In an autumnal love story of erotic obsession, possessiveness, remembrance, oblivion, and time, an elderly woman dwells upon a failed love affair of some time past, when she was no longer young but not yet old. The narrator relives meeting her lover, Franz, at the natural history museum, when, for the first time in her life, she experiences all-consuming love and absolute happiness. Ultimately the affair founders because of her inability to believe that Franz will actually leave his wife. After he disappears from her life, she withdraws from the world, waiting for his return and revisiting...

This book contains two narratives, each of which offers a clear and moving portrait of how German Jews came to terms with the changes in their lives brought on by the Nazis. In "Under the Nazi Regime, " Erich Leyens reflects on the effects of authoritarianism on everyday Germans. By contrast, Lotte Andor's "Memoirs of an Unknown Actress" focuses on the absurdity of an exile's life, telling her story with unusual humor and an appreciation of life's unexpected joys. Both stories present a deep understanding of how human beings learn to cope in the face of evil.

At the age of fifty and faced with severe depression, Salomea Genin began to write about her family's history. From stories both told and untold, Genin recreates the lives of the Zwerling family in the Jewish quarter of Lvov: Shulim, her strict and deeply religious grandfather; his patient but tired wife Dvoire; and his beautiful, rebellious daughter Shayndl, who marries a dreamer against her father's wishes and without his blessing, and who will later become Salomea Genin's mother.

Genin's richly detailed portrait shows the effects of a family's struggles--personal, religious, social,...

At the age of fifty and faced with severe depression, Salomea Genin began to write about her family's history and her own. From stories both told and untold, Genin recreates the lives of the Zwerling family in the Jewish quarter of Lemberg (Lvov): There is her strict, deeply religious grandfather, Shulim, the patriarch; his patient but tired wife, Dvoire; and his beautiful and rebellious daughter, Shayndl, who marries the dreamer Avram Genin against her father's wishes and without his blessing, and who will later become Salomea Genin's mother. Genin details her grandparents' and parents'...

Event of the time are a bit like Impressionist paintings ... which combine into a recognizable whole only when observed from a distance.
--Gertrude Kolmar in a letter to her sister, October 22, 1939

So a picture of Gertrud Kolmar, a gifted Jewish writer struggling to sustain her art and family, emerges from these eloquent and allusive letters. Written in the stolen moments before her day as a forced laborer in a munitions factory began, the letters tell of Kolmar's move from the family home in Finkenkrug to a three-room flat in Berlin, which she and her father must soon share...

When Professor Henner Marcus receives an urgent plea from his niece, Nina Aschauer, he leaves Chicago behind and travels 5,000 miles to France. Nina has finally materialized after a five-year absence, and he is anxious to help her with the trouble she appears to be in. A historian, Nina is irresistibly driven to explore the Pyrenees Mountains for the location of her birth, occurring as her parents fled the Nazis. All she knows is that the name of the place is Valladine, but the name is not found on any map. Her inquiries lead her to an encounter with Alphonse de Sola, a rough-hewn shepherd...

When Professor Henner Marcus receives an urgent plea from his niece, Nina Aschauer, he leaves Chicago behind and travels 5,000 miles to France. Nina has finally materialized after a five-year absence, and he is anxious to help her with the trouble she appears to be in. A historian, Nina is irresistibly driven to explore the Pyrenees Mountains for the location of her birth, occurring as her parents fled the Nazis. All she knows is that the name of the place is Valladine, but the name is not found on any map. Her inquiries lead her to an encounter with Alphonse de Sola, a rough-hewn shepherd...

From February 1942 to July 1944, Oskar Rosenfeld served in the statistics department of the Lodz ghetto. A playwright and journalist, he kept his own notes on life and conditions in the ghetto for a fictionalized account he hoped to write one day. Though Rosenfeld eventually perished at Auschwitz, "In the Beginning Was the Ghetto" projects his voice at last to the wider world.

A veteran actress's brutal murder at a Broadway theater in 1941 sets off a police investigation that reaches back to pre-WWI Vienna and 1920s Berlin in Brigitte Goldstein's densely plotted noir mystery novel, Death of a Diva.

In 1941 New York, the murder on Broadway of Stella Berger, famed star of screen and stage of Weimar Germany and outspoken critic of the Nazi regime which had forced her into exile, sends shock waves through the American public.

The police act quickly, and the prime suspect, an emigrant street musician, is tried and put on death row. But Misia...