Fiction

Pearl Abraham, The Romance Reader.
A young Hasidic girl escapes her restrictive environment into the world of romance novels and dreams of a different life.

Maggie Anton, Rashi's Daughters: Joheved.
In medieval France, a Talmudic scholar with no sons teaches his three daughters even though it was forbidden.

Aharon Appelfeld, The Iron Tracks.
A man living a migratory life on the railroads of Central Europe collects antiques and hunts for the man who killed his parents in the Holocaust.

Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March.
A poor youth in Chicago during the Depression suffers hard knocks as he makes his way in the world but bounces back.

David Bezmozgis, Natasha and Other Stories.
Interconnected stories about a boy coming of age in a family of Latvian Jews who emigrate to Canada from the Soviet Union in the 1980s.

Jenna Blum, Those Who Save Us.
A professor researching women's roles in Nazi Germany uncovers secrets from her mother's past.

Hortense Calisher, Sunday Jews.
A family story about the five children of a Jewish woman and a Catholic man.

Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay.
An artist who needs money to bring his family out of Nazi-occupied Prague collaborates with his American cousin to create a comic book hero.

Paula Cohen, Jane Austen in Boca.
Pride and prejudice stand in the way of romance in a Boca Raton retirement community.

Henry Denker, Horowitz & Mrs. Washington.
A man who had a stroke after being mugged is determined not to like the African-American nurse hired by his daughter.

Anita Diamant, The Red Tent.
Jacob and Leah’s daughter Dinah—briefly mentioned in Genesis when her brothers killed her intended husband—is given a story of her own.

Nathan Englander, For the Relief of Unbearable Urges.
Nine short stories explore the collision of Jewish law and tradition with secular realities.

Joseph Epstein, Fabulous Small Jews.
A collection of stories about people who reach turning points in their lives.

Nomi Eve, The Family Orchard.
A family leaves Eastern Europe in 1837 and settles in Jerusalem, where each successive generation adds a unique chapter to their rich family history.

Jonathan Foer, Everything Is Illuminated.
A writer trying to find the woman who saved his grandfather from the Nazis travels to the Ukraine along with a translator.

Jennifer Gilmore, Golden Country.
A door-to-door salesman in Brooklyn who invented a cleaning product objects to his daughter’s engagement to the son of a gangster.

Myla Goldberg, Bee Season.
A girl ignored by her family becomes the center of attention when she starts winning spelling bees.

Judy Goldman, The Slow Way Back.
A Southern woman translates some of her mother’s letters from Yiddish and unravels a family secret.

Gloria Goldreich, That Year of Our War.
A girl whose mother died & whose father is serving in the army is left in the care of her aunts and uncles.

Rebecca Goldstein, Mazel.
A Jewish actress in Warsaw begins anew in America, where her legacy of endures in her daughter and granddaughter.

Allegra Goodman, Kaaterskill Falls.
Three Orthodox families at the summer resort of Kaaterskill Falls are tugged between religious tradition and the secular world.

Joanna Goodman, You Made Me Love You.
Three sisters raised in a creative Jewish family in Toronto try to follow their dreams.

Noah Gordon, The Last Jew.
A teenage boy who witnessed his father’s and brother’s deaths during the Inquisition hides in Spain, determined to remain a Jew.

Philippa Gregory, The Queen's Fool.
A Jewish girl who escaped the Inquisition becomes a Fool at the English court and is caught up in the rivalry between Queen Mary and Princess Elizabeth.

Joel Gross, The Books of Rachel.
A diamond necklace is passed to daughters named Rachel through generations of a family from the Inquisition to the 20th century.

Joyce Hackett, Disturbance of the Inner Ear.
A former child prodigy finds herself teaching cello in Italy and traces her late father’s roots back to a prison orchestra in Theresienstadt.

Pete Hamill, Snow in August.
In 1940s Brooklyn, an Irish-Catholic boy and an elderly rabbi learn from each other while dealing with the prejudice of their neighbors.

Ehud Havazelet, Like Never Before.
Ten interrelated stories about a young man growing up in the 1960s who rebels against the heritage brought by his father from the Old World.

Robert Hill, When All Is Said and Done.
In the 1960s, a Jewish couple move to suburbia and deal with neighbors, efforts to have children, and a lingering illness.

Dara Horn, In the Image.
After the sudden death of their teenage granddaughter, an immigrant couple’s lives become entwined with that of the girl’s best friend.

Alan Isler, The Prince of West End Avenue.
A man in an Upper West Side retirement home is reminded of his past when a woman resembling a lost love appears and a cherished letter disappears.

Stephanie Kallos, Broken for You.
An elderly woman with a mansion full of antiques takes in a young woman in search of her wayward boyfriend.

Andrew Kane, Rabbi, Rabbi.
An Orthodox man groomed by his parents to be a rabbi but uncertain of his own desires falls in love with a woman who wants to become a rabbi.

Ruchama King, Seven Blessings.
Two matchmakers in Jerusalem try to find mates for Orthodox men and women while dealing with their own marriages.

Binnie Kirshenbaum, Hester among the Ruins.
A Jewish-American biographer travels to Germany to research the past of a German historian and falls in love with the subject of her book.

Lowell Komie, Last Jewish Shortstop in America.
A fortyish, divorced father of two, behind on his alimony and child support, builds a gigantic Hall of Fame for Jewish sports heroes on the North Shore.

Daniela Kuper, Hunger and Thirst.
In the 1950s on Chicago’s north side, a girl tries to hold her family together through her father’s drinking and her mother’s obsession with fashion.

Adam Langer, Crossing California.
In 1979, changes occur in the lives of three families living in Rogers Park on the dividing line between the prosperous professionals and the working class.

Michael Lavigne, Not Me.
A man caring for his father who has Alzheimer’s discovers a secret in his father's journals.

Syd Lieberman, Streets and Alleys.
Humorous moments in the life of a man who grew up in Albany Park on Chicago's northwest side.

Elinor Lipman, The Inn at Lake Devine.
A young woman is determined to do battle with an innkeeper who refuses to accommodate her family because they are Jewish.

Arnost Lustig, Lovely Green Eyes.
A Jewish girl who escaped death in Auschwitz by passing as a gentile and prostituting herself to soldiers feels survivor's guilt.

Carol Magun, Circling Eden.
An American college student discovers herself during a year abroad in Jerusalem at the time of the Yom Kippur War of 1973.

Bernard Malamud, The Fixer.
Wrongfully accused of the murder of a Christian boy in Czarist Russia, Yakov Bok steadfastly maintains his innocence in the face of coercion and torture.

Rohit Matalon, The One Facing Us.
The story of several generations of a once-grand Jewish family in Cairo, now scattered in the wake of political upheaval and personal tragedy.

Eva Mekler, The Polish Woman.
A Polish-Catholic nanny tells her Jewish employer that she may be his missing cousin thought to have died in a concentration camp.

Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces.
A Polish boy who witnessed his family's slaughter is saved by a Greek but can’t escape his memories.

Tova Mirvis, The Ladies Auxiliary.
When the young people in the Orthodox community of Memphis begin to stray, a newly arrived convert to Judaism is blamed.

Anna Mitgutsch, House of Childhood.
A man whose family left Austria before the Nazi occupation returns to reclaim the family home.

Gina Nahai, Moonlight on the Avenue of Faith.
The tale of a Jewish woman from the ghettoes of Tehran who began life as a bad luck child and who one day grows wings and flies away.

Lilian Nattel, The River Midnight.
Nine interwoven stories set in a shtetl in 19th century Poland show the same events from the points of view of different villagers.

Amos Oz, Don't Call It Night.
A quiet, contemplative novel of modern relationships and modern Israel revolving around an older man and his young lover in a small desert town.

Cynthia Ozick, The Puttermesser Papers.
A bureaucrat finds she has created a golem and is then elected mayor of New York, but her efforts to create a civic paradise soon go awry.

Letty Pogrebin, Three Daughters.
A woman tries to heal the rift between her feminist sister and their rabbi father and religious sister.

Chaim Potok, The Chosen.
The classic story of two boys from different backgrounds who form a lasting friendship.

Dorit Rabinyan, Persian Brides.
In the Jewish quarter of a small Persian village at the beginning of the 20th century, a girl abandoned by her husband awaits the birth of her child.

Naomi Ragen, The Ghost of Hannah Mendes.
When a dying woman's granddaughters show no interest in their Sephardic roots, her ancestor’s ghost tells her to send them in search of an old manuscript.

Robert Rand, My Suburban Shtetl.
A novel about growing up in the Jewish community of Skokie in the 1960s and 1970s, including the time of the infamous Nazi demonstration.

Edeet Ravel, A Wall of Light.
A deaf professor in Tel Aviv who suffered tragedies in her past is determined to live her life her own way.

Frederick Reiken, Lost Legends of New Jersey.
A boy growing up in the suburbs of New Jersey copes with the dissolution of his family by perceiving magic in ordinary things.

Nancy Reisman, The First Desire.
A Russian-Jewish family in upstate New York unravels after the mother dies and the eldest sister—charged with caring for her siblings—leaves home.

Mordecai Richler, Joshua Then and Now.
The son of a crook and an exotic dancer overcomes his inauspicious beginnings to become a celebrated television writer, but he is not happy with his life.

Nancy Richler, Your Mouth Is Lovely.
In 1911, a woman in a Siberian prison camp writes a journal for the daughter she sent to Canada explaining how she came to be there.

Anne Roiphe, Lovingkindness.
A mother is shocked when her daughter announces that she has joined an extreme right-wing Orthodox Jewish group and is seeking an arranged marriage.

Jonathan Rosen, Joy Comes in the Morning.
A female rabbi working as a hospital chaplain encounters a Holocaust survivor and his nonreligious son.

Henry Roth, Call It Sleep.
The son of Yiddish speaking immigrants growing up on the Lower East Side of New York seeks his own identity as the old way of life changes.

Philip Roth, The Plot Against America.
In an alternate America, Charles Lindbergh beats FDR for the Presidency in 1940, profoundly affecting the lives of American Jews.

Jean Sasson, Ester's Child.
In the decade between the end of WWII and the founding of Israel, three disparate families are bound together by the disappearance of 2 children.

Edward Schwarzschild, Responsible Men.
A shady salesman returns home to Philadelphia for the bar mitzvah of his son, who is trying to cope with his parents' divorce.

W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz.
An orphan who came to England in 1939 and was raised by a Welsh Methodist minister and his wife as their own has no memory of his roots.

Bernhard Schlink, The Reader.
A teenage boy in Germany who has an affair with an enigmatic older woman learns she was guilty of an unspeakable crime during the Holocaust.

Scribblers on the Roof.
Stories by contemporary Jewish authors.

Meir Shalev, The Loves of Judith.
Between the world wars, a housekeeper arrives on a farm in Palestine and is pursued by three men.

Isaac Bashevis Singer, The Collected Stories.
Skillfully wrought stories replete with insights on human nature, including "Gimpel the Fool."

Katie Singer, Wholeness of a Broken Heart.
When her mother suddenly shuts her out of her life, a daughter seeks answers in her family's previous generations of women.

Aryeh Lev Stollman, The Illuminated Soul.
A woman who flees from wartime Prague with a rare 15th-century Hebrew manuscript takes refuge in the home of a devout Jewish family in Ontario.

Leon Uris, Exodus.
A sweeping saga of the migration of Jews from Europe to found the new nation of Israel.

Eleanor Widmer, Up from Orchard Street.
A story of three generations of a Russian-Jewish immigrant family on New York's Lower East Side.

Elie Wiesel, The Fifth Son.
When a man learns his father is haunted by his role in the murder of an SS officer who's really alive, he sets out to complete his father's act of revenge.

Amy Wilentz, Martyrs' Crossing.
A guard at a military checkpoint in Jerusalem sets off an explosive chain of events when he refuses to let a dying Palestinian boy pass to a hospital.

Jonathan Wilson, A Palestine Affair.
In British-occupied Palestine, an artist and his wife are witnesses to the death of a prominent Jew whose murder is blamed on an Arab boy.

Herman Wouk, The Hope; The Glory.
The epic saga of Israel's history from the beginning of nationhood in 1948 to modern times.

A.B. Yehoshua, A Woman of Jerusalem.
When a Slavic immigrant to Israel is killed in a terrorist attack, a co-worker is assigned to take her body back to her homeland.

Anzia Yezierska, How I Found America.
Stories chronicling the lives of immigrants on New York's Lower East Side, their economic hardships and the difficulties of assimilation.

Simone Zelitch, Louisa.
A woman who's the daughter of Nazis and the wife of a Jew is hated by the mother-in-law she saved from the Holocaust and by her neighbors in Israel.

Richard Zimler, Last Kabbalist of Lisbon.
In the days leading up to the Lisbon massacre of 1506, a manuscript illustrator tries to discover who murdered his uncle, a well-known kabbalist.

Markus Zusak, The Book Thief.
In Nazi Germany, Death takes an orphan girl's brother and then continues to observe her as she begins to steal books and learns to read.

Mysteries

Mitchell Chefitz, The Thirty-Third Hour. Fiction
Rabbi Arthur Greenberg has 33 hours to clear or condemn a colleague accused of a sexual offense.

Howard Engel, The Cooperman Variations.
Canadian-Jewish P.I. Benny Cooperman is hired as a bodyguard by an old classmate. Part of a series.

Batya Gur, The Saturday Morning Murder.
A Jerusalem detective investigates the murder of a prominent psychiatrist. First in a series.

John Hayes, Catskill.
On the eve of World War II, an attorney in the Catskills investigates a shooting at a houseful of Jewish refugees that resulted in a woman’s death.

Michael Kahn, Bearing Witness.
An attorney files an age-discrimination lawsuit against a large corporation and uncovers a trail of dirty money going back to the Nazi era. Part of a series.

Sharon Kahn, Fax Me a Bagel.
The widow of a rabbi who died in a mysterious hit-and-run fears that a poisoned bagel may have been meant for her. First in a series.

Faye Kellerman, The Ritual Bath.
An L.A. detective investigates a rape at the ritual bath of an Orthodox community. First in a series.

Harry Kemelman, Friday the Rabbi Slept Late.
When Rabbi Small is implicated in a murder, he helps the town's Catholic police chief solve the crime. First in a series.

Rochelle Krich, Blood Money.
An L.A. detective investigating an elderly man's death uncovers a web of deceit leading back to the Holocaust. Part of a series.

David Liss, A Conspiracy of Paper.
In 18th century London, a thief-taker investigates a murder that may be related to his father's death.

Criminal Kabbalah and Mystery Midrash.
Two anthologies of Jewish mystery stories.

Caroline Roe, Poultice for a Healer.
A blind Jewish physician in medieval Spain investigates a death by poison.

Robert Rosenberg, Crimes of the City.
During the chaos of the Intifada, a Jerusalem detective must solve the murders of two Russian Orthodox nuns. First in a series.