Jewish Adult Fiction

"In a glorious debut, a boy confronts queer lust, shame, the threat of wars, and the plague of family on the day he becomes a man. At a banquet hall, at the onset of war, Adam Weizmann's bar mitzvah party turns into a glorious catastrophe. On the cusp of manhood-and the verge of a nervous breakdown-Adam braces for his special day, mired in family neurosis and national dysfunction. In a chorus of voices, a cast of outsiders chronicles Adam's coming-of-age:...

"From the award-winning author of Bubblegum and The Instructions, a daring new novel about the absurdity, the humor, and the tragedy of survivorship. A one-in-ten-billion natural disaster devastates Chicago. A Jewish comedian, his most devoted fan, and the city's mayor must struggle to move forward while the world-quite literally-caves beneath their feet. With this polyphonic tale of Chicago-style politics and political correctness, stand-up comedy...

4.7 stars

"Revisits the story of the Ark that rescued life on earth, and rediscovers the agonizing burdens endured by the woman at the heart of the story. Naamah is a parable for our time: a fable of body, spirit, and resilience"--

On Division Avenue, just a block or two up from the East River in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, Surie Eckstein is soon to be a great-grandmother. Her ten children range in age from thirteen to thirty-nine. Her in-laws, postwar immigrants from Romania, live on the first floor of their house. Her daughter Tzila Ruchel lives on the second. She and Yidel, a scribe in such demand that he makes only a few Torah scrolls a year, live on the third. Wed when Surie...

4.5 stars

A Parisian architect is paid handsomely to devise secret hiding spaces for Jews in his Nazi-occupied country but struggles with risking his life for a cause he is ambivalent towards, until a personal failure brings home their suffering.

"A poignant tale about one woman's quest to recover her family's history, and a story of loss and survival during the Holocaust. In the first decades of the twenty-first century, Consie, an American woman, stumbles upon a family letter, sent from Germany in 1945. The letter contains staggering news: Consie's great-uncle Hermann, who was transported to Auschwitz with his wife and three daughters, might have escaped. Spurred by the discovery and gripped...

"October 16, 1943, inside the Vatican as darkness descends upon Rome. Having been alerted to the Nazi plan to round up the city's Jewish population the next day, Monsignor F. dispatches an envoy to a nearby palazzo to bring Ludwig Pollak and his family to safety within the papal premises. But Pollak shows himself in no hurry to leave his home and accept the eleventh-hour offer of refuge. Pollak's visitor is obliged to take a seat and listen as he...

4.5 stars

"Tells the tale of an American woman, a British RAF pilot, and a young Jewish teenager whose lives intersect in occupied Paris during the tumultuous days of World War II"--

3 stars

"1955 in New York City, the city of progress. But in the Perlman residence, the past is as close as the present. Rachel Perlman, a child of Berlin and an artist bearing her mother's legacy, arrives in New York as part of the wave of Jewish Displaced persons who managed to survive the brutalities of the war. But despite her efforts, Rachel is unable to live the "normal" life of an American housewife, not until she can shake the ghosts of her past and...

4 stars

"A powerful new novel of identity, loyalty and true love, from the international bestselling author of The Tenth Song In 1950's Brooklyn, sisters Rose and Pearl Weiss grow up in a loving but strict ultra-Orthodox family, never dreaming of defying their parents or their community's unbending and intrusive demands. Then, a chance meeting with a young French immigrant turns Rose's world upside down, its once bearable strictures suddenly tightening like...