Deborah, Golda, and Me: Being Female and Jewish in America


Letty Cottin Pogrebin - 1991
    A leading feminist activist, author, and nationally known lecturer writes of her struggle to integrate a feminist head with a Jewish heart.

The Kalinka Affair: A Father's Hunt for His Daughter's Killer


Joshua Hammer - 2012
    Suspicions of murder began to surround her stepfather, a German doctor named Dieter Krombach, but Bamberski could only hope the truth would prevail. But when the authorities gave up their pursuit, he knew he had to act. So against the odds, Bamberski embarked on an obsessive quest to capture and punish his daughter’s killer. In this riveting true story by Joshua Hammer, a father travels to the limits of law in search of justice.

The Good, the Mad and the Ugly: The Andy Morrison Story


Andy Morrison - 2011
    The autobiography of the most troubled footballer of modern times.

Cold Hands, Warm Heart: One Woman's Story of Ten Years in the Alaskan Wilderness


Marilyn Moore-Shaver - 2016
    Moore-Shaver, with her husband and children, spent ten years in the Alaskan bush where they lived a simple but satisfying lifestyle with all the attendant challenges and adventures. She and her family lived in the Interior of Alaska where winter temperature drop as low as -60 degrees or more and stay there for weeks on end. The summers are three months long, and everything must be done during that short season to prepare for the following winter. She tells of encounters with bears, surviving spring floods, and setting her husband's broken leg while looking at a first-aid book. Her desire to learn the skills of bush life led her to tan moose hides, catch fish in nets, snare rabbits for dinner, and much more, most of which was learned through trial and error. The average contact with others was about every three months when a friend might fly out to visit and maybe bring mail. Loneliness was never a problem, says the author, but it was exciting to see someone after a long stretch of isolation. Growing up near Boston, Massachusetts, hardly prepared Ms. Moore-Shaver for such a rough and primitive life, but her love of nature and her interest in learning all she could about this back-to-basics way of life come through in the pages of her book. She tells her story just as it happened and includes journal entries she made at the time.

The Riddle Of Babi Yar: The True Story Told by a Survivor of the Mass Murders in Kiev, 1941-1943


Ziama Trubakov - 2013
    When all Jews were ordered to appear at a gathering point, he didn’t go and persuaded others not to go either. Pretending to be a collaborator for the occupation authorities, he kept on saving lives. He rode his bike to nearby villages to barter goods for his family, at the same time trying to get in touch with partisan units. Like a true ‘blade runner’, he always had a narrow escape until a traitor denounced him. Even then, in the concentration camp, forced to exhume and burn the corpses of those massacred in the first months of the occupation, he didn’t think of death – he thought of freedom. And he led others with him - out from the camp, towards life and a happy future – just a day before their scheduled execution. In the night streets of Kiev, hiding from patrols, they made their way home, to reunite with their families. A dreamlike story, but a true one. Some say, Ziama never existed and the story is a fiction. To contradict this statement and to prove the authenticity of the described events, I found transcripts of the KGB interrogations of the witnesses and of those guilty of the crimes committed in Babi Yar, Kiev, in 1941-1943. This is the truth the world needs to know. The further in time we are from the Holocaust, the more denial and more lies we encounter. So that no Jew would ever have to hide under a Gentile name, so that no Jew would ever have his life threatened for the mere fact that he is a Jew – read and spread Ziama’s message to the world. And if the worst happens and History repeats itself – let Ziama’s heroism be an example to all of us how to fight back and not allow anything to destroy us.Here at last, after 70 years, the final truth about Babi Yar.

Arik: The Life of Ariel Sharon


David Landau - 2013
    The life of Ariel Sharon spans much of modern Israel’s history. A commander in the Israeli Army from its inception in 1948, Sharon participated in the 1948 War of Independence, played decisive roles in the 1956 Suez War and the Six-Day War of 1967, and is credited here with the shift in the outcome of the Yom Kippur War of 1973. After leaving the professional army, Sharon became a political leader and served in numerous governments, most prominently as the defense minister during the 1982 Lebanon War in which he bore “personal responsibility,” according to the state’s commission of inquiry, for massacres of Palestinian civilians by Lebanese militia. As a general and as a politician, he championed the construction of Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank and Gaza. But as prime minister, he performed a dramatic reversal: orchestrating Israel’s unilateral disengagement from the Gaza Strip. Landau brilliantly chronicles Sharon’s surprising about-face, combining the immediacy of firsthand reportage with the analysis and independent insight of a historian’s perspective. Sharon suffered a stroke in January 2006 and remains in a persistent vegetative state. This biography recounts the life of the man who is considered by many to be Israel’s greatest military leader and political statesman, illustrating how Sharon’s leadership transformed Israel, and how his views were shaped by the changing nature of Israeli society.

Ben-Gurion: A Political Life


Shimon Peres - 2011
    Although the state that Ben-Gurion would lead through war and peace had not yet declared its precarious independence, the “Old Man,” as he was called even then, was already a mythic figure. Peres, who came of age in the cabinets of Ben-Gurion, is uniquely placed to evoke this figure of stirring contradictions—a prophetic visionary and a canny pragmatist who early grasped the necessity of compromise for national survival. Ben-Gurion supported the 1947 United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine, though it meant surrendering a two-thousand-year-old dream of Jewish settlement in the entire land of Israel. He granted the Orthodox their first exemptions from military service despite his own deep secular commitments, and he reached out to Germany in the aftermath of the Holocaust, knowing that Israel would need as many strong alliances as possible within the European community. A protégé of Ben-Gurion and himself a legendary figure on the international political stage, Shimon Peres brings to his account of Ben-Gurion’s life and towering achievements the profound insight of a statesman who shares Ben-Gurion’s dream of a modern, democratic Jewish nation-state that lives in peace and security alongside its Arab neighbors. In Ben-Gurion, Peres sees a neglected model of leadership that Israel and the world desperately need in the twenty-first century.

After Anatevka: A Novel Inspired by Fiddler on the Roof


Alexandra Silber - 2017
    In stories originally written by Sholem Aleichem and then made world-famous in the celebrated musical Fiddler on the Roof, Tevye, his wife Golde, and their five daughters dealt with the outside influences that were encroaching upon their humble lives. But what happened to those remarkable characters after the curtain fell?In After Anatevka, Alexandra Silber picks up where “Fiddler” left off. Second-eldest daughter Hodel takes center stage as she attempts to join her Socialist-leaning fiancé Perchik to the outer reaches of a Siberian work camp. But before Hodel and Perchik can finally be together, they both face extraordinary hurdles and adversaries—both personal and political—attempting to keep them apart at all costs.A love story set against a backdrop of some of the greatest violence in European history, After Anatevaka is a stunning conclusion to a tale that has gripped audiences around the globe for decades.

Forbidden Strawberries


Cipora Hurwitz - 2010
    All at once the life of her tranquil family became a Hell. Forbidden Strawberries is the riveting auto-biography of Cipora Hurwitz, an innocent young girl caught up in the Maelstrom of the Holocaust.Her eldest brother survived the war by the skin of his teeth by fleeing to the Soviet Union. The second brother was murdered when only sixteen. Her parents, by great efforts, succeeded in hiding their little daughter and thereby save her life. Devastatingly, they themselves were unable to escape the hands of the murderers.Cipora, as yet a young child and an orphan, was miraculously saved after surviving the Budzyn camps and the Majdanek extermination camp. The author relates the story of her life during the Holocaust to a delegation of Hashomer Hatzair youth and Israeli High School students on a mission to the death camps in Poland. In Forbidden Strawberries, Cipora presents her testimony on what transpired to her family and friends who were exterminated, thus paying tribute to their memory.

Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots


Deborah Feldman - 2012
    It was stolen moments spent with the empowered literary characters of Jane Austen and Louisa May Alcott that helped her to imagine an alternative way of life. Trapped as a teenager in a sexually and emotionally dysfunctional marriage to a man she barely knew, the tension between Deborah’s desires and her responsibilities as a good Satmar girl grew more explosive until she gave birth at nineteen and realized that, for the sake of herself and her son, she had to escape.

The Lake on Fire


Rosellen Brown - 2018
    Dazzled by the lore of the American dream, Chaya and her strange, brilliant, young brother Asher stow away to Chicago; what they discover there, however, is a Gilded Age as empty a facade as the beautiful Columbian Exposition luring thousands to Lake Michigan's shore. The pair scrapes together a meager living--Chaya in a cigar factory; Asher, roaming the city and stealing books and jewelry to share with the poor, until they find different paths of escape. An examination of family, love, and revolution, this profound tale resonates eerily with today's current events and tumultuous social landscape. The Lake on Fire is robust, gleaming, and grimy all at once, proving that celebrated author Rosellen Brown is back with a story as luminous as ever.

Invisible Jews: Surviving the Holocaust in Poland


Eddie Bielawski - 2017
    Not a propitious time and place for a Jewish child to be born.One memory that has been etched indelibly in my mind is the sight of the Nazi army marching toward Russia. Our house was located on the main road leading to the Russian frontier. Day and night they marched - soldiers, trucks, tanks, and more soldiers, in a never ending line - an invincible force. I remember my father, holding me in his arms, saying to my mother, "Who is going to stop them? Certainly not the Russians." One night, my father had a dream. In this dream he saw what he had to do: where to build the bunker, how to build it, and even its dimensions.He would build a bunker under a wooden storage shed behind the house. It would be covered with boards, on top of which would be placed soil and bits of straw which would render it invisible. In order to camouflage the entrance, he would construct a shallow box and fill it with earth and cover it with straw so that it would be indistinguishable from the rest of the earthen floor. Air would be supplied through a drain pipe buried in the earth. This was to be our Noah's Ark that would save us from the initial deluge. It took my father about three weeks to finish the job. When he was done, he took my mother and sister into the shed and asked them if they could find the trap door. When they could not, he was satisfied.My mother prepared dry biscuits, jars of jam made out of beets, some tinned goods such as sardines, some sugar and salt. We placed two buckets in the bunker. One bucket was filled with water, the other bucket was empty and would serve as the latrine. We also took down some blankets, a couple of pillows and some warm clothing. We were ready.For three long years, starting in 1941 when the Nazis started the deportations and mass killings, we hid in secret bunkers, dug in fields, under sheds, or constructed in barn lofts. It seems that the only way that a Jew could survive in wartime Poland was to become invisible. So we became invisible Jews.

When it was Great: A Dealer's Autobiographic Story (Memoirs From Las Vegas)


Jim Sinay - 2015
    His “Uncle” Ed Pucci, who was Frank Sinatra’s bodyguard and a close family friend, set him up with an entry level dealer’s job in Vegas. Over the next three decades, Jimmy experienced all Las Vegas had to offer. He dealt craps to famous gangsters in a private game, he interacted with John Wayne, Elvis Presley, Redd Foxx, Debbie Reynolds, Louis Prima and other celebrities. Jimmy was a confirmed bachelor who lived the high life with the ladies, although at times his carousing nearly cost him his life. He saw hundreds of thousands of dollars bet on one roll of the dice, he caught gambling cheaters and had run ins with some very nasty types. ˃˃˃ Folktales from a bygone era Jimmy’s stories are folktales from a bygone era, the 1960s, 70s and 80s when Vegas was still a relatively small town. Back in the day, the “joints” were ruled by men whose names all ended in vowels and there was a good time to be had 24/7. When It Was Great will make you laugh and touch your heart, but most of all it will take you back to the Las Vegas of yesterday, when the Rat Pack played at the Sands, Elvis headlined at the Hilton and working stiffs like Jimmy partied like there was no tomorrow. Scroll up and grab a copy today.

Where Am I?: My Autobiography


Phil Tufnell - 2015
    Cricket's dressing-room clown is now broadcasting's joker in the pack. Whether it's dining on mealworms on I'm a Celebrity, displaying his ballroom fleckle on Strictly Come Dancing or causing weekly mayhem for the long-suffering host Sue Barker on A Question of Sport, millions of us enjoy Tuffers' lust for life and endearing sense of humour.In Where Am I?, Phil gamely tries to make sense of the wonderful roller-coaster he has been riding these last dozen years, delighting fans with a treasure trove of wonderful stories about the places he has been, the people he has met, the 'things' he has been asked to do but - most of all - the sheer enormous joy he has had doing it all.

Henry Ford and the Jews: The Mass Production Of Hate


Neil Baldwin - 2001
    How and why did this quintessential American folk-hero and pioneering industrialist become one of the most obsessive anti-Semites of our time-a man who devoted his immense financial resources to publishing a pernicious forgery, The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion? Once Henry Ford's virulent media campaign against the Jews took off during the "anxious decade" following World War I, how did America's splintered Jewish community attempt to cope with the relentless tirade conducted for ninety-one consecutive weeks in the automobile manufacturer's personal newspaper, The Dearborn Independent? What were the repercussions of Ford's Jew-hatred extending deeply into the 1930s? Drawing upon previously-uncited oral history transcripts, archival correspondence, and family memoirs, Neil Baldwin answers these and other questions, examining the conservative biases of the men at the inner circle of the Ford Motor Company and disentangling painful ideological struggles among an elite Jewish leadership reluctantly pitted against the clout and popularity of "The Flivver King."