Book picks similar to
The Iron Tracks by Aharon Appelfeld


fiction
holocaust
historical-fiction
israel

The Last Visit to Berlin: A Historical Family Saga Based On A True Story


Ruvik Rosenthal - 2020
    The fate of an entire family…Berlin, 1933. Erich, a Jew, and Hilde, a Christian, are a young couple, the parents of Yvonne, and owners of a small book publishing firm. With Hitler’s rise to power and the persecution of Jews, their lives are destroyed in an instant.The Nazis burn their books and, fearing for their lives, the family is forced to escape to Holland.The many hardships, however, tear the family apart when Hilde chooses to return to Germany together with Yvonne, leaving Erich, who immigrates to Palestine. Will he ever see his family again?The Last Visit to Berlin is a saga that spreads over one hundred years in the lives of the members of the Freyer family. The novel follows the most difficult moments the family went through. It tells the story of the tragic destiny suffered by generation after generation in Germany and in the Land of Israel, reliving their shattered beliefs and documenting their stubborn insistence on living a good life under the shadow of memories and loss.

Kaaterskill Falls


Allegra Goodman - 1998
    Elizabeth Shulman, a devout follower of Rav Elijah Kirshner and the mother of five daughters, is restless. She needs a project of her own, outside her family and her cloistered community. Across the street, Andras Melish is drawn to Kaaterskill by his adoring older sisters, bound to him by their loss and wrenching escape from the Holocaust. Both comforted and crippled by his sisters' love, Andras cannot overcome the ambivalence he feels toward his children and his own beautiful wife. At the top of the hill, Rav Kirshner is coming to the end of his life, and he struggles to decide which of his sons should succeed him: the pious but stolid Isaiah, or the brilliant but worldly Jeremy. Behind the scenes, alarmed as his beloved Kaaterskill is overdeveloped by Michael King, the local real estate broker, Judge Miles Taylor keeps an old secret in check, biding his time....

Focus


Arthur Miller - 1945
    It remains as chilling and incisive today as it was at the time of its controversial debut. As World War II draws to a close, anti-Semitism is alive and well in Brooklyn, New York. Here, Newman, an American of English descent, floats through a world of multiethnic neighborhoods indifferent to the racism around him. That is, until he begins wearing glasses that render him "Jewish" in the eyes of others, making him the target of anti-Semitic persecution. As he and his wife find friendship and support from a Jewish immigrant, Newman slowly begins to understand the racial hatreds that surround him. "A strong, sincere book bursting with indignation." (The New York Times Book Review)

The History of Love


Nicole Krauss - 2005
    Believing she might discover it in an old book her mother is lovingly translating, she sets out in search of its author. Across New York an old man called Leo Gursky is trying to survive a little bit longer. He spends his days dreaming of the lost love who, sixty years ago in Poland, inspired him to write a book. And although he doesn't know it yet, that book also survived: crossing oceans and generations, and changing lives...

Once We Were Brothers


Ronald H. Balson - 2010
    Although the charges are denounced as preposterous, his accuser is convinced he is right and engages attorney Catherine Lockhart to bring Rosenzweig to justice. Solomon persuades attorney Catherine Lockhart to take his case, revealing that the true Piatek was abandoned as a child and raised by Solomon's own family only to betray them during the Nazi occupation. But has Solomon accused the right man?Once We Were Brothers is Ronald H. Balson's compelling tale of two boys and a family who struggle to survive in war-torn Poland, and a young love that struggles to endure the unspeakable cruelty of the Holocaust. Two lives, two worlds, and sixty years converge in an explosive race to redemption that makes for a moving and powerful tale of love, survival, and ultimately the triumph of the human spirit.

Mephisto


Klaus Mann - 1936
    In it he captures the Isherwood-like atmosphere of Nazi Germany while telling a satiric story about the rise to power of one man - a thinly veiled caricature of his own brother-in-law. The man is Hendrik Hofgen, a character actor who in his own life plays a bizarre part in the elite circle of the Third Reich. Hofgen is publicly a revolutionary, but secretly he is a man driven by an obsessive need for power and fame. Although he benefits from the prestige of being married to the daughter of an eminent politician, he endangers his rise in Nazi society by his compulsive involvement with ‘a black Venus.’ His brilliant success as Mephisto in FAUST brings him the support of the Führer’s prime minister, who appoints him head of the State Theater. His dreams are finally realized, but the story ends on a note of despair as Hofgen is forced to confront the emptiness of his life. Mann weaves his tale with amazing skill. The result is a fascinating novel of decadence and evil.Klaus Mann, the second child of Thomas Mann, was born in Munich in 1906. He began writing short stories and articles in 1924, and within a year was a theatrical critic for a Berlin newspaper. In 1925 both a volume of short stories and his first novel, THE PIOUS DANCE, were published. His sister, Erika, to whom he was very close, was in the cast of his first play, ANJA AND ESTHER. Mann left Germany in 1933 and lived in Amsterdam until 1936, during which time he became a Czechoslovakian citizen, having been deprived of his German citizenship by the Nazis. He moved to America in 1936, living in Princeton, New Jersey, and New York City. He became a U.S. citizen in 1943. He died at the age of forty-two in Cannes, France. Robin Smyth was a European correspondent for the London Observer.

Siegfried


Harry Mulisch - 2001
    He is later contacted by an elderly couple who believe he should hear their shocking story. As servants at the Berghof, Hitler's retreat during the war, they looked after Eva Braun and consequently became guardians of a shattering secret and unwilling participants in a terrible crime. Burdened by his new knowledge, Herter must decide what to do with it...

The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon


Richard Zimler - 1996
    Just a few years earlier, Jews living in Portugal were dragged to the baptismal font and forced to convert to Christianity. Many of these New Christians persevered in their Jewish prayers and rituals in secret and at great risk; the hidden, arcane practices of the kabbalists, a mystical sect of Jews, continued as well.One such secret Jew was Berekiah Zarco, an intelligent young manuscript illuminator. Inflamed by love and revenge, he searches, in the crucible of the raging pogrom, for the killer of his beloved uncle Abraham, a renowned kabbalist and manuscript illuminator, discovered murdered in a hidden synagogue along with a young girl in dishabille. Risking his life in streets seething with mayhem, Berekiah tracks down answers among Christians, New Christians, Jews, and the fellow kabbalists of his uncle, whose secret language and codes by turns light and obscure the way to the truth he seeks.

Wherever You Go


Joan Leegant - 2010
    Yona Stern longs to make amends with her estranged sister who lives in a radical Jewish settlement. Mark Greenglass, a Talmud teacher, has inexplicably lost his once fierce devotion to Orthodox Judaism and now wonders if he’s done with God. Enter Aaron Blinder, an unstable college dropout whose famous father endlessly—some say obsessively—mines the Holocaust for his best-selling, melodramatic novels. In a sweeping, beautifully written story of the lengths to which we will go in search of spiritual fulfillment, Joan Leegant weaves together the stories of three lives in the grip of a volatile, demanding faith, and ultimately bound together by a tragic act of violence. Haunting and wise, Wherever You Go is a gripping and prescient debut novel.

Gentlemen of the Road


Michael Chabon - 2007
    Two wandering adventurers and unlikely soulmates are variously plying their trades as swords for hire, horse thieves and con artists - until fortune entangles them in the myriad schemes and battles that follow a bloody coup in the medieval Jewish empire of the Khazars.

Memoirs of an Anti-Semite


Gregor von Rezzori - 1979
    Our hero tells of his childhood: his passion for hunting, his love of the wild landscape of Romania, his ridiculous social snobbery. He leads us through his youth, and between fantastic and colourful stories of Bucharest in the late twenties and early thirties, he dissects his own complicated, at times agonizing, development as a moral creature. We are with him as the Nazis take over Austria; as his own anti-semitism - already such a mixture of belief, caprice, and compromise - is shaken to its core. And later on we meet him as a much older man, one haunted by his own protean character, by the beautiful but tragic web of memories and events that together form his history, and by the greatest love of his life, a beautiful Jewess.

The Forsaken Army: The Great Novel of Stalingrad


Heinrich Gerlach - 1957
    Only a handful of these men ever returned to Germany: Heinrich Gerlach was one of them, and he determined to spend the rest of his life telling the world how his fellow soldiers had been sacrificed to Hitler's megalomania. Though a novel, every episode, every character, every detail of description is thoroughly authentic.

My Mother's Secret


J.L. Witterick - 2013
     Based on a true story, MY MOTHER'S SECRET is a profound, captivating, and ultimately uplifting tale intertwining the lives of two Jewish families in hiding from the Nazis, a fleeing German soldier, and the clever and "righteous" mother and daughter who teamed up to save them. Franciszka and her daughter, Helena, are unlikely heroines. They are simple people who mind their own business and don't stand out from the crowd. Until 1939, when crisis strikes. The Nazis have invaded Poland and they are starting to persecute the Jews. Providing shelter to a Jew has become a death sentence. And yet, Franciszka and Helena decide to do just that. In their tiny, two-bedroom home in Sokal, Poland, they cleverly hide a Jewish family of two brothers and their wives in their pigsty out back, a Jewish doctor with his wife and son in a makeshift cellar under the kitchen floorboards, and a defecting German soldier in the attic--each group completely unbeknownst to the others. For everyone to survive, Franciszka will have to outsmart her neighbors and the German commanders standing guard right outside her yard. Told simply and succinctly from four different perspectives, MY MOTHER'S SECRET is a reminder that there are, in fact, no profiles of courage and each individual's character is a personal choice. This book was inspired by the true story of Franciszka Halamajowa, who, with her daughter, saved the lives of fifteen Jews in Poland during the Second World War. She also hid a young German soldier in her attic at the same time. Before the war, there were six thousand Jews in Sokal, Poland. Only thirty survived the war and half of those did so because of Franciszka.

Returning Lost Loves: A Novel


Yehoshua Kenaz - 1997
    In a modern-day Tel Aviv apartment complex, the lonely and isolated lives of a couple in the midst of an affair, a middle-aged realtor, an Ashkenazi Jew, and a couple whose son has gone AWOL intersect when a cleaning lady is found raped and murdered.

Farewell Shanghai


Angel Wagenstein - 2004
    A magnet for every human ambition and vice, Shanghai is a city of extremes—of dazzling wealth and wretched poverty, suffering and pleasure, and, for the four refugees, exile and safety. There, they enter the world of Jewish refugees, many of them artists and intellectuals, who must either starve or eke out an impoverished and sometimes degraded living, but they are determined to live intelligently, upholding the high culture, humor, and even, insofar as they can, the elegance of their former lives. Master storyteller Angel Wagenstein crafts an intense narrative of life and death, passionate love, and profound courage against the backdrop of the war and the millions of lives caught up in it.