Lamar Public Library

"Corbin College, not-quite-upstate New York, winter 1959-1960: Ruben Blum, a Jewish historian-but not an historian of the Jews-is co-opted onto a hiring committee to review the application of an exiled Israeli scholar specializing in the Spanish Inquisition. When Benzion Netanyahu shows up for an interview, family unexpectedly in tow, Blum plays the reluctant host, to guests who proceed to lay waste to his American complacencies. Mixing fiction with...

The author once again casts her unerring eye on the dark impulses and abiding love that drive human beings to acts of savage violence and uinexpected tenderness.

"Paris, 1940: German tanks rumble through the streets of Paris, forcing frightened citizens to flee. But not everyone has the luxury to leave. Camille Lacroix, a chambermaid at the world-famous Ht̥el Ritz, must stay to support her family back home in Brittany. Desperate to earn money, Camille also acts as a lady's maid for longtime guest Vivian Miller, a glamorous American widow--and a Nazi sympathizer. Despite her distrust of the woman, Camille...

In the spring of 1942, young Elzbieta Rabinek is aware of the swiftly growing discord just beyond the courtyard of her comfortable Warsaw home. She has no fondness for the Germans who patrol her streets and impose their curfews, but has never given much thought to what goes on behind the walls that contain her Jewish neighbors. She knows all too well about German brutality, and that they're the reason she must conceal her real identity. But in befriending...

"It is 1946 when Vera Frankel and her best friend Edith Ban arrive in Naples. Refugees from Hungary, they escaped from a train headed for Auschwitz and were hidden by farmers until the end of the war while the rest of their families perished. Now, they want to start new lives abroad, and armed with a letter of recommendation from an American general, Vera finds work at the United States embassy and falls in love with Captain Anton Wight. But as Vera...

From Harold Coyle, the New York Times bestselling author of Twice the Citizen, comes the fourth book in the Nathan Dixon series: They Are Soldiers They are your neighbor and the person who delivers your mail. They teach your children and build your homes. Every day you see them but do not notice them, that is not until they are needed. Only when disasters strike, whether it be natural or man made do they become something quite different, something...

Kit Philipson has always felt like stranger in his family. An only child in Glasgow, Scotland, his mother was a teacher; his father, a journalist, escaped from Nazi Germany at the age of three on one of the 1939 Kindertransports. On her deathbed, Kit's mother tells him he was adopted and his birth name was Novello. A search of old newspaper files reveals that a three-year-old boy named Peter Novello was abducted from his parents' holiday hotel in...

"From New York Times best-selling author Jami Attenberg comes a sharp, funny, and emotionally powerful novel about a family reuniting at the deathbed of its patriarch. In reckoning with his secret past, can they rebuild and begin anew?"--

As the summer of 2004 draws to a close, Archy Stallings and Nat Jaffe are still hanging in there - longtime friends, bandmates, and co-regents of Brokeland Records, a kingdom of used vinyl located in the borderlands of Berkeley and Oakland. Their wives, Gwen Shanks and Aviva Roth-Jaffe, are the Berkeley Birth Partners, two semi-legendary midwives who have welcomed more than a thousand newly minted citizens into the dented utopia at whose heart - half...

A novel spanning four decades, from pre-World War II Transylvania to contemporary New York, looks at the cause and effect of both belief and non-belief within the Jewish religion, in a tale that focuses on the relationship of two sisters within a Hasidic sect.