Jewish Heritage Month

4 stars

The New York Times-bestselling author of A Fierce Radiance and City of Light returns with a new powerful and passionate novel--inspired by historical events--about two women, one European and one American, and the mysterious choral masterpiece by Johann Sebastian Bach that changes both their lives. In the ruins of Germany in 1945, at the end of World War II, American soldier Henry Sachs takes a souvenir, an old music manuscript, from a seemingly deserted...

4.7 stars

On a spring morning, neighbors Valentina Kaplan and Oksana Savchenko wake up to an angry red sky. A reactor at the nuclear power plant where their fathers work--Chernobyl--has exploded. Before they know it, the two girls, who've always been enemies, find themselves on a train bound for Leningrad to stay with Valentina's estranged grandmother, Rita Grigorievna. In their new lives in Leningrad, they begin to learn what it means to trust another person....

"On the same day Faye's brother comes home with a black eye, a package arrives from a relative they have never met. It's a slab of clay: some weird kind of bar mitzvah present? The strange gift turns out to be an invitation to learn a craft that has been in their family for centuries. And it's not pottery. Faye and Shiloh are driven to New York City by their grandfather for a spring break filled with magical instruction. But at night, they find themselves...

3 stars

"Deep in the Hungarian woods, the sacred magic of King Solomon lives on in his descendants. Gathering under the midnight stars, they perform small miracles and none are more gifted than the great Rabbi Isaac and his three daughters. But darkness is creeping across Europe, threatening the lives of every Jewish person in every village. Each sister will have to make an impossible choice in an effort to survive - and change the fate of their family forever"--...

2.7 stars

"Told in alternating perspectives that deftly interweave past and present, [this novel] is a magnetic, unflinching portrait of the bond between sisters, as well as a psychologically acute exploration of the legacy of divorce, the ways trauma reverberates over generations, and how it might be possible to overcome the past"--

5 stars

"A ... novel of family secrets, based on real events, about a Jewish, Ukrainian veteran with a secret that could land him in the gulag, and his wife and children who are forced to live in the shadow of all he has not told them. Yefim Shulman, husband, father, grandfather, and war veteran, was beloved by his family and his coworkers. But in the days after his death, his widow finds an old letter to the KGB in his briefcase. Yefim had a lifelong secret,...