New Books
2014-15
Fiction:
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Elsewhere,
Perhaps (Amos Oz) - Situated only two miles from a hostile
border, Amos Oz’s fictional community of Metsudat
Ram is a microcosm of the Israeli frontier kibbutz. There, held together by
necessity and menace, the kibbutzniks share love
and sorrow under the guns of their enemies and the eyes of history. |
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Fima (Amos Oz) -Fima 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 the
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, engaged in a humiliating struggle
to release his shirt from the zipper of his fly. With wit and insight, Amos
Oz portrays a man—and a generation—dreaming noble dreams but doing nothing. |
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Tunes for
Bears to Dance to (Robert Cormier) - A masterful
portrayal of hatred, prejudice and manipulation that challenges readers to
examine how they would behave in the face of evil. Henry meets and befriends
Mr. Levine, an elderly Holocaust survivor, who is carving a replica of the
village where he lived and which was destroyed in the war. Henry's friendship
with Mr. Levine is put to the test when his prejudiced boss, Mr. Hairston,
asks Henry to destroy Mr. Levine's village. |
Non-Fiction:
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All But My
Life (Gerda Weissman Klein) - All But My Life is the unforgettable story of Gerda Weissmann Klein's six-year ordeal as a victim of Nazi
cruelty. From her comfortable home in Bielitz
(present-day Bielsko) in Poland to her miraculous
survival and her liberation by American troops--including the man who was to
become her husband--in Volary, Czechoslovakia, in
1945, Gerda takes the reader on a terrifying journey. |
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What
Happened to the Children who Fled Nazi Persecution (Sonnert)
- This book is the result of a four-year, in-depth study
using social science methodology of those refugees who came as children or
youths from Central Europe to the United States during the 1930s and 1940s,
fleeing persecution from the National Socialist regime. This study examines
their fates in their new country, their successes and tribulations. |
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Nazi
Officer’s Wife (Beer) - Edith Hahn was an outspoken young woman
in Vienna when the Gestapo forced her into a ghetto and then into a slave
labor camp. When she returned home months later, she knew she would become a
hunted woman and went underground. With the help of a Christian friend, she
emerged in Munich as Grete Denner. There she met
Werner Vetter, a Nazi Party member who fell in love with her. Despite Edith's
protests and even her eventual confession that she was Jewish, he married her
and kept her identity a secret. |
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Destruction
of the European Jews (Hilberg) - This student edition of The Destruction of the European Jews makes
accessible for classroom use Raul Hilberg s
landmark account of Germany s annihilation of Europe s Jewish communities in
1933 1945. Perhaps more than any other book, it answers the question: How did
it happen? |
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A Lucky
Child (Buergenthal) - In a new edition of his bestselling memoir, Thomas Buergenthal
tells of his astonishing experiences as a young boy. Buergenthal
arrived at Auschwitz at age 10 after surviving two ghettos and one work camp.
Separated from his mother and then his father, he managed by his wits and
some remarkable strokes of luck to survive on his own. Almost two years after
his liberation, Buergenthal was miraculously
reunited with his mother and in 1951 arrived in the U.S. to start a new life. |
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From Hell to
Here (Hochman) – This book gives us a firsthand account of human strength and perseverance.
Mr. Hochman has since lived his life as a model citizen, doing great things
to give to the community in which he lives. For a person to be treated so
badly by other humans, it is amazing that he shares his story with the world.
He is a genuine, honorable, extraordinary human being. He holds no bitterness
against those who could have destroyed his life. He chose to live life. The
book tells the story of his survival. The way he lives his life tells the
story of the amazing heart this man possesses. |
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The Girls of
Room 28 (Brenner) - Brenner,
a Berlin-based journalist, focuses on 10 former child survivors, women in
their late 70s, who went through the Theresienstadt
concentration camp during the Holocaust. She notes that 12,000 children
entered the camp from 1942 to 1944, but only a few hundred survived to war's
end, and a handful of women of Room 28 in the camp's Girls' Home, now
scattered around the world, reunited for the first time in 1991. The insights
of the survivors and stories of the camp's victims are unforgettable and full
of poignant humanity, conveyed through letters, photos, diaries and
remembrances. Forced into exile and almost certain death under the Nazi
regime, the children confronted hunger, cold, terror and the soul's endurance
as many of the girls of Room 28 were slowly eliminated; the small band of
survivors is committed to keeping their memory alive. Well-detailed and
inspiring, Brenner's book, especially her heartfelt epilogue, pays glowing
tribute to these heroic survivors. |
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Witness
(Greene) - Textbooks and
historical accounts can provide a broad view of the Holocaust, but nothing
can come close to the power of the testimony of those who were there. As
Holocaust scholar Lawrence Langer writes in his introduction to this collage
of first-hand accounts, "Without survivor testimony, the human dimension
of the catastrophe would remain a subject of speculation." For more than
two decades, the Fortunoff Video Archive at Yale
University has been videotaping the oral histories of Holocaust survivors and
eyewitnesses. This extraordinary project has resulted in a documentary that
will air on PBS in April and in this companion book. Editors Greene, a
filmmaker, and Kumar, a scholar specializing in ethics and morality in global
TV production, have woven together the testimonies of 27 individuals into an
unforgettable narrative of the Holocaust: starting with pre-WWII Jewish life,
they go on to describe the war's outbreak, ghettos, resistance and hiding,
death camps, death marches, liberation and life after the Holocaust. Through careful
selection and sequencing, the editors have succeeded in their goal: "to
edit without editorializing." These painfully sad testimonies speak for
themselves, providing the horrific details of people's experiences. |
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Refuge in
Hell (Silver) - When Soviet
troops liberated the Jewish Hospital in Berlin in April 1945, they found 800
Jewish doctors, nurses, and patients that had survived there during World War
II. The hospital's director was Dr. Walter Lustig,
a German-born Jew, who had been baptized and married an Aryan woman. His ties
to the notorious Adolf Eichmann were the reason that the hospital remained
open. Lustig compiled lists of Jews--both staff
members and patients--for deportation to concentration camps. He was later
executed by the Soviets, purportedly for collaborating with the Nazis. Much
of the book centers on the complex character of Lustig
and whether he should be lauded for keeping many of the Jews alive or
condemned for sending many of them to their deaths. Silver was able to locate
and interview a number of survivors. He also relied on the work of scholars
who had researched the history of the hospital. The result is a graphic
account of a little-known episode in the Holocaust. |
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Does the Soul Survive? Spitz) -
With a blend of candor, personal questioning and
sharp-eyed scholarship, Rabbi Elie Kaplan Spitz
relates his own observations and the firsthand accounts shared with him by
others, experiences that helped propel his journey from skeptic to believer
that there is life after life. From near-death
experiences to reincarnation, past-life memory to the work of mediums, Rabbi
Spitz explores what we are really able to know about the afterlife, and draws
on Jewish texts to share that belief in these concepts―so often
approached with reluctance―is in fact true to Jewish tradition. |
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Zookeeper’s
Wife (Ackerman) - After their zoo was bombed, Polish
zookeepers Jan and Antonina Zabinski managed to
save over three hundred people from the Nazis by hiding refugees in the empty
animal cages. With animal names for these "guests," and human names
for the animals, it's no wonder that the zoo's code name became "The
House Under a Crazy Star." Best-selling naturalist and acclaimed
storyteller Diane Ackerman combines extensive research and an exuberant
writing style to re-create this fascinating, true-life story―sharing
Antonina's life as "the zookeeper's wife," while examining the
disturbing obsessions at the core of Nazism. Winner of the 2008 Orion Award. |
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Elie Wiesel A Voice for Humanity (Stern) - Few
Holocaust survivors have gained the recognition and honor as Elie Wiesel has as an author, journalist and lecturer. In
this latest biography Ellen Stern chronicles the remarkable life of Elie Wiesel. |
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Life Between
Memory and Hope (Mankowitz) - Zeev W. Mankowitz tells the remarkable
story of the 250,000 survivors of the Holocaust who converged on the American
Zone of Occupied Germany from 1945 to 1948. The survivors were ordinary
people who had lived through experiences that beggar description. Despite the
fact that they had often lost everything and everyone, they got on with their
lives and worked for a better future. Using largely inaccessible archival
material and with the help of illuminating illustrations, Mankowitz gives a
moving and sensitive account of this special community of Holocaust survivors. |
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History on
Trial (Lipstadt) - In her
acclaimed 1993 book Denying the
Holocaust, Deborah Lipstadt called
putative WWII historian David Irving "one of the most dangerous
spokespersons for Holocaust denial." A prolific author of books on Nazi
Germany who has claimed that more people died in Ted Kennedy's car at
Chappaquiddick than in the gas chambers at Auschwitz, Irving responded by
filing a libel lawsuit in the United Kingdom -- where the burden of proof
lies on the defendant, not on the plaintiff. At stake were not only the
reputations of two historians but the record of history itself. |
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Youth:
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I was There
(Richter) - A young German boy narrates his experiences
in the Hitler youth movement during the early years of the Third Reich. |
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Shadows in
Twilight (Daniels) - Shadows in Twilight is the true story of
a twelve-year-old Jewish boy and his will to survive despite the horrors of
World War II. The young reader is immediately drawn into the moving, often
astonishing reality of the adult world. One cannot help but identify with the
author’s dilemmas, joy sorrow, and fear. His heroic courage and endurance
will surely inspire today’s youth. |
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The Shadow
Children (Schnur) - Gr. 4-7. Etienne has always spent idyllic summers on his
grand-pere's small farm near a French village in
the years after World War II. But the summer Etienne turns 11, he loses his
innocence after discovering a terrible secret. He learns that thousands of
Jewish refugee children once found shelter there, but when the Nazis came,
the villagers--including his grandfather--abandoned the children and let the
Germans take them away. On one level, this is a suspenseful ghost story: who
are the ragged children hiding in the woods? Why is Etienne the only one who
sees them and hears their sobbing? On a deeper level, it's a story of
haunting guilt. It's as if the boy is seeing his grand-pere's
guilty memories, including the clashing transport trains that took the
children away forever. The prose is spare and beautiful, and the expressive
charcoal illustrations move from the warm affection of the present to the
shadowy horror that won't go away. |
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Menorah in
the Night Sky (Shore) - A beautifully illustrated children's
book, Menorah in the Night Sky by Jacques J.M Shore, draws on the miraculous
events of Chanukah - the Festival of Lights - and tells the meaningful, yet
simple story of two young boys, best friends in a lonely camp during the
Holocaust, whose faith and hope brings them their own Chanukah miracle. |
