When her publisher insists that she write a Hanukkah romance, Rachel Rubenstein-Goldblatt, a Jewish woman with a secret career as a Christmas romance novelist, unexpectedly finds inspiration when she encounters a childhood acquaintance at the Matzah Ball, a Jewish music celebration on the last night of Hanukkah.

Summer 1940: Hedy Bercu watches the skies over Jersey for German planes, convinced that an invasion is imminent. When it finally comes, there is no counterattack from Allied forces. Most islanders and occupying forces settle into an uneasy coexistence, but for Hedy, the situation is perilously different. For Hedy is Jewish. With no means of escape, Hedy works as a translator for the Germans while silently working against them, and forges a tentative...

"From the two-time National Book Award winning author of The Snow Leopard and Shadow Country, a short, powerful novel about an American professor of Holocaust Studies who, over the course of a weeklong spiritual retreat at Auschwitz, is forced to grapple with his own past and a family secret: the Jewish mother abandoned to her doom by his Gentile father"--

Enjoying summertime weeks of freedom at a popular Jewish beach with their children, beautiful Ada thrives away from her strict husband, while chef Vivie develops diplomatic skills, and unmarried Bec is forced to choose between family beliefs and her passion for a married man.

Deborah Green is a woman of passionate contradictions, a rabbi struggling with her own doubts and desires. Her life changes when she visits the hospital room of Henry Friedman, an older man who has attempted suicide. His parents were murdered in the Holocaust when he was a child, and all his life he has struggled with painful questions. Can happiness come after such loss, or does the very wish profane the dead? Can religious promises ever be fulfilled?...

Three generations of women confront family secrets in this exquisetely wrought debut novel that examines the experience of religious community, the perilous emotional path to adulthood, and the ower of sacred Jewish rituals to repair the damaged bonds between mothers and daughters.

Csilla has felt protected by the Duna river her entire life, and especially during the Holocaust of World War II, but that magic seems to have broken when Communists took control of Hungary. When her parents are killed by the secret police, Csilla's deep feelings of betrayal and disconnection cause her to plan her escape from her unrecognizable homeland. They are posthumously exonerated, however, sparking a series of protests that make her reconsider...