Julia M. Klein, the Forward’s contributing book critic, has been a two-time finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing. Follow her @JuliaMKlein.
Julia M. KleinContributing Book Critic
By Julia M. Klein
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Culture After the Holocaust, incalculable losses and jaw-dropping discoveries
House of Glass: The Story and Secrets of a Twentieth-Century Jewish Family By Hadley Freeman Simon & Schuster, 323 pages, $26 The most vivid of the characters striding through Hadley Freeman’s “House of Glass” is Alex Maguy, whose very surname is pure self-invention. Freeman’s swaggeringly self-confident great-uncle founded a fashion house and an art gallery,…
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Culture At 99, a survivor tells his daring tale of heroism
The Art of Resistance: My Four Years in the French Underground By Justus Rosenberg William Morrow, 288 pages, $28.99 In 1937, with Nazi violence disrupting Jewish life in Danzig (now Gdańsk, Poland), Justus Rosenberg’s parents sent him to Paris to pursue his studies. He was just 16, and it would be 15 years before he…
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Culture In Amsterdam, borne back ceaselessly into a Jewish past
House on Endless Waters By Emuna Elon; translated from Hebrew by Anthony Berris and Linda Yechiel Atria Books, 320 pages, $27 The plot of Emuna Elon’s lovely novel – about history, fiction and the importance of family ties — begins with a broken promise: The prominent Israeli novelist Yoel Blum has agreed to return to…
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Culture From Treblinka, a story of anguish and healing
Driving to Treblinka: A Long Search for a Lost Father By Diana Wichtel Heritage, 278 pages, $22.95 Diana Wichtel’s father was an improbable Holocaust survivor. He managed to squeeze through the window of a rail car on its way from the Warsaw Ghetto to the Treblinka death camp, leaving his mother and other relatives to…
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Culture On The Trail Of Nazis And Nazi Hunters In America
Citizen 865: The Hunt for Hitler’s Hidden Soldiers in America By Debbie Cenziper Hachette Books, 300 pages, $28 In his 2016 book, “The Nazi Hunters,” Andrew Nagorski suggested that, with nearly all the Nazi perpetrators gone, the time had come to tell the story of the men and women who had pursued them across continents…
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Culture A Survivor’s Story Where No One Is Exactly Who They Seem
The Survivors: A Story of War, Inheritance, and Healing By Adam P. Frankel Harper, 271 pages, $27.99 Whenever he excelled, Adam P. Frankel’s paternal grandmother offered these words of encouragement: “Good genes.” The astute reader may detect a hint of ironic foreshadowing. Frankel’s memoir, “The Survivors,” takes a series of surprising, sometimes unwieldy, twists and…
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Culture To Protect A Predator: How Ronan Farrow Unmasked A Conspiracy
Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators By Ronan Farrow Little, Brown and Company, 448 pages, $30 While Ronan Farrow was investigating sexual harassment and assault accusations against Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein for NBC News, Weinstein was reaching out repeatedly to Farrow’s bosses to quash his reporting. In one chilling exchange,…
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Culture From Poland To The USSR To Iran To Israel: A Holocaust Story
Tehran Children: A Holocaust Refugee Odyssey By Mikhal Dekel W.W. Norton & Company, 417 pages, $27.95 It was the prompting of an Iranian-American colleague at the City College of New York that stirred Mikhal Dekel’s interest in her family’s Holocaust narrative of flight, hardship and survival. Dekel’s initial idea was to collaborate on a book…
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