Books of Jewish interest Reccomendations ?

Hi all sorry to intrude but i need some help , Its getting near time for my store to supply about 5000 dollars worth of books for a Jewish book fair in the area , So im looking for input on titles that may be of interest . All Catagories of books , I believe i need more childrens titles , how ever i would like to give them at least 20 percent newer books that they have no seen as opposed to just reissuing the previous years lists . thanks in advance .

fiction or non?

Sarah's Key by Tatiana De Rosnay (Paris 1942)

Anything by Elie Wiesel Night for example

A thread of grace by Mary Doria Russell (WWII Italy)

Hope that helps

How about books by Faye Moskowitz? I enjoyed her book of short stories, A Leak in the Heart.

Of course, I imagine Anne Frank is already on the list...

k4k

People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks

The Book Thief; When a Crocodile Meets the Sun; The Zookeeper's Wife; Man in a White Sharkskin Suit. All of these are good reads with Jewish interest.

I forgot...

A YA book The Boy In The Striped Pajamas by John Boyne

Sara Houghteling's Pictures at an Exhibition. (My review is here.)

You might take a look at what's new at Spertus Institute's shop: http://www.spertusshop.org/books-c-9.html I have to say I'm mightily tempted by Jews and Shoes (if for no other reason that to get a copy on LT!).

(I second the recommendation above for People of the Book.)

The Exiled and the Redeemed by Ithzak Ben-Zvi

Written in the 1950s, by a president of Israel; writes up what is (and sometimes isnʻt) Jewish about various ethnic groups, e.g. the Ethiopian Jews. In the case of some, the Jewish identity has been disputed.

The Lost: The Search for Six Million by Daniel Mendelsohn
The Source by James A. Michener
Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer
The Secret Book of Grazia dei Rossi by Jacqueline Park
Sophie's Choice by William Styron

All are a little off the beaten track, but they come with my hearty recommendation and are very good to excellent. I think they'd all do well at a book fair.

How This Night is Different - Elisa Albert - short stories
The Ministry of Special Cases -Nathan Englander - novel about Argentinian Jews
Beaufort - Ron Leshem - novel about the IDF in Lebanon
Friendly Fire - A.B. Yehoshua - novel about an Israeli in Africa
The Girl on the Fridge - Etgar Keret - very short, bizarre stories
The Moldavian Pimp - Edgardo Cozarinsky - novel about Jews in Argentina
Adjusting Sights - Haim Sabato - novel about an IDF tank batallion
The Blessing of a Broken Heart - Sherri Mandell - nonfiction about hope after a child's murder
There are Jews in My House - Lara Vapnyar - short stories
Scream Queens of the Dead Sea: Sex! Heavy Metal! Linguistics! - Gilad Elbom - novel about a nursing assistant in a mental institute

For children, I would recommend the All of a Kind family series by Sydney Taylor as well as Hana's Suitcase by Karen Levine and Mischling, Second Degree by Ilse Koehn, although that one is closer to young adult readers age.

With regards to Holocaust themed books, Martin Gilbert has a substantial ouvre of books that I would recommend.

I also would recommend the aforementioned People of the Book.

..and I would second The Book Thief by Markus Zusak which seems to be loved by all who read it (including me). It's a YA novel about the Holocaust).

#11, I loved the All of a Kind Family series when I was a child and am thrilled to find they are still available!

Other books I enjoyed, although none of these are YA, some could be read by mature teenagers.

Her First American by Lore Segal -- story of a young woman who comes to the US as a refugee, and Other People's Houses, Segal's memoir
Maus and Maus II by Art Spiegelman -- brilliant graphic tales, and I'm using graphic in both senses
The Periodic Table by Primo Levi -- moving memoir of life in Italy before and during World War II by a noted scientist
The Family Moskat and other works of Isaac Bashevis Singer --portraits of life in Jewish eastern Europe before the Holocaust
Other works translated from the Yiddish, for example by Sholem Aleichem,Mendele Mocher Seforim, I.L. Peretz, etc.

The Joys of Yiddish by Leo Rosten -- under the guise of a dictionary of Yiddish, an introduction not only to the language, but to the humor and culture
The Mezuzah in the Madonna's Foot by Trudy Alexy -- the story of the "secret Jews" who kept their religion after the Spanish inquisition and migrated to South and Central American and the US Southwest
Out of Egypt by Andre Aciman -- the life of generations of a Jewish family in Alexandria, by a writer whose family left when he was young

Oh, definitely, the two Maus books by Spiegelman as suggested in post # 13.

How about The Wall by John Hersey? The writer isn't Jewish, but the story is amazing and beautifully written. k4k

Lots of good ideas, here. For further ideas on fiction, you might want to check out the discussions in the Jewish Fiction group: http://www.librarything.com/groups/jewishfiction.

I'd recommend many of the works of Philip Roth, including the Ghost Writer and The Plot Against America and Goodbye, Columbus.

Bernard Malamud, including The Fixer and The Assistant.

Almost anything by Isaac Singer, as already mentioned.

I believe Elie Wiesel's Night has been mentioned here. One of his books I think is under-rated but excellent is The Fifth Son.

The Chosen by Chaim Potok and My Name Is Asher Lev.

I second Bernard Malamud , the short story collections Magic barrel and Idiots first.
Grace Paley also has some great short story collections - Later the same day and Little disturbances of man. Try some Bernice Rubens novels. How about Anita Brookner and Cynthia Ozick and Isaac Babel? And there has to be some Franz Kafka and Joseph Heller and Harold Bloom.

My Father's Paradise is an interesting memoir about a little-known group of Jews in Iraq.

For even more ideas you can try playing around with tags and tagmashes through Search. Even just a search for the tag "jewish" brings up a lot of the books listed here, and since you seem to need a lot of books, tags certainly list a lot more than any one person could call to mind at a time.

Along the lines of post #19, other Iraqi Jewish memoirs I have enjoyed very much include Farewell, Babylon: Coming of Age in Jewish Baghdad, by Naim Kattan; Baghdad, Yesterday: The Making of an Arab Jew, by Sasson Somekh; and Last Days in Babylon: The History of a Family, the Story of a Nation, by Marina Benjamin.

On Arab Jewry in general is Rachel Shabi's We Look Like the Enemy: the Hidden Story of Israel's Jews from Arab Lands; and The Jews of Arab Lands: A History and Source Book, by Norman Stillman.

Herman Wouk wrote a couple of very impressive books about WWII - Winds of War and War and Remembrance - well worth a read!

They Fought Back by Yuri Suhl for non-fiction, Mila 18 and several others by Leon Uris for fiction.

The memoir, Through the Unknown, Remembered Gate: A Spiritual Journey by Emily Benedek is excellent, but it seems to be out of print -- I had to purchase a used copy from Amazon.

ETA: touchstones!! Arrrggghh!

k4k

my two cents are:
The liberated Bride by A.B. Yehoshua
This Year in Jerusalem by Mordecai Richler
Call it Sleep by Henry Roth

For what it's worth, here's a list compiled by the Yiddish National Book Center - a list of one hundred great Jewish books.

I know it's more fun when we introduce those books that we've 'discovered' ourselves, but I thought this list so applicable to the thread I had to post it.

http://yiddishbookcenter.org/story.php?n=10026

Thanks, grelobe, for reminding me of Mordecai Richler. A Canadian Jewish writer, he is most famous for The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, but many of his books are wickedly funny, especially Solomon Gursky Was Here.

Can't go wrong with Maus. I know it's already been recommended, but make sure to have plenty of copies on hand. And I haven't read it, but it's been sitting on my tbr shelf for a year now, so how about helping me alleviate my guilt by including In Case We're Separated? It looks interesting. the blurb reads:

"Spanning the length and breadth of the twentieth century, Alice Mattison's masterful In Case We're Separated looks at a family of Jewish immigrants in the 1920s and 1930s and follows the urban, emotionally turbulent lives of their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren against a backdrop of . . ."

and LT member cneis9 says, "Very interesting format - based on the poetry form sestina. Having attmpted to write a sestina, an admirable effort."

it's also a NYT Book Review Notable Book of the Year, if you need more convincing.

And it's a shame that no-one has mentioned The Plot: The Secret Story of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. While not Eisner's best work, The Plot is his attempt to document the history of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and its continued use despite have been proven a fraud countless times. And if you're a snob who looks down on comic books, well, there's an introduction by Umberto Eco :)

And check it out yourself before you include A Contract With God, also a work by Will Eisner. David Ulin: "...elaborate sagas of immigrant life, of the struggle with God and meaning — stories that attempt to tease out the complex issues of existence, issues that cannot be resolved. ... "Who knows," Eisner writes above a full-page drawing of swarming cockroaches, "why all the creatures of earth struggle so to live." It's a plaintive motif, and it resonates across these pages, as Eisner's characters strive not just to survive but to understand — a desire that, as often as not, eludes them in the end. ... Eisner's iconic status makes it hard to approach him critically; how do you take on a legend, after all? Yet to read these three novels back-to-back-to-back is to be reminded not only of his considerable innovations but also of his limitations. His visual style, developed in the 1930s, never progressed beyond a broad-strokes realism, more appropriate for the funny pages than for the nuanced work he would aspire to create. His narrative abilities, too, are uneven, occasionally gimmicky and contrived. ... Still, there remains something momentous ... a magisterial quality, as if we're witnessing the birth of a movement, a kind of aesthetic big bang."

If you have a sense of humor and isn't afraid to take a risk, how about The Hebrew Hammer? It's a movie, not a book. It's absolutely shameless and stupid and I remember laughing for about a week. I think the tag line is "The Hebrew Hammer: Part Man. Part Street. 100% Kosher." Some people will probably find it offensive, but it's never cruel. Just . . . very very politically incorrect, as far from PC as you can get without becoming President of Iran. Still, please consider THE HEBREW HAMMER. Nora Dunn was really funny.

And speaking of THE HEBREW HAMMER, that reminds me of a more serious, non-fiction work, The Hebrew Goddess. It's, well, it's about the feminine facet of G-D. Yeah, so don't include it if the crowd's really conservative. Although it's a mind-opener, so . . . I guess I'll leave it up to you to decide.

The last thing I want to do is to cross the line into unseemly self-promotion and get smacked with the dreaded red flags, but Brandeis University Press publishes quite a bit of Jewish nonfiction, both academic and general interest, and you can poke through the Brandeis tag in my library or pester me for details on any of our books.

>29 UPNE:

Oh, we'll pester you.

>30 TomWaitsTables:

Well, I can't say I didn't ask for it!

you might try recent recommended title lists from the Association of Jewish Libraries, www.jewishlibraries.org. look under Resources for book lists with up to the minute titles for children and also adults.

David Liss A conspiracy of Paper and The Coffee Trader, both are award winning books...

>31 UPNE:
:)

Post # 28 reminded me of my favorite graphic novel - The Rabbi's Cat by Joann Sfar. Don't miss this one!

Second The Rabbi's Cat. Great book.

>36 jnwelch:
yep. there's also a sequel. thanks, SqueakyChu.

***

What about The Holocaust Is Over?

Avraham Burg interview, excerpted:

"The Jewish people is the Jewish (ph?) of (ph?) memory. I mean, you have so many times, the commandments, the responsibility to remember. Remember the Sabbath. Remember this, remember that. We are people of memory, that’s part of our DNA, so to say. . . . But still, when you remember, does not mean that you permanently live and relive the past. You remember, and you move forward. What happens to us today, we remember, but we are trapped with the memory. We did not yet -- which is natural, which is normal -- it’s only 60 years after. But a day will come and we will have to go out of the catch-22. And I’m aiming for this date. . . .

I give an anecdote which I tell in my story. Here is a businessman, friend of mine. And I had a meeting with him, and we couldn’t because he went to Poland and he said, two weeks’ time. After two days, I got a telephone call from his secretary saying, you can meet Mr. Dit (ph) tomorrow morning. So I came, I said, but you told me that you are away for two weeks. What happened? He said, listen, I went to Poland. I had some business to do there. I touched down in Warsaw, I took a train. It was all snow, and we rode for a couple of hours, and it was the train, of the trains, and the endless snow (INAUDIBLE), so to say. And it all came back to me, and I couldn’t stand it anymore. So I simply ran away, came back home.

I said, wow, what a compelling -- what a compelling experience. I went back home, I wrote it down, because I collected some raw material for my book. And in the morning, I called him, I said, “Dit, tell me something. Where your parents came from?” He said, from Iraq. I said, “From Iraq? So what does that mean it all came back to you?” And it is, OK? It happened to us, even though it didn’t happen to us, and it happens to us daily.

Every day we kill and re-kill Hitler. And every day, he kills and re-kills us."