Exploring Top Books of Shelfari

Readers fell in love with Cannie Shapiro, the smart, sharp-tongued, bighearted heroine of Good in Bed who found her happy ending after her mother came out of the closet, her father fell out of her life, and her ex-boyfriend started chronicling their ex-sex life in the pages of a national magazine. Now Cannie's back. After her debut novel -- a fictionalized (and highly sexualized) version of her life -- became an... (more)

The Believers

by Zoe Heller

When radical New York lawyer Joel Litvinoff is felled by a stroke, his wife, Audrey, uncovers a secret that forces her to reexamine everything she thought she knew about their forty-year marriage. Joels children will soon have to come to terms with this discovery themselves, but for the meantime, they are struggling with their own dilemmas and doubts. Rosa, a disillusioned revolutionary, has found herself... (more)

Portnoy's Complaint

by Philip Roth

Portnoy's Complaint n. <after Alexander Portnoy (1933-)> A disorder in which strongly-felt ethical and altruistic impulses are perpetually warring with extreme sexual longings, often of a perverse nature. Spievogel says: "Acts of exhibitionism, voyeurism, fetishism, auto-eroticism and oral coitus are plentiful; as a consequence of the patient's "morality," however, neither fantasy nor act issues in genuine... (more)

All But My Life: A Memoir

by Gerda Weissmann Klein

All But My Life is the unforgettable story of Gerda Weissmann Klein's six-year ordeal as a victim of Nazi cruelty. From her comfortable home in Bielitz (present-day Bielsko) in Poland to her miraculous survival and her liberation by American troops--including the man who was to become her husband--in Volary, Czechoslovakia, in 1945, Gerda takes the reader on a terrifying journey. Gerda's serene and idyllic... (more)

The Inn at Lake Devine (Vintage Contemporaries)

The Inn at Lake Devine (Vintage Contemporaries)

by Elinor Lipman

It's 1962 and all across America barriers are collapsing. But when Natalie Marx's mother inquires about summer accommodations in Vermont, she gets the following reply: The Inn at Lake Devine is a family-owned resort, which has been in continuous operation since 1922. Our guests who feel most comfortable here, and return year after year, are Gentiles. For twelve-year-old Natalie, who has a stubborn sense of... (more)

Turbulent Souls:: A Catholic Son's Return To His Jewish Family

Turbulent Souls:: A Catholic Son's Return To His Jewish Family

by Stephen J. Dubner

Turbulent Souls is a luminous memoir, crafted with the eye of a journalist and the art of a novelist by New York Times Magazine writer and editor Stephen J. Dubner. By turns comic and heartbreaking, it tells the story of a family torn apart by religion, sustained by faith, and reunited by truth.

Almost Perfect Moment, An: A Novel (P.S.)

Almost Perfect Moment, An: A Novel (P.S.)

by Binnie Kirshenbaum

In Brooklyn, in the Age of Disco, Valentine Kessler -- a sweet Jewish girl who bears a remarkable resemblance to the Virgin Mary of Lourdes -- has an unerring gift for shattering the dreams and hopes of those who love her. Miriam, her long-suffering mother, betrayed and anguished by the husband she adores, seeks solace in daily games of mah-jongg with The Girls, a cross between a Greek Chorus and Brooklyn's... (more)

Day After Night

by Anita Diamant

Just as she gave voice to the silent women of the Old Testament in The Red Tent , Anita Diamant creates a cast of breathtakingly vivid characters -- young women who escaped to Israel from Nazi Europe -- in this intensely dramatic novel. Day After Night is based on the extraordinary true story of the October 1945 rescue of more than two hundred prisoners from the Atlit internment camp, a prison for "illegal"... (more)

Call It Sleep

by Henry Roth

The Assistant

Austerlitz

by W.G. Sebald

In the summer of 1939, five-year-old Jacques Austerlitz is sent to England on one of the Kindertransports and placed with foster parents in Wales. For reasons of their own, the childless Calvinist couple erase from the boy all knowledge of his identity. Throughout his life Austerlitz is haunted by feelings of otherness, but it is not until retirement that he embarks on a journey to make sense of his curious early... (more)

The Search

by Eric Heuvel

Esther remembers her own experience of the Holocaust as a Jewish girl living in Amsterdam, and recounts to her grandson Daniel and his friend Jeroen how she escaped from the Nazis and survived by going into hiding in the countryside. Her parents were not so lucky. Esther knows they were sent to a concentration camp and died there, and with Daniel’s help she embarks on a search to discover what happened to them... (more)

The Chosen

by Chaim Potok

Foreskin's Lament: A Memoir

by Shalom Auslander

Shalom Auslander was raised with a terrified respect for God. Even as he grew up and was estranged from his community, his religion and its traditions, he could not find his way to a life where he didn't struggle against God daily. Foreskin's Lament reveals Auslander's youth in a strict, socially isolated Orthodox community, and recounts his rebellion and efforts to make a new life apart from it. Auslander... (more)

People of the Book: Thirty Scholars Reflect on Their Jewish Identity (Wisconsin Studies Autobiography)Jeffrey; Fishkin, Shelley Fisher Rubin-Dorsky

People of the Book: Thirty Scholars Reflect on Their Jewish Identity (Wisconsin Studies Autobiography)

by Jeffrey; Fishkin, Shelley Fisher Rubin-Dorsky

An Uncommon Friendship: From Opposite Sides of the Holocaust

An Uncommon Friendship: From Opposite Sides of the Holocaust

by Bernat Rosner

Two men, who meet and become good friends after enjoying successful adult lives in California, have experienced childhoods so tragically opposed that the two men must decide whether to talk about them or not. In 1944, 13-year-old Fritz was almost old enough to join the Hitler Youth in his German village of Kleinheubach. That same year in Tab, Hungary, 12-year-old Bernie was loaded onto a train with the rest of the... (more)

Allegra Maud Goldman

by Edith Konecky

This comic novel, first published in 1976, about a feisty Jewish girl child growing up in a wealthy bourgeois Brooklyn family in the 1920s is evoked by a conciousness witty, authentic, and memorable. Alone, Allegra must learn about what it means to be female, about sex, and about death. She must reconcile the bigotries and limitations of her difficult family, and give and receive love however she can. There are... (more)

Black, White, and Jewish: How Memory Works

Black, White, and Jewish: How Memory Works

by Rebecca Walker

Hailed as "compelling" by The Washington Post and "stunningly honest" by The San Francisco Chronicle , this memoir has hit bestseller lists and earned critical praise from coast to coast. Rebecca Walker was born in 1969 to author Alice Walker and lawyer Mel Leventhal, who met and married in the heyday of the Civil Rights movement. But after their divorce, Rebecca was a lonely only child ferrying between two... (more)

Endless Steppe: Growing Up in Siberia

by Esther Rudomin Hautzig

Exiled to Siberia In June 1942, the Rudomin family is arrested by the Russians. They are "capitalists -- enemies of the people." Forced from their home and friends in Vilna, Poland, they are herded into crowded cattle cars. Their destination: the endless steppe of Siberia. For five years, Ester and her family live in exile, weeding potato fields and working in the mines, struggling for enough food and clothing to... (more)

The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible

The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible

by A. J. Jacobs

From the bestselling author of The Know-It-All comes a fascinating and timely exploration of religion and the Bible. Raised in a secular family but increasingly interested in the relevance of faith in our modern world, A.J. Jacobs decides to dive in headfirst and attempt to obey the Bible as literally as possible for one full year. He vows to follow the Ten Commandments. To be fruitful and multiply. To love his... (more)

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Tags: being jewish

by Jennifer Weiner