Exploring Top Books of Shelfari

The Ladies Auxiliary (Ballantine Reader's Circle)

The Ladies Auxiliary (Ballantine Reader's Circle)

by Tova Mirvis

When free-spirited Batsheva moves into the close-knit Orthodox community of Memphis, Tennessee, the already precarious relationship between the Ladies Auxiliary and their teenage daughters is shaken to the core. In this extraordinary novel, Tova Mirvis takes us into the fascinating and insular world of the Memphis Orthodox Jews, one ripe with tradition and contradiction. Warm and wise, enchanting and funny, The... (more)

My Name Is Asher Lev

by Chaim Potok

Asher Lev is a Ladover Hasid who keeps kosher, prays three times a day and believes in the Ribbono Shel Olom, the Master of the Universe. Asher Lev is an artist who is compulsively driven to render the world he sees and feels even when it leads him to blasphemy.In this stirring and often visionary novel, Chaim Potok traces Asher’s passage between these two identities, the one consecrated to God, the other subject... (more)

Mitla Pass

by Leon Uris

In this semi-autobiographical story, unhappy novelist Gideon Zadok parachutes, on the eve of the 1956 Sinai War, into Mitla Pass with a company of Israeli soldiers to face his past and prove his courage. "Sour, self-indulgent characters and surprisingly awkward dialogue suggest that only the staunchest Uris fans will enjoy his new novel," concluded PW . Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Malkeh and Her Children

by Marjorie Edelson

Richly plotted, animated by beautifully realized characters, and steeped in magnificent old-world detail, Malkeh and Her Children is the captivating epic of the remarkable Mandelkern family as they weather the storm of the Russian Revolution. At the family's center stands the indomitable Malkeh, an intelligent and beautiful woman, who marries Yoysef, an itinerant tailor. Together, the young couple embrace the... (more)

The Sacrifice of Tamar (Readers Guide Editions)

The Sacrifice of Tamar (Readers Guide Editions)

by Naomi Ragen, Rage

Tamar Feingold's life is haunted by the painful, yet unspoken memories of her parents' time in a Nazi concentration camp. Battling between her feelings and her religion, the secrets of her past threaten to explode and destroy everything she has.

Sotah (Readers Guide Editions)

by Naomi Ragen, Rage

Set against the backdrop of Jerusalem's ancient rituals, a contemporary story of sacred and profane love, and a young woman's struggle to reconcile tradition with freedom. Ninety-three weeks on the best-seller list. Sotah introduces a family with three daughters approaching the age of marriage: Devorah, Dina and Chaya Leah. In the strict orthodoxy of their world, a sotah is a wife suspected of infidelity who... (more)

The Genizah At The House Of Shepher

by Tamar Yellin

Beginning with a search for the ten lost tribes and ending in an attic, where lies an important bible which has been missing for seventy-nine years, The Genizah at the House of Shepher is Tamar Yellin's critically acclaimed debut novel. Returning to her grandparents' home in Jerusalem after an absence of many years, Shulamit, an English biblical scholar, stumbles into the mystery of the so-called Shepher... (more)

The Chosen

by Chaim Potok

Fault Lines

by Nancy Huston

A best seller in France, with over 400,000 copies sold, and currently being translated into eighteen languages, Fault Lines is the new novel from internationally-acclaimed and best-selling author Nancy Huston. Huston's novel is a profound and poetic story that traces four generations of a single family from present-day California to WW II¨Cera Germany. Fault Lines begins with Sol, a gifted, terrifying child... (more)

The Coffee Trader: A Novel (Ballantine Reader's Circle)

The Coffee Trader: A Novel (Ballantine Reader's Circle)

by David Liss

Amsterdam, 1659: On the world’s first commodities exchange, fortunes are won and lost in an instant. Miguel Lienzo, a sharp-witted trader in the city’s close-knit community of Portuguese Jews, knows this only too well. Once among the city’s most envied merchants, Miguel has suddenly lost everything. Now, impoverished and humiliated, living in his younger brother’s canal-flooded basement, Miguel must find a way to... (more)

The Outside World (Vintage Contemporaries)

The Outside World (Vintage Contemporaries)

by Tova Mirvis

Tzippy Goldman was born for marriage. She and her mother had always assumed she’d graduate high school, be set up with the right boy, and have a beautiful wedding with white lace and pareve vanilla cream frosting. But at twenty-two, Tzippy’s fast approaching spinsterhood. She dreams of escape; instead, she leaves for a year in Jerusalem. There she meets–re-meets–Baruch, the son of her mother’s college roommate.... (more)

Snow in August

by Pete Hamill

In 1940s Brooklyn, friendship between an 11-year-old Irish Catholic boy and an elderly Jewish rabbi might seem as unlikely as, well, snow in August. But the relationship between young Michael Devlin and Rabbi Judah Hirsch is only one of the many miracles large and small contained in Pete Hamill's novel. Michael finds himself in trouble when he witnesses the 17-year-old leader of the dreaded Falcons gang beating an... (more)

The SECRET BOOK OF GRAZIA DEI ROSSI

by Jacqueline Park

The Secret Book of Grazia dei Rossi is a sweeping tale of intrigue and romance set in a time rife with court politics, papal chicanery, religious intolerance, and inviolable social rules. Grazia, private secretary to the world-renowned Isabella d'Este, is the daughter of an eminent Jewish banker, the wife of the pope's Jewish physician, and the lover of a Christian prince. In a "secret book," written as a legacy... (more)

Incantation

by Alice Hoffman

From a New York Times bestselling author comes a journey of loss and rebirth with a startling premise inspired by historical fact. Estrella is a Marrano: one of the Spanish Jews living double lives when those who refused conversion risked everything. Estrella's discovery that her family secretly practices the ancient way of wisdom known as kabbalah leads her to her true self and true love-but also to a... (more)

The Glory: A Novel

by Herman Wouk

Like no other novelist at work today, Herman Wouk has managed to capture the sweep of history in novels rich in character and alive with drama. In The Hope, which opens in 1948 and culminates in the miraculous triumph of 1967s Six-Day War, Wouk plunges the reader into the story of a nation struggling for its birth and then its survival. As the tale resumes in The Glory, Wouk portrays the young nation once again... (more)

Marjorie Morningstar

by Herman Wouk

Novel by Herman Wouk, published in 1955, about a woman who rebels against the confining middle-class values of her industrious American-Jewish family. Her dream of being an actress ends in failure. She ultimately forfeits her illusions and marries a conventional man with whom she finds sufficient contentment as a suburban wife and mother, thus finally coming to accept her parents' values. -- The Merriam-Webster... (more)

The Hope: A Novel

by Herman Wouk

Like no other novelist at work today, Herman Wouk has managed to capture the sweep of history in novels rich in character and alive with drama. In The Hope, which opens in 1948 and culminates in the miraculous triumph of 1967s Six-Day War, Wouk plunges the reader into the story of a nation struggling for its birth and then its survival. As the tale resumes in The Glory, Wouk portrays the young nation once again... (more)

The Menorah Men

by Lionel Davidson

When a fragment from one of the Dead Sea Scrolls is discovered by Israeli archaeologists, Casper Laing is brought to decipher the hidden message. Now, it's Laing's mission to hunt and retrieve the True Menorah, the great seven-branched gold candlestick stolen from Solomon's temple in 70 A.D., and return it to its rightful home in Israel. Previously published by Harper & Row.

The Archivist: A Novel

by Martha Cooley

A young woman's impassioned pursuit of a sealed cache of T.S. Eliot's letters lies at the heart of this emotionally charged novel, now in paperback.

The Book of Abraham

by Marek Halter, Lowell Bair

The story begins in Jerusalem in 70 AD as Abraham the Temple scribe flees the destruction of his home. Two thousand years and a hundred generations later, another Abraham perishes, immolated in the fires of the Warsaw Ghetto.

Shelfari Book Activity

Tags: jewish fiction

by Tova Mirvis

by Chaim Potok

by Leon Uris

by Marjorie Edelson

by Naomi Ragen, Rage

by Naomi Ragen, Rage

by Tamar Yellin

by Chaim Potok

by Nancy Huston

by David Liss

by Tova Mirvis

by Pete Hamill

by Jacqueline Park

by Alice Hoffman

by Herman Wouk

by Herman Wouk

by Herman Wouk

by Lionel Davidson

by Martha Cooley

by Marek Halter, Lowell Bair