Book picks similar to
The Agunah by Chaim Grade
fiction
yiddish
diaspora
fiction-poetry
'Til the Well Runs Dry
Lauren Francis-Sharma - 2014
When she meets Farouk Karam, an ambitious young policeman the rewards and risks in Marcia's life amplify forever.'Til the Well Runs Dry sees Marcia and Farouk from their e courtship through personal and historical events that threaten Marcia's secret, entangle the couple and their children in a tumultuous scandal, and put the future in doubt for all of them.
The Netanyahus
Joshua Cohen - 2021
When Benzion Netanyahu shows up for an interview, family unexpectedly in tow, Blum plays the reluctant host, to guests who proceed to lay waste to his American complacencies. Mixing fiction with non-fiction, the campus novel with the lecture, THE NETANYAHUS is a wildly inventive, genre-bending comedy of blending, identity, and politics - 'An Account of A Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Incident in the History of a Very Famous Family' that finds Joshua Cohen at the height of his powers.
Little Brother & Homeland
Cory Doctorow - 2013
I'd recommend Little Brother over pretty much any book I've read this year." -Neil Gaiman
Little Brother
Marcus Yallow is seventeen years old when he skips school and finds himself caught in the aftermath of a terrorist attack on San Francisco. In the wrong place at the wrong time, Marcus and his friends are apprehended by the Department of Homeland Security and whisked away to a secret prison where they are brutally interrogated for days.When the DHS finally releases them, Marcus discovers that his city has become a police state. He knows that no one will believe him, which leaves him one option: to take down the DHS himself. Can one brilliant teenage hacker actually fight back? Maybe, but only if he's very careful...and if he chooses his friends well.
Homeland
A few years after the events of Little Brother, California's economy collapses and Marcus finds himself employed by a crusading politician who promises reform. Then his former nemesis, Masha, emerges with a thumbdrive containing WikiLeaks-style evidence of government wrongdoing. When Marcus witnesses Masha's kidnapping by the same agents who detained and tortured him earlier, he has to decide whether to save her or leak the archive that will cost his employer the election and put thousands at risk.Surrounded by friends who consider him a hacker hero, stalked by people who look like they're used to inflicting pain, Marcus has to act, and act fast.
The Tattooist of Auschwitz
Heather Morris - 2018
When his captors discover that he speaks several languages, he is put to work as a Tätowierer (the German word for tattooist), tasked with permanently marking his fellow prisoners.Imprisoned for more than two and a half years, Lale witnesses horrific atrocities and barbarism—but also incredible acts of bravery and compassion. Risking his own life, he uses his privileged position to exchange jewels and money from murdered Jews for food to keep his fellow prisoners alive.One day in July 1942, Lale, prisoner 32407, comforts a trembling young woman waiting in line to have the number 34902 tattooed onto her arm. Her name is Gita, and in that first encounter, Lale vows to somehow survive the camp and marry her.A vivid, harrowing, and ultimately hopeful re-creation of Lale Sokolov's experiences as the man who tattooed the arms of thousands of prisoners with what would become one of the most potent symbols of the Holocaust, The Tattooist of Auschwitz is also a testament to the endurance of love and humanity under the darkest possible conditions.
The Code Thief
Justin Conboy - 2016
A young computer hacker, Dylan Charles, is entrapped by CIA Agent John McGovern. Charles is forced to give up his expertise in order to secure the release of his brother from jail. Developing a sophisticated computer virus, to halt the Iranian Nuclear program, things get out of hand along with the virus. From Iran to Iraq to Wall Street, this action-packed story of two men who despise each other, but who must work together for the common good, has all the attributes of a modern-day espionage classic. CODE THIEF is a must read for all fiction/thriller fans.
The Architecture of Snow
David Morrell - 2009
D. Salinger. In the mid-1960s, the revered creator of The Catcher in the Rye suddenly stopped publishing and withdrew from public life. In David Morrell’s haunting “The Architecture of Snow,” an author similar to Salinger submits a manuscript after a four-decade absence. Why has he abruptly resurfaced? What caused his long-ago disappearance? When editor Tom Neal embarks on a search to a remote New England town, he uncovers the disturbing truth behind a tragic mystery that changes his life in unimaginable ways.
A Start in Life
Alan Sillitoe - 1970
A Start in Life is Sillitoe's ninth novel and follows the fortunes of Michael Cullen, who describes himself as ''a bastard'' at the start of the novel and soon confirms another meaning of the term when he leaves Nottingham and his pregnant girlfriend behind to flee to London, where he becomes involved in a smuggling ring. Sillitoe has adopted the picaresque form for this novel, yet it is full of his trademark humour.
Bertrand Court
Michelle Brafman - 2016
Linked through bloodlines and grocery lines, they respond to life's bruises by grabbing power, sex, or the family silver. As they atone and forgive, they unmask the love and truth that hop white picket fences.
Michelle Brafman is the author of the novel Washing the Dead. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in Slate, Tablet, the Washington Post, Lilith, the the minnesota review, and elsewhere. She teaches fiction writing at the Johns Hopkins University MA in Writing Program and lives with her family in Glen Echo, Maryland.
The Lost Shtetl
Max Gross - 2020
. . until now.What if there was a town that history missed?For decades, the tiny Jewish shtetl of Kreskol existed in happy isolation, virtually untouched and unchanged. Spared by the Holocaust and the Cold War, its residents enjoyed remarkable peace. It missed out on cars, and electricity, and the internet, and indoor plumbing. But when a marriage dispute spins out of control, the whole town comes crashing into the twenty-first century.Pesha Lindauer, who has just suffered an ugly, acrimonious divorce, suddenly disappears. A day later, her husband goes after her, setting off a panic among the town elders. They send a woefully unprepared outcast named Yankel Lewinkopf out into the wider world to alert the Polish authorities. Venturing beyond the remote safety of Kreskol, Yankel is confronted by the beauty and the ravages of the modern-day outside world – and his reception is met with a confusing mix of disbelief, condescension, and unexpected kindness. When the truth eventually surfaces, his story and the existence of Kreskol make headlines nationwide. Returning Yankel to Kreskol, the Polish government plans to reintegrate the town that time forgot. Yet in doing so, the devious origins of its disappearance come to the light. And what has become of the mystery of Pesha and her former husband? Divided between those embracing change and those clinging to its old world ways, the people of Kreskol will have to find a way to come together . . . or risk their village disappearing for good.
The Marriage Artist
Andrew Winer - 2010
Lying next to her is her suspected lover, Benjamin Wind, the very artist Daniel most championed. Tormented by questions about the circumstances of their deaths, Daniel dedicates himself to uncovering the secrets of their relationship and the inspiration behind Wind's dazzling final exhibition.What Daniel discovers is a web of mysteries leading back to pre-World War II Vienna and the magnificent life of Josef Pick, a forgotten artist who may have been the twentieth century's greatest painter of love. But the most astonishing discoveryis what connects these two artists acrosshalf a century: a remarkable woman whose response to the tragedy of her generation offers Daniel answers to the questions he never knew to ask.Ambitious, haunting, and stunningly written, "The Marriage Artist" tells a universal tale of a family dramatically reshaped by the quest for personal freedom in the face of inherited beliefs, public prejudices, and the unfathomable turns of history. It is at once a provocative snapshot of contemporary marriage, the recovery of a passion that history never recorded, and a fierce reminder of the way we enlist love in our perpetual search for meaning and permanence.
Cancer Is a Bitch: Or, I'd Rather Be Having a Midlife Crisis
Gail Konop Baker - 2008
I want to be big. I want to be gracious and cool. I want to be the Audrey Hepburn of cancer…” Gail Konop Baker was a runner, yoga practitioner, and lifelong subscriber to Prevention magazine. As her forty-sixth birthday approached, she looked forward to a time when she could at last take a deep breath, with one child heading off to college and the other two busy with their lives. She finally felt as if she was getting her life back.Then, right before Valentine’s Day 2006, she heard the words that would forever change her: Just to be safe, I think we should biopsy.It was the beginning of her year-long struggle with breast cancer and its fallout—one that would upstage any midlife crisis she’d fretted was waiting in the wings. “I want to feel bad about my neck. I do,” she writes. “But I feel bad I may not ever get to feel bad about my neck.” Gail was suddenly faced with the truth that awaits us all—this was her life, and she would do anything to hold on to it. As a doctor’s wife, she knew more than she should about her diagnosis and treatment. As a mother, she found unbearable the idea of not being there for the next birthday, next graduation, next anything. And as a woman who’d put her dreams on hold for years, she was determined to make every minute count.But Cancer Is a Bitch is about much more than the “C” word; it's about the outrageous challenges of marriage, the joys and unpredictability of motherhood, about figuring out what it is you want to do with your life, about wanting to live now.Funny, raw, and moving, this story will resonate with every mother and wife, and with anyone who has been affected by cancer. It is one woman’s unforgettable, beautifully told account of juggling midlife and motherhood with a rogue boob—and, ultimately, triumphing.
Middlesex
Jeffrey Eugenides - 2002
To understand why Calliope is not like other girls, she has to uncover a guilty family secret, and the astonishing genetic history that turns Callie into Cal, one of the most audacious and wondrous narrators in contemporary fiction. Lyrical and thrilling, Middlesex is an exhilarating reinvention of the American epic.
Fear of Flying
Erica Jong - 1973
But, as she comes to learn, liberation and happiness are not necessarily the same thing. A literary sensation when first published in 1973, Fear of Flying established Erica Jong as one of her generation’s foremost voices on sex and feminism. Nearly four decades later, the novel has lost none of its insight, verve, or jaw-dropping wit.
Insect Dreams: The Half Life of Gregor Samsa
Marc Estrin - 2002
Instead, having spirited him from his bedchamber, she apparently sold the metamorphosed Gregor to a Viennese sideshow, where-it being 1915-he could earn his living lecturing carnival crowds on the implications of Rilke and Herr Spengler. In this delightfully original work of imagination, compassion, and good reason, we follow the trajectory of Kafka's salesman-turned-cockroach across two continents and thirty years as he touches the most significant flash points of his time. In the process, Marc Estrin delivers a human saga of cultural ambition and compassionate insight that may be the most surprising addition to Jewish literature in a generation. What's more, the book is funny. And Estrin's Gregor is downright endearing. With its reach and substance, Insect Dreams is nothing short of a liberal education-in cultural history, musical theory, nuclear physics, and the world of ideas. But it's also a remarkable reading experience. With a scope, heart, and intelligence unparalleled in recent memory, Insect Dreams should spark wide-ranging discussions about who we're becoming, now that the swiftest century is complete.
In America
Susan Sontag - 2000
Maryna, who has renounced her career, is accompanied by her small son and husband; in her entourage is a rising young writer who is in love with her. The novel portrays a West that is still largely empty, where white settlers confront native Californians and Asian coolies. The image of America, and of California-as fantasy, as escape, as radical simplification-constantly meets a more complex reality. The commune fails and most of the migrants go home, but Maryna stays and triumphs on the American stage.In America is a big, juicy, surprising book-about a woman's search for self-transformation, about the fate of idealism, about the world of the theater-that will captivate its readers from the first page. It is Sontag's most delicious, most brilliant achievement.