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Welcome to MyJewishBooks.com

Welcome to MyJewishBooks.com, where we list new, diverse, and eclectic books of Jewish interest and sort them by publication date (we do not believe in segmenting by fiction and non-fiction). All net proceeds go to tzedaka. Look at the hyperlinks to the left for books by publication data or season.

Be sure to visit our Releases in 2015, Fall 2014, Summer 2014, Spring 2014, Winter 2014, Fall 2013, Summer 2013, and all the rest of our pages(oFrah, Hanukkah, MLK books, Tu b'shvat books, etc).

Thank you for visiting. You can see our blog updates at MyJewishBooks.wordpress.com

The Boston Girl
A Novel
by Anita Diamant
December 09, 2014
Scribner
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 a teeming multicultural neighborhood, Addie’s intelligence and curiosity take her to a world her parents can’t imagine—a world of short skirts, movies, celebrity culture, and new opportunities for women. Addie wants to finish high school and dreams of going to college. She wants a career and to find true love.
Eighty-five-year-old Addie tells the story of her life to her twenty-two-year-old granddaughter, who has asked her “How did you get to be the woman you are today.” She begins in 1915, the year she found her voice and made friends who would help shape the course of her life. From the one-room tenement apartment she shared with her parents and two sisters, to the library group for girls she joins at a neighborhood settlement house, to her first, disastrous love affair, Addie recalls her adventures with compassion for the naïve girl she was and a wicked sense of humor.
Written with the same attention to historical detail and emotional resonance that made Anita Diamant’s previous novels bestsellers, The Boston Girl is a moving portrait of one woman’s complicated life in twentieth century America, and a fascinating look at a generation of women finding their places in a changing world.
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TEL AVIV NOIR
A Collection of stories
Edited by Etgar Keret and Assaf Gavron
October 2014
Akashic
Akashic Books continues its groundbreaking series of original noir anthologies, launched with the summer 2004 award-winning best seller Brooklyn Noir.
Each book is comprised of all-new stories, each one set in a distinct neighborhood or location within the respective city. For Tel Aviv Noir, Etgar Keret and Assaf Gavron have masterfully assembled some of Israel's top contemporary writers into a compulsively readable collection.

From the introduction by Etgar Keret:
"In spite of its outwardly warm and polite exterior, Tel Aviv has quite a bit to hide. At any club, most of the people dancing around you to the sounds of a deep-house hit dedicated to peace and love have undergone extensive automatic-weapons training and a hand-grenade tutorial...The workers washing the dishes in the fluorescent-lit kitchen of that same club are Eritrean refugees who have crossed the Egyptian border illegally, along with a group of bedouins smuggling some high-quality hash, which the deejay will soon be smoking on his little podium, right by the busy dance floor filled with drunks, coked-up lawyers, and Ukrainian call girls whose pimp keeps their passports in a safe two streets away. Don't get me wrong--Tel Aviv is a lovely, safe city. Most of the time, for most of its inhabitants. But the stories in this collection describe what happens the rest of the time, to the rest of its inhabitants. From one last cup of coffee at a café targeted by a suicide bomber, through repeat visits from a Yiddish-speaking ghost, to an organized tour of mythological crime scenes that goes terribly wrong, the stories of Tel Aviv Noir reveal the concealed, scarred face of this city that we love so much."
Featuring brand-new stories by:
Etgar Keret,
Gadi Taub,
Lavie Tidhar,
Deakla Keydar,
Matan Hermoni,
Julia Fermentto,
Gon Ben Ari,
Shimon Adaf,
Alex Epstein,
Antonio Ungar,
Gai Ad,
Assaf Gavron,
Silje Bekeng, and
Yoav Katz.
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SPEAKING OF ASSAF GAVRON!

THE HILLTOP
A Novel
By Assaf Gavron
October 28, 2014
Scribner
Hailed as “The Great Israeli Novel” (Time Out Tel Aviv) and winner of the prestigious Bernstein Prize, The Hilltop is a monumental and daring work about life in a West Bank settlement from one of Israel’s most acclaimed young novelists.
On a rocky, beautiful hilltop stands Ma’aleh Hermesh C, a fledgling community flying under the radar. According to the government it doesn’t exist; according to the military it must be defended.
On this contested land, Othniel Assis—under the wary gaze of the neighboring Palestinian village—plants asparagus, arugula, and cherry tomatoes, and he installs goats—and his ever-expanding family. As Othniel cheerfully manipulates government agencies, more settlers arrive, and, amid a hodge-podge of shipping containers and mobile homes, the outpost takes root.
One of the settlement’s steadfast residents is Gabi Kupper, a one-time free spirit and kibbutz-dweller, who undergoes a religious awakening. The delicate routines of Gabi’s new life are thrown into turmoil with the sudden arrival of Roni, his prodigal brother, who, years after venturing to America in search of fortune, arrives at Gabi’s door, penniless. To the settlement’s dismay, Roni soon hatches a plan to sell the “artisanal” olive oil from the Palestinian village to Tel Aviv yuppies. When a curious Washington Post correspondent stumbles into their midst, Ma’aleh Hermesh C becomes the focus of an international diplomatic scandal and faces its greatest test yet.
By turns serious and satirical, The Hilltop brilliantly skewers the complex, often absurd reality of life in Israel, the West Bank settlers, and the nation's relationship to the United States, and makes a startling parallel between today’s settlements and the kibbutz movement of Gabi and Roni’s youth. Rich with humor and insight, Assaf Gavron’s novel is the first fiction to grapple with one of the most charged geo-political issues of our time, and he has written a masterpiece.
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Can't We Talk about Something More Pleasant?
A Memoir Hardcover
In Graphic Form
by Roz Chast
May 2014
Bloomsbury USA
In her first memoir, Roz Chast brings her signature wit to the topic of her aging Jewish parents. Spanning the last several years of their lives and told through four-color cartoons, family photos, and documents, and a narrative as rife with laughs as it is with tears, Chast’s memoir is both comfort and comic relief for anyone experiencing the life-altering loss of elderly parents.
When it came to her elderly mother and father, Roz held to the practices of denial, avoidance, and distraction. But when Elizabeth Chast climbed a ladder to locate an old souvenir from the “crazy closet”—with predictable results—the tools that had served Roz well through her parents’ seventies, eighties, and into their early nineties could no longer be deployed.
While the particulars are Chast-ian in their idiosyncrasies—an anxious father who had relied heavily on his wife for stability as he slipped into dementia and a former assistant principal mother whose overbearing personality had sidelined Roz for decades—the themes are universal: adult children accepting a parental role; aging and unstable parents leaving a family home for an institution; dealing with uncomfortable physical intimacies; managing logistics; and hiring strangers to provide the most personal care.
An amazing portrait of two lives at their end and an only child coping as best she can, Can We Talk about Something More Pleasant will show the full range of Roz Chast’s talent as cartoonist and storyteller..
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Sarah's Key
(Movie Tie-in paperback edition)
Tatiana de Rosnay
July 5, 2011, St Martin’s Griffin
PW Starred Review. De Rosnay's U.S. debut fictionalizes the 1942 Paris roundups and deportations, in which thousands of Jewish families were arrested, held at the Vélodrome d'Hiver outside the city, then transported to Auschwitz. Forty-five-year-old Julia Jarmond, American by birth, moved to Paris when she was 20 and is married to the arrogant, unfaithful Bertrand Tézac, with whom she has an 11-year-old daughter. Julia writes for an American magazine and her editor assigns her to cover the 60th anniversary of the Vél' d'Hiv' roundups. Julia soon learns that the apartment she and Bertrand plan to move into was acquired by Bertrand's family when its Jewish occupants were dispossessed and deported 60 years before. She resolves to find out what happened to the former occupants: Wladyslaw and Rywka Starzynski, parents of 10-year-old Sarah and four-year-old Michel. The more Julia discovers—especially about Sarah, the only member of the Starzynski family to survive—the more she uncovers about Bertrand's family, about France and, finally, herself. Already translated into 15 languages, the novel is De Rosnay's 10th (but her first written in English, her first language). It beautifully conveys Julia's conflicting loyalties, and makes Sarah's trials so riveting, her innocence so absorbing, that the book is hard to put down.
Click the cover to read more, or to read an excerpt

COME ON PEOPLE!!!
YOU GOTTA DO A JEWISH VERSION OF THIS! I LEGO THE JEWISH HOLIDAYS, or I LEGO ISRAEL, or I LEGO SHABBOS…

I LEGO NY
BY CHRISTOPH NIEMANN
March 2010, Abrams
I LEGO N.Y. is an imaginative look at life in New York City constructed entirely out of LEGOs. Designer and illustrator Christoph Niemann was inspired to create a series of miniature New York vignettes out of his sons' toys after a few cold and dark winter days in Berlin. The former New Yorker then posted photographs of his creations along with his handwritten captions on his New York Times blog. Resident and honorary New Yorkers around the world responded enthusiastically to the clever and minimalist inventions, which captured both the iconic (the Empire State Building) and the mundane (man standing on a subway platform) in fewer LEGO pieces than one might think possible. This book includes all of the original images, plus thirteen new creations. The resulting collection is delightful in its simplicity and moving in its ability to capture the spirit of life in New York in so few strokes. [book]

Christoph Niemann is an award-winning illustrator and children’s book author
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People ask us… how many copies does a best selling Jewish book sell?
Well, that is hard to say, but take a look at some 2009/2010 reported values
The Lost Symbol, a novel by Dan Brown: 5,500,000 copies in '09; 2,300,000 in 2010
Going Rogue by Sarah Palin 2,600,000 copies
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. 2,400,000 copies in 2010, 3,685,000 paperbacks in 2010
The Girl Who Played With Fire. 2,100,000 copies in 2010, 2,650,000 paperbacks in 2010
The Associate by John Grisham 2,100,000 copies
The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest. 1,900,000 in 2010
11/23/63 by Stephen King. 918,000 copies in 2011
Under the Dome by Stephen King 900,000 copies
True Compass by Edward Kennedy y 870,000 copies
Arguing With Idiots by Glenn Beck 860,000 copies
** Have A Little Faith. A True Story by Mitch Albom 855,000 in '09, 275,000 in 2010
Pirate Latitudes by Michael Crichton 850,000 copies
* Sh*T My Dad Says by Justin Halpern. 761,000 copies in 2010
U is for Undertow by Sue Grafton 700,000 copies
Bossypants by Tina Fey. 671,000 in 2011
Superfreakonomics by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner 480,000 copies
** Sarah‘s Key by Tatiana de Rosnay 570,000 copies
Go The Fcck To Sleep by Adan Mansbach. 550,000 copies in 2011
* Best Friends Forever by Jennifer Weiner. 467,000 in 2010
** City of Thieves by David Benioff 333,000 copies
** I Remember Nothing by Nora Ephron. 210,000 copies in 2010
** The Defector by Daniel Silva 200,000 copies
** People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks 180,000 copies
* The Finkler Question. 155,000 copies in 2010
Too Big To Fail by Andrew Ross Sorkin 150,000 copies
The Audacity to Win by David Plouffe 147,000 copies
* My Passion for Design by Barbra Streisand. 125,000 in 2010
Moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer 125,000 in 2011
A Secret Kept. By Tatiana De Rosnay. 120,932 copies in 2010
** The Zookeeper‘s Wife by Diane Ackerman 105,000 copies
** The Dovekeepers by Alice Hoffman. 102,000 in 2011

PER LA VITA
A CD IN GERMANY BY
von Bejarano & Microphone Mafia (Künstler)
Featuring Esther Bejarano
2010
Esther Béjarano joins MICROPHONE MAFIA to spread the message of tolerance in Germany and Europe through hip-hop. Born in 1924, she is among the last survivors of the Girl orchestra of Auschwitz. Béjarano was born as Esther Loewy as a daughter of the Head Cantor of a Jewish municipality. The father encouraged his daughter to get interested in music and Esther learned to play the piano. At age 15 she had to separate from her parents, in order to prepare for emigration to Palestine. This emigration was thrwarted by the Nazis. She carried out two years of hard labour in Neuendorf Labour Camp close to Fürstenwalde/Spree. On April 20, 1943 all members of the labour camp were deported to Auschwitz. There she had to drag stones until she joined the Girl orchestra of Auschwitz. In the orchestra, she played the accordion. The orchestra had the task of playing for the daily march of the gangs by the camp gate. She survived Auschwitz after escaping in March, 1945. She emigrated to Palestine and returned later to Germany. At the beginning of the 1980s, with her daughter Edna and son Joram, she created the musical group Coincidence. They sing songs from the ghetto and Jewish as well as anti-fascist songs. Béjarano lives today in Hamburg. She is a co-founder and chairman of the Auschwitz Committee and was awarded the Carl-von-Ossietzky medal. She holds the Cross of Merit, First class of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany.
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