Though Iris Stern considers herself a modern woman, with a successful academic career and a happy marriage, she still holds steadfast to her old-fashioned sensibilities. But as the mother of three adult children, each with their own lives and burdens to bear, she often finds those sensibilities called into question when confronted with the choices her children have made.

Hedy Kiesler is lucky. Her beauty leads to a starring role in a controversial film and marriage to a powerful Austrian arms dealer, allowing her to evade Nazi persecution despite her Jewish heritage. But Hedy is also intelligent. At lavish Vienna dinner parties, she overhears the Third Reich's plans. One night in 1937, desperate to escape her controlling husband and the rise of the Nazis, she disguises herself and flees her husband's castle. She lands...

After learning the Torah by heart in third-century Babylonia, Hisdadukh cannot continue with her studies because she is female, so instead she considers practicing sorcery.

"From the two-time National Book Award winning author of The Snow Leopard and Shadow Country, a short, powerful novel about an American professor of Holocaust Studies who, over the course of a weeklong spiritual retreat at Auschwitz, is forced to grapple with his own past and a family secret: the Jewish mother abandoned to her doom by his Gentile father"--

"From the New York Times bestselling author of The Red Tent and Day After Night, comes an unforgettable novel about family ties and values, friendship and feminism told through the eyes of a young Jewish woman growing up in Boston in the early twentieth century. 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...

When her publisher insists that she write a Hanukkah romance, Rachel Rubenstein-Goldblatt, a Jewish woman with a secret career as a Christmas romance novelist, unexpectedly finds inspiration when she encounters a childhood acquaintance at the Matzah Ball, a Jewish music celebration on the last night of Hanukkah. For a decade Rachel Rubenstein-Goldblatt has hidden her career as a Christmas romance novelist from her family. Her talent has made her...

"1955 in New York City, the city of progress. But in the Perlman residence, the past is as close as the present. Rachel Perlman, a child of Berlin and an artist bearing her mother's legacy, arrives in New York as part of the wave of Jewish Displaced persons who managed to survive the brutalities of the war. But despite her efforts, Rachel is unable to live the "normal" life of an American housewife, not until she can shake the ghosts of her past and...

"It is the autumn of 1943, and life is becoming increasingly perilous for Italian Jews like the Mazin family. With Nazi Germany now occupying most of her beloved homeland, and the threat of imprisonment and deportation growing ever more certain, Antonina Mazin has but one hope to survive--to leave Venice and her beloved parents and hide in the countryside with a man she has only just met. Nico Gerardi was studying for the priesthood until circumstances...

After fleeing Vienna, Hedy Bercu, a Jewish woman living on the island of Jersey, is forced to hide in plain sight during the German occupation and to survive must depend on her own courage, her community, and a German soldier she befriends.

"Rachel is twenty-four, a lapsed Jew who has made calorie restriction her religion. By day, she maintains an illusion of existential control, by way of obsessive food rituals, while working as an underling at a Los Angeles talent management agency. At night, she pedals nowhere on the elliptical machine. Rachel is content to carry on subsisting--until her therapist encourages her to take a ninety-day communication detox from her mother, who raised...