Jewish American Heritage Month--Adult Fiction

"Atlantic City, 1934. Every summer, Esther and Joseph Adler rent their house out to vacationers escaping to "America's Playground" and move into the apartment above their bakery. The apartment is where they raised their two daughters, Fannie and Florence, and, despite the cramped quarters, it still feels like home. Now Florence has returned from college, determined to spend the summer training to swim the English Channel, and Fannie, pregnant again...

"It's 1969 in New York City's Lower East Side, and word has spread of the arrival of a mystical woman, a traveling psychic who claims to be able to tell anyone the day they will die. The Gold children -- four adolescents on the cusp of self-awareness -- sneak out to hear their fortunes. Their prophecies inform their next five decades. Golden-boy Simon escapes to the West Coast, searching for love in '80s San Francisco. Dreamy Klara becomes a Las Vegas...

"It's 2024, and Tobey Harlan--college dropout, temporary waiter, recently dumped--steals from the wall of his father's house three paintings by the venerated and controversial artist Di Stiegl. Tobey's just lost everything he owns to a Northern California wildfire, and if he can sell the paintings (albeit in a shady way to an infamous tech bro) he can start life anew in a place no one will ever find him, perhaps even Oregon. A hundred years before,...

"With this brilliant novel, the bestselling author of The Mysteries of Pittsburgh and Wonder Boys gives us an exhilarating triumph of language and invention, a stunning novel in which the tragicomic adventures of a couple of boy geniuses reveal much about what happened to America in the middle of the twentieth century. Like Phillip Roth's American Pastoral or Don DeLillo's Underworld, Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is a...

Addie Baum is The Boston Girl, born in 1900 to immigrant parents who were unprepared for and suspicious of America and its effect on their three daughters. Growing up in the North End, then a teeming multicultural neighborhood, Addie's intelligence and curiosity take her to a world her parents can't imagine -- a world of short skirts, movies, celebrity culture, and new opportunities for women. Addie wants to finish high school and dreams of going...

Four young women haunted by unspeakable memories and losses, afraid to begin to hope, find salvation in the bonds of friendship and shared experience even as they confront the challenge of re-creating themselves in a strange new country. Based on the extraordinary true story of the October 1945 rescue of more than two hundred Jewish prisoners from the Atlit internment camp outside Haifa.

"Love comes home for the challah-days in this sparkling romance. Snow is falling, holiday lights are twinkling, and Abby Cohen is pissed. For one thing, her most annoying customer, Seth, has been coming into her café every morning with his sunshiny attitude, determined to break down her carefully constructed emotional walls. And, as the only Jew on the tourism board of her Vermont town, Abby's been charged with planning their fledgling Hanukkah festival....

"From the author of the highly praised Days of Awe: a sweeping, achingly beautiful new novel that moves between Germany on the eve of World War II and present day Wisconsin, unspooling a story of love, longing, and the ceaseless push and pull of motherhood. Annelise is a dreamer: imagining her future while working at her parents' popular bakery in Feldenheim, Germany, anticipating all the delicious possibilities yet to come. There are rumors that...

"On a November day in 1940, Adam Paskow becomes a prisoner in the Warsaw Ghetto, where the Jews of the city are cut off from their former lives and held captive by Nazi guards to await an uncertain fate. Weeks later, he is approached by a mysterious figure with a surprising request: Would he join a secret group of archivists working to preserve the truth of what is happening inside these walls? Adam agrees and begins taking testimonies from his students,...

"When Pru Steiner met and married Spence Robin--her dazzling young hotshot English professor at Columbia--she thought she knew what she was signing up for. But thirty years later, when Spence develops early-onset Alzheimer's, the peaceful (if ambivalent) life Pru has built for herself begins to crumble. Spence is no longer the Great Man she fell in love with, and as his needs become more pronounced, Pru finds herself short on money, overwhelmed by...