit.

    Thirteen years later, Ash is living as an Orthodox Jew in Israel, cutting himself off from his mother, Ellie, and his wild-child sister, Bits. But soon he may have to face them again; Alena's remains have finally been uncovered. Now Bits is traveling across the world in a bold and desperate attempt to bring her brother home and salvage what's left of their family.Sharp and captivating, Who by Fire deftly explores what happens when people try to rescue one another.