Showing titles in Jewish

The Butterfly Boy takes the listener on a dramatic, sweeping journey through two World Wars in Germany and races on around the globe throughout that tumultuous century. The Butterfly Boy is the story of Arnie, who as a small boy loses the use of his arms through polio, yet conquers this to grow up to be the "greatest mouth painter in the world". Born in a sleepy German town, Arnie rises to become one of Hitler's favourite artistes despite his handicap and his Jewish mother.

Rabbi Gabrielle succeeds the senior rabbi at Congregation Ohav Shalom and in this new role must perform a funeral for her favorite Bar Mitzvah boy, now a young man recently murdered in a remote Washington, D.C., park. This death brings her to a ghetto high school where the victim coached its struggling tennis team. An avid tennis player herself, Gabrielle attempts to keep the tennis team going and, because the police are unable to apprehend the murderer, investigates the crime. This brings her into conflict with Washington's thriving gun trade. Pursuit of the killer thrusts Gabrielle into the nation's spotlight, exactly where she doesn't want to be.

Pregnant with her first child, Diny Branson is haunted by her mother's death years ago in the Hudson River. Was it suicide or accident? Slowly, Diny weaves the many threads of Lise's tragic life - from a fairyland youth to a happy marriage, then through the travails of losing a child.

Beginning in 1938 Germany, Sophie L.: A Life in Five Moves chronicles the moves of a Jewish woman, Sophie, as she travels from war-torn Europe to South America, finally settling in the United States. Sophie's life is full of ups and downs, but the two things that remain the same are her resilience and adaptability. Leslie Berlin weaves together a beautiful narrative that effectively captures what it's like to have a home that is constantly changing.

All men are artists. After all, they have their lives. Wolf Walker is that noblest of creatures: The unrealized artist. He is also ethical advisor to the Lester & French Advertising Agency - a professional conscience. After reading an alarming entry in his wife’s diary on his fortieth birthday, Wolf sets out to reclaim his sense of identity. His resulting midlife crisis is both surreal and hilarious, poignant and imaginative. The Rose Rabbi is a fable about the relation between morals, art, and life, from one of America’s best writers of fiction.

An all-Jewish basketball team barnstorms across Depression-era America, confronting prejudice and point-shaving in this “some-times agonizing, frequently hilarious” novel (Chicago Tribune) by “the game’s foremost chronicler” (Wall Street Journal).

A prized Torah scroll is stolen from Ohav Shalom. The FBI determines the event to be a "Hate Crime" and initiates an investigation. But Rabbi Gabrielle unearths clues into the theft that lead in another direction. While intensely active in her daily rabbinical duties, her attention is drawn back 65 years to the origin of the stolen Torah in the Ukraine. The discovery brings this liberal rabbi into conflict with the powerful and well-organized Orthodox Jewish community in New York. Internecine warfare between Jewish denominations must be pacified before Rabbi Gabrielle can return to her post at Ohav Shalom.

Rabbi Gabrielle, a young female rabbi in Washington, DC, is called upon to defend an accused rapist in court, imperiling her career. She must negotiate a hostile climate both in her synagogue and in the community, while attempting to live a normal life as an attractive, unmarried woman. Here is a chance to have an internal look at the life of a clergywoman in a profession that has long been a man's proprietary domain.

A murdered servant girl is found in the palace of King Herod Antipas. The prefect, Pontius Pilate, is in attendance. The populace has already been buzzing over the brutal death of one of their prophets, John, known familiarly as the Baptizer, and scandal is in the air.

From Tehran to Los Angeles, The Luminous Heart of Jonah S. is a sweeping saga that tells the story of the Soleymans, an Iranian Jewish family tormented for decades by Raphael's Son, a crafty and unscrupulous financier who has futilely claimed to be an heir to the family's fortune. Forty years later in contemporary Los Angeles, Raphael's Son has nearly achieved his goal - until he suddenly disappears, presumed by many to have been murdered. The possible suspects are legion.

Bestselling author Howard Fast's riveting portrait of Israel's strong and beautiful Queen Berenice, whose life story is one of the ancient world's greatest romances. Throughout her rule in the first century AD, Queen Berenice is idolized by some, and hated by others. Though her fiery red hair makes her instantly recognizable, it is her mysterious charm and steely will that make her unforgettable. The daughter of Israel's King Agrippa I, Berenice is determined to free the kingdom of Israel from the shadow of the Roman Empire. But her plans are derailed after her husband, Shimeon, dies during a bloody civil war.

As a native teenager from Kansas she comes to New York in search of fame and fortune. The pursuit of her dream leads her into marriage, motherhood, a heart-rending separation and then divorce. At the age of 45, she meets a man who not only gives her a renewed sense of her Jewish heritage, but also offers her the chance for total fulfillment as a woman.

In a riveting novel of love and adventure, young Julius Meyer comes to the New World to find himself acting as translator for the famed Indian chief, Standing Bear. Young Jewish immigrant Julius comes of age surrounded by the wild world of 1867 Nebraska. He befriends the mysterious Prophet John, who saves his life when the two are captured by the Ponca Indian tribe. Living as a slave, Julius meets the noble chief Standing Bear and his young daughter, Prairie Flower, with whom he falls in love.

A witty and touching novella about life on the periphery of academia and Hollywood. Robert is an adjunct, a university lecturer commuting between two-far flung Los Angeles colleges. He doesn't have health insurance - a serious problem when he develops a violent allergy to student writing. Meanwhile he's trying to keep his car, and his relationship with a successful but skittish TV writer, from falling apart.

Roaming India in 1939 and the early 1940s, two flawed but extraordinary men latch onto each other with shocking consequences as each follows an ill-fated quest for “enlightenment.” Moses, a Polish Jew, is fleeing both the Nazis and his own failed marriage; Sahadeva, an itinerant Hindu monk, is trying to resolve his crisis of religious belief. Both men find themselves embroiled in hardship, shame, and chaos, stumbling into scandal and ultimately tragedy.

This sweeping historical novel tells the story of the Trail of Tears as it has never been told before. Abrahan Bento Sassaporta Naggar has traveled to America from the filthy streets of East London in search of a better life. But Abe's visions of a privileged apprenticeship in the Sassaporta Brothers' empire are soon replaced with the grim reality of indentured servitude in Greensborough, North Carolina. Some 50 miles west, Dark Water of the Mountains leads a life of irreverent solitude.

The Oriental Wife is the story of two assimilated Jewish children from Nuremberg who flee Hitler’s Germany and struggle to put down roots elsewhere. When they meet up again in New York, they fall in love both with each other and with America, believing they have found a permanent refuge. But just when it looks as though nothing can ever touch them again, their lives are shattered by a freakish accident and a betrayal that will reverberate into the life of their American daughter.

A delightfully funny and moving novel about the singular life of a cantankerous Jewish-American writer and anarchist troublemaker, as remembered by his daughter. In 1972, sixty-four-year-old Ezra Slavin's heart gives out at an anti-war rally. A contentious and irascible Jewish-American writer, anarchist, and inadvertent guru to discontented youth, he leaves behind a large extended family of ex-wives, lovers, and children, most of whom had cut all ties with the infuriating intellectual provocateur years earlier.

Behind the lights and glamour of Broadway, two men reckon with a shared past - one that hides a terrible secret. Jud Kramer is mounting his most painful and personal play while trying to enjoy life with his beautiful actress wife and baby daughter. Into his life comes Carl Walkowitz, a brooding, charismatic drifter who bears the scars of his concentration camp past.

Thirty years after they walked hand in hand to the electric chair, sentenced to die for giving the gift of the atom bomb to the Soviet Union, Solomon and Dolores Rubell are the targets of a new investigation - conducted not by the FBI, or some paranoid Senate subcommittee, but by Gerald Lerner, boyhood Communist and author of such classic chronicles of the American Jewish experience as Hot Pastrami Sandwich and Kosher and Topless.