Lake Bluff Library Adult Reading Lists: Jewish Stories

A dramatic misinterpretation of the Jewish tradition has shaped the history of the West: Christianity is the religion of love, and Judaism the religion of law. In the face of centuries of this widespread misrepresentation, Rabbi Shai Held recovers the heart of the Jewish tradition, offering the radical and moving argument that love belongs as much to Judaism as it does to Christianity.
(Description from NoveList)

This inventive new biography of the legendary physicist examines his complex and contradictory nature-from brilliant scientist to charming lothario and life of the party-in 99 vignettes based on intriguingly different particles.
(Description from catalog)

Organized chronologically and covering every short film, television episode, and blockbuster movie that Steven Spielberg has ever directed, Steven Spielberg All the Films tells the behind-the-scenes stories of how each project was conceived, cast, and produced. Spanning more than fifty years, this book details every aspect of the creative processes that resulted in some of the most memorable and celebrated films of all time, including E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Jaws, Jurassic Park, The Color Purple, Schindler's List, and Saving Private Ryan as well as newer work such as Lincoln, The Post, and The Fabelmans.
(Description from catalog)

As an orphaned survivor and witness to the horrors of Auschwitz, Elie Wiesel (1928-2016) compelled the world to confront the Holocaust with his searing memoir Night. How did this soft-spoken man from a small Carpathian town become such an influential figure on the world stage? Drawing on Wiesel's prodigious literary output and interviews with his family, friends, scholars, and critics, Joseph Berger seeks to answer this question.
(Description from catalog)

Follows the parallel journeys of Holocaust survivor Eddie Willner and his friend Mike, who endured years in Nazi death camps, and the American soldiers of Company D, whose harrowing wartime experiences culminated in the unexpected rescue of the two boys in war-torn Europe.
(Description from NoveList)

Sir Nicholas Winton rescued 669 Jewish children from Nazi occupied Czechoslovakia at the brink of World War II. This book explores the 106-year life of an incredible humanitarian, a man whose astounding feats only came to public light decades later. His legacy is to encourage us all to act when we see injustice or need, and to remind us that every one of us can change the world for the better.
(Description from NoveList)

In 1983, a wealthy businessman named Carl Fletcher is kidnapped from his driveway in the nicest part of Long Island, brutalized, and held for ransom. He is returned to his wife and kids less than a week later, only slightly the worse for wear, and the family begins the hard work of trying to move on with their lives and resume their prized places in the saga of the American dream, coming to understand that though their money may have been what put them in danger, it is also what guaranteed them their safety in the end.
(Description from catalog)

1940, Emilia Romagna. Lili and Esti have been best friends since meeting at the University of Ferrara. Mussolini's Racial Laws have deemed Lili and Esti descendants of an 'inferior' Jewish race, but life somehow goes on--until Germany invades northern Italy, and the friends find themselves in occupied territory.
(Description from NoveList)

Germany, 1946: Emmy Clarke is a librarian not a soldier. But that doesn’t stop the Library of Congress from sending her overseas to Germany to help the Monuments Men retrieve and catalog precious literature that was plundered by the Nazis. The Offenbach Archival Depot and its work may get less attention than returning art to its rightful owners, but for Emmy, who sees the personalized messages on the inside of the books and the notes in margins of pages, it feels just as important.
(Description from NoveList)

Ana will never forget her mother's face when she and her baby brother,Oskar, were sent out of their Polish ghetto and into the arms of a Christian friend. For Oskar, though, their new family is the only one he remembers. When a woman from a Jewish reclamation organization seizes them, believing she has their best interest at heart, Ana sees an opportunity to reconnect with her roots, while Oskar sees only the loss of the home he loves.
(Description from catalog)

There was a time when the family Künstler lived in the fairy-tale city of Vienna. Circumstances transformed that fairy tale into a nightmare, and in 1939 the Künstlers found their way out of Vienna and into a new fairy tale: Los Angeles, California, United States of America. An ill-timed visit forces twentysomething New Yorker Julian to shelter in place in Venice Beach with his glamorous and eccentric ninety-three-year-old grandmother, Mamie Künstler, and her inscrutable housekeeper.
(Description from catalog)