Books To Read by Jewish American Authors

An exhilarating novel about one American family and the dark moment that shatters their suburban paradise, from the New York Times bestselling author of Fleishman Is in Trouble.

In Rooms for Vanishing, the violence of war has fractured the universe for the Altermans, a Jewish family from Vienna. Moving across decades, and across the world, the novel finds the Altermans alone in their separate futures, haunted by the loss of their loved ones, each certain that they are the sole survivor of their family. Spellbinding and profound, Rooms for Vanishing is a singular work that explores how — amid profound loss and the madness of grief — ghosts are made momentarily real.

The moving story of an undocumented child living in poverty in the richest country in the world — an incandescent debut from an astonishing new talent. Inhabiting her childhood perspective with exquisite lyric clarity and unforgettable charm and strength, Qian Julie Wang has penned an essential American story about a family fracturing under the weight of invisibility, and a girl coming of age in the shadows, who never stops seeking the light.

Ben Katchor retells the history of where we choose to eat — a history that starts with the first man who was allowed to enter a walled garden and was encouraged by the garden’s owner to enjoy its fruits. He examines the biblical milk-and-meat taboo, the first vegetarian practices, and the invention of the restaurant. Through text and drawings, Katchor illuminates the historical confluence of events and ideas that led to the development of a “milekhdike (dairy) personality” and the proliferation of dairy restaurants in America, and he recollects his own experiences in many of these iconic restaurants just before they disappeared.

An “absolutely transformative” (People) culinary memoir about the relationship between food and family — sustenance and survival — from a chef, award-winning journalist, and daughter of a Holocaust survivor.

An intimate and lyrical celebration of great love, great art, and the sacrifices we make for both. An homage to New York City, to romance, and even to loss, This Is a Love Story tenderly and suspensefully captures deep truths about life and marriage in radiant prose. It is about love that endures despite what life throws at us, or perhaps even because of it.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and co-writer of In the Heights tells her lyrical story of coming of age against the backdrop of an ailing Philadelphia barrio, with her sprawling Puerto Rican family as a collective muse.

A thrilling reimagining of the world of Charles Dickens, as seen through the eyes of the infamous Jacob Fagin, London’s most gifted pickpocket, liar, and rogue. Colorfully written and wickedly funny, Allison Epstein breathes fresh life into the teeming streets of Dickensian London — reclaiming one of Victorian literature’s most notorious villains in an unforgettable new adventure.

The Civil Rights movement brought author Alice Walker and lawyer Mel Leventhal together, and in 1969 their daughter, Rebecca, was born. Some saw this unusual copper-colored girl as an outrage or an oddity; others viewed her as a symbol of harmony, a triumph of love over hate. But after her parents divorced, leaving her a lonely only child ferrying between two worlds that only seemed to grow further apart, Rebecca was no longer sure what she represented. In this book, Rebecca attempts to define herself as a soul instead of a symbol, and offers a new look at the challenge of personal identity, in a story at once strikingly unique and truly universal.

Falling in love with your husband is anything but convenient in this steamy romance from the New York Times bestselling author of Business or Pleasure.

Sam and Sadie — two college friends, often in love, but never lovers — become creative partners in a dazzling and intricately imagined world of video game design, where success brings them fame, joy, tragedy, duplicity, and, ultimately, a kind of immortality. It is a love story, but not one you have read before.

A young woman and her lover are marooned on an island in this “lushly painted” (People) historical epic of love, faith, and defiance from the bestselling author of Sam. Inspired by the real life of a sixteenth-century heroine, Isola is the timeless story of a woman fighting for survival.

One spring morning, Kathryn Schulz went to lunch with a stranger and fell in love. Having spent years looking for the right relationship, she was dazzled by how swiftly everything changed when she finally met her future wife. But as the two of them began building a life together, Schulz’s beloved father — a charming, brilliant, absentminded Jewish refugee — went into the hospital with a minor heart condition and never came out. Newly in love yet also newly bereft, Schulz was left contending simultaneously with wild joy and terrible grief. Those twin experiences form the heart of Lost & Found, a profound meditation on the families that make us and the families we make.

In Ashkenazi Jewish folklore, a golem is a humanoid being created out of mud or clay and animated through secret prayers. Its sole purpose is to defend the Jewish people against the immediate threat of violence. It is always a rabbi who makes a golem, and always in a time of crisis. But Len Bronstein is no rabbi — he’s a Brooklyn art teacher who steals a large quantity of clay from his school, gets extremely stoned, and manages to bring his creation to life despite knowing little about Judaism and even less about golems. The Golem of Brooklyn is an epic romp through Jewish history and the American present that wrestles with the deepest questions of our humanity — the conflicts between faith and skepticism, tribalism and interdependence, and vengeance and healing.

From the #1 international bestselling author of The Lost Wife comes an emotionally charged story about a mother’s love, a teacher’s promise, and a child’s heart … A novel that will make readers examine what it means to live life with a full heart.

When his father dies, it falls to Larry — the secular son in a family of Orthodox Brooklyn Jews — to recite the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, every day for eleven months. But to the horror and dismay of his sister, Larry refuses, imperiling the fate of his father’s soul. To appease her, he hires a stranger through a website called kaddish.com to say the prayer instead — a decision that will have profound, and very personal, repercussions. Irreverent, hilarious, and wholly irresistible,

New York Times bestseller and winner of the Pulitzer Prize, this epic, beloved novel follows two boy geniuses dreaming up superheroes in New York’s Golden Age of comics. Spanning continents and eras, this superb book by one of America’s finest writers remains one of the defining novels of our modern American age.

In The Color of Water, McBride retraces his mother’s footsteps and, through her searing and spirited voice, recreates her remarkable story. The daughter of a failed itinerant Orthodox rabbi, she was born Rachel Shilsky (actually Ruchel Dwara Zylska) in Poland on April 1, 1921. Interspersed throughout his mother’s compelling narrative, McBride shares candid recollections of his own experiences as a mixed-race child of poverty. The Color of Water touches readers of all colors as a vivid portrait of growing up, a haunting meditation on race and identity, and a lyrical valentine to a mother from her son.

The year is 2013 and the Greenspans are the envy of Brookline, Massachusetts, an idyllic (and idealistic) suburb west of Boston. Scott Greenspan is a successful physician with his own cardiology practice. His wife, Deb, is a pillar of the community who spends her free time helping resettle refugees. But when Scott is caught falsifying blood samples at work, he sets in motion a series of scandals that threatens to shatter his family. From Brookline to Berlin to the battlefields of Syria, Hope follows the Greenspans over one tumultuous year as they question, and compromise, the values that have shaped their lives.

The Man Who Sold Air in the Holy Land announces the arrival of a natural-born storyteller of immense talent. Warm, poignant, delightfully whimsical, Omer Friedlander’s gorgeously immersive and imaginative stories take you to the narrow limestone alleyways of Jerusalem, the desolate beauty of the Negev Desert, and the sprawling orange groves of Jaffa, with characters that spring to vivid life. These stories render the intimate lives of people striving for connection. They are fairy tales turned on their head by the stakes of real life, where moments of fragile intimacy mix with comedy and notes of the absurd. Told in prose of astonishing vividness that also demonstrates remarkable control and restraint, they have a universal appeal to the heart.

A family reunion for the ages when two clans convene for the summer at their beloved getaway in the Catskills — perfect for fans of Dirty Dancing and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel — from the acclaimed author of The Floating Feldmans.

Even after she left home for Hollywood, Emmy-nominated TV writer Bess Kalb saved every voicemail her grandmother Bobby Bell ever left her. Bobby was a force — irrepressible, glamorous, unapologetically opinionated. Bobby doted on Bess; Bess adored Bobby. Then, at 90, Bobby died. But in this debut memoir, Bobby is speaking to Bess once more, in a voice as passionate as it ever was in life. Nobody Will Tell You This But Me marks the creation of a totally new, virtuosic form of memoir: A reconstruction of a beloved grandmother’s words and wisdom to tell her family’s story with equal parts poignancy and hilarity.

The child of parents who were each the sole survivors of their respective families, for Esther Safran Foer the Holocaust loomed in the backdrop of daily life, felt but never discussed. So when Esther’s mother makes an astonishing revelation — that her father had a previous wife and daughter, both killed in the Holocaust — Esther resolves to find out who they were, and how her father survived. Armed with only a black-and-white photo and a hand-drawn map, she travels to Ukraine, determined to find the shtetl where her father hid during the war. What she finds reshapes her identity and gives her the opportunity to finally mourn.

A young woman has one month and a closetful of shoes to discover the future she thought she’d lost in this captivating novel from the author of Eliza Starts a Rumor.

If you knew the date of your death, how would you live your life? Both a dazzling family love story and a sweeping novel of remarkable ambition and depth, The Immortalists probes the line between destiny and choice, reality and illusion, this world and the next. It is a deeply moving testament to the power of story, the nature of belief, and the unrelenting pull of familial bonds.