Monroe Free Library

A work forty years in the making-Sir Martin Gilbert's illustrated survey of the pre- and post-war history of the Jewish people in Europe. Masterfully covering such topics as pre-war Jewish life, the Warsaw Ghetto revolt, and the reflections of Holocaust survivors, Gilbert interweaves firsthand accounts with unforgettable photographs and documents, coming together to form a three-dimensional portrait of the lives of the Jewish people during one of...

"Just before WWI, Golda comes to America yearning for independence, but she tosses aside her dreams of freedom and marries her widowed brother-in-law after her sister dies giving birth to their son, Morty. In the crowded streets of Brooklyn where Jewish and Italian gangs demand protection money from local storekeepers and entice youngsters with the promise of wealth, Golda, Ben, and Morty thrive as a family. But in the Depression, Ben, faced with...

In 1953 at a distinguished New York publishing firm, Simon Putnam, a recent Harvard graduate, is tasked with editing a steamy bodice-ripper based on the trial of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg--a project that makes him realize that the people around him are not what they seem.

In Brooklyn in the late 1940s, adolescent Michael Devlin is a dutiful son to his widowed mother and a conscientious altar boy at the parish church. One day, he meets Rabbi Judah Hirsch, a chance encounter that inaugurates a friendship with vast consequences, good and bad, for both of them. Michael lost his father in the war, and the rabbi, a recent immigrant to this country, lost his wife. The threads of their connection widen and strengthen as the...

When Danielle Marton's father is killed during the early days of the German Occupation, her mother sends her to live in a quiet farming town near Limoges in Vichy France. Now called Marie-Jeanne Chantier, Danielle struggles to balance the truth of what's happened to her family and her country with the lies she must tell to keep herself safe. At first, she's bitter about being left behind by her mother, and horrified at having to milk the cow and memorize...

In 1945 on the outskirts of Salzburg, victorious American soldiers capture a train filled with unspeakable riches: piles of fine gold watches; mountains of fur coats; crates filled with wedding rings, silver picture frames, family heirlooms, and Shabbat candlesticks passed down through generations. Jack Wiseman, a tough, smart New York Jew, is the lieutenant charged with guarding this treasure - a responsibility that grows more complicated when he...

"From the New York Times bestselling author of The Red Tent and Day After Night, comes an unforgettable novel about family ties and values, friendship and feminism told through the eyes of a young Jewish woman growing up in Boston in the early twentieth century. Addie Baum is The Boston Girl, born in 1900 to immigrant parents who were unprepared for and suspicious of America and its effect on their three daughters. Growing up in the North End, then...

Philip Roth's new novel is a candidly intimate yet universal story of loss, regret, and stoicism. The best-selling author of The Plot Against America now turns his attention from to one man's lifelong skirmish with mortality. The fate of Roth's everyman is traced from his first shocking confrontation with death on the idyllic beaches of his childhood summers, through the family trials and professional achievements of his vigorous adulthood, and into...