Books To Read for Jewish American Heritage Month

In Ashkenazi Jewish folklore, a golem is a humanoid being created out of mud or clay and animated through secret prayers. Its sole purpose is to defend the Jewish people against the immediate threat of violence. It is always a rabbi who makes a golem, and always in a time of crisis. But Len Bronstein is no rabbi — he’s a Brooklyn art teacher who steals a large quantity of clay from his school, gets extremely stoned, and manages to bring his creation to life despite knowing little about Judaism and even less about golems. The Golem of Brooklyn is an epic romp through Jewish history and the American present that wrestles with the deepest questions of our humanity — the conflicts between faith and skepticism, tribalism and interdependence, and vengeance and healing.

What happens to a girl’s sense of joy and belonging — to her belief in herself — as she becomes a woman? This unforgettable portrait of coming-of-age offers subtle yet powerful reflections on class, parenthood, addiction, lust, and the irrepressible power of dreams.

From the #1 international bestselling author of The Lost Wife and The Velvet Hours comes an emotionally charged story about a mother’s love, a teacher’s promise, and a child’s heart … A novel that will make readers examine what it means to live life with a full heart.

When his father dies, it falls to Larry — the secular son in a family of Orthodox Brooklyn Jews — to recite the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, every day for eleven months. But to the horror and dismay of his sister, Larry refuses, imperiling the fate of his father’s soul. To appease her, he hires a stranger through a website called kaddish.com to say the prayer instead — a decision that will have profound, and very personal, repercussions. Irreverent, hilarious, and wholly irresistible,

New York Times bestseller and winner of the Pulitzer Prize, this epic, beloved novel follows two boy geniuses dreaming up superheroes in New York’s Golden Age of comics. Spanning continents and eras, this superb book by one of America’s finest writers remains one of the defining novels of our modern American age.

In The Color of Water, McBride retraces his mother’s footsteps and, through her searing and spirited voice, recreates her remarkable story. The daughter of a failed itinerant Orthodox rabbi, she was born Rachel Shilsky (actually Ruchel Dwara Zylska) in Poland on April 1, 1921. Interspersed throughout his mother’s compelling narrative, McBride shares candid recollections of his own experiences as a mixed-race child of poverty. The Color of Water touches readers of all colors as a vivid portrait of growing up, a haunting meditation on race and identity, and a lyrical valentine to a mother from her son.

The year is 2013 and the Greenspans are the envy of Brookline, Massachusetts, an idyllic (and idealistic) suburb west of Boston. Scott Greenspan is a successful physician with his own cardiology practice. His wife, Deb, is a pillar of the community who spends her free time helping resettle refugees. But when Scott is caught falsifying blood samples at work, he sets in motion a series of scandals that threatens to shatter his family. From Brookline to Berlin to the battlefields of Syria, Hope follows the Greenspans over one tumultuous year as they question, and compromise, the values that have shaped their lives.

The Man Who Sold Air in the Holy Land announces the arrival of a natural-born storyteller of immense talent. Warm, poignant, delightfully whimsical, Omer Friedlander’s gorgeously immersive and imaginative stories take you to the narrow limestone alleyways of Jerusalem, the desolate beauty of the Negev Desert, and the sprawling orange groves of Jaffa, with characters that spring to vivid life. These stories render the intimate lives of people striving for connection. They are fairy tales turned on their head by the stakes of real life, where moments of fragile intimacy mix with comedy and notes of the absurd. Told in prose of astonishing vividness that also demonstrates remarkable control and restraint, they have a universal appeal to the heart.

A family reunion for the ages when two clans convene for the summer at their beloved getaway in the Catskills — perfect for fans of Dirty Dancing and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel — from the acclaimed author of The Floating Feldmans.

Even after she left home for Hollywood, Emmy-nominated TV writer Bess Kalb saved every voicemail her grandmother Bobby Bell ever left her. Bobby was a force — irrepressible, glamorous, unapologetically opinionated. Bobby doted on Bess; Bess adored Bobby. Then, at 90, Bobby died. But in this debut memoir, Bobby is speaking to Bess once more, in a voice as passionate as it ever was in life. Nobody Will Tell You This But Me marks the creation of a totally new, virtuosic form of memoir: a reconstruction of a beloved grandmother’s words and wisdom to tell her family’s story with equal parts poignancy and hilarity.

Toby Fleishman thought he knew what to expect when he and his wife of almost fifteen years separated: weekends and every other holiday with the kids, some residual bitterness, the occasional moment of tension in their co-parenting negotiations. He could not have predicted that one day, in the middle of his summer of sexual emancipation, Rachel would just drop their two children off at his place and simply not return …

The child of parents who were each the sole survivors of their respective families, for Esther Safran Foer the Holocaust loomed in the backdrop of daily life, felt but never discussed. So when Esther’s mother makes an astonishing revelation — that her father had a previous wife and daughter, both killed in the Holocaust — Esther resolves to find out who they were, and how her father survived. Armed with only a black-and-white photo and a hand-drawn map, she travels to Ukraine, determined to find the shtetl where her father hid during the war. What she finds reshapes her identity and gives her the opportunity to finally mourn.

A young woman has one month and a closetful of shoes to discover the future she thought she’d lost in this captivating new novel from the author of Eliza Starts a Rumor and Nine Women, One Dress.

If you knew the date of your death, how would you live your life? Both a dazzling family love story and a sweeping novel of remarkable ambition and depth, The Immortalists probes the line between destiny and choice, reality and illusion, this world and the next. It is a deeply moving testament to the power of story, the nature of belief, and the unrelenting pull of familial bonds.