Sometimes the price of being saved is much higher than we could ever expect or know and Jewish children hidden during the Holocaust found that out the hard way.  The novel Once We Were Home (Flatiron, $27.99) explores a few of their stories — author Jennifer Rosner talks to fiction editor Yona Zeldis McDonough about what it’s like to be lost, found and lost again.  YZM: What drew you to this stories and how did you go about researching it?  JR: The stories of children that I highlight in Once We Were Home were little-known to me, despite my having read quite significantly a ..read more

Sometimes the price of being saved is much higher than we could ever expect or know and Jewish children hidden during the Holocaust found that out the hard way.  The novel Once We Were Home (Flatiron, $27.99) explores a few of their stories — author Jennifer Rosen talks to fiction editor Yona Zeldis McDonough about what it’s like to be lost, found and lost again.  YZM: What drew you to this stories and how did you go about researching it?  JR: The stories of children that I highlight in Once We Were Home were little-known to me, despite my having read quite significantly ab ..read more

In We Are On Our Own (Drawn & Quarterly, $22.95), comics artist Miriam Katin illustrated her family’s story of hiding in the Holocaust. Her mother encouraged her to create this work—but on one condition. The author illustrator talks to fiction editor Yona Zeldis McDonough about the unique relationship of words to images.  YZM: What made this the right time to tell your story?  How did your mother feel about your doing it?  MK: The stories my mother told me about life in hiding and surviving during the war were like a constant presence in my mind—an unwanted, uninvited presen ..read more

The twins Bronka and JoJo Lubinski are at the center of Shadows We Carry (Spark Press, $17.95), a post-Holocaust novel set in the 1960’s that grapples with the insidious power of long-held family secrets, and the confusion of religious identities and bloodlines. Author Meryl Ain talks to Fiction Editor Yona Zeldis McDonough about how the scars of World War II played out in the revolutionary societal changes of the time. YZM: You’ve said this is a sequel to your first novel, The Takeaway Men; what about those characters made you want to return to them?  MA: First and foremost, ma ..read more

After her brother’s death from a congenital heart defect and a move to new town, twelve-year-old Lucy finds herself in an awkward position; she’s the new kid in a grade full of survivors of a shooting that happened four years ago. Lucy feels isolated and unable to share her family’s own loss, which is profoundly different from the trauma of her peers and she struggles through her days. This is the jumping off point for Emily Barth Isler’s brave and important debut novel Aftermath (Carolrhoda Books, $17.99) which aims to makes the unfathomable understandable to a young and tender audience.  ..read more

September 1939 and Edith Becker sits with her hands trembling beneath the table where she’s seated before some of the most important men of the Alte Pinakoteck, one of Munich’s greatest museums.  Usually, Edith’s work as a conservator keeps her ] behind the scenes, but today she’s been asked to identify and comment on paintings held in private collections across Poland.  What she doesn’t know is that this is just the beginning of an extensive and highly organized plot to plunder Europe’s artwork and use it to glorify the Third Reich.  Fiction Editor Yona Zeldis McDonough talks t ..read more

Rome, 1943: Marina Tozzi is on her way home from university when she learns that her father has been killed for harboring a Jewish artist. Her grief is mixed with fear for her own life, and she flees to Villa I Tatti, the Florentine villa of her father’s American friend Bernard Berenson and his partner Belle da Costa Greene, the famed librarian who once curated J.P. Morgan’s library. So begins Anita Abriel’s novel A Girl During the War (Atria, $17.00). Abriel, the author of two other novels set during World War II, talks to Fiction Editor Yona Zeldis McDonough about why she endows her you ..read more

In twelfth century Salerno, Kingdom of Sicily, a young Jewish woman named Rebecca, who will be familiar to readers of Ivanhoe, pursues her dreams by attending medical school. Practicing her profession, she defies family pressure to marry Rafael, the man who loves her. But even more pressing is the conquest of Sicily by the Hohenstaufens and the arrival of rogue crusaders, both of which threaten Salerno’s long-standing atmosphere of religious tolerance. When a rabbi is falsely accused of murdering a crusader, Rebecca and Rafael commit to pursuing justice and protecting the Jewish community ..read more

Would Whoopi Goldberg have been suspended from the View had she been a white Ashkenazi Jew? If Whoopi Goldberg had been a white Jew and made statements showing limited understanding of the Holocaust and its dynamics, would she have provoked the same outrage? Furthermore, would the View have suspended her? Since last week’s incidents, these questions will not stop knocking around inside my head. I have to admit that I do not think she would have been suspended. I believe she would have simply been corrected, with no punitive action applied. We need to ask ourselves why that might be.  Flex ..read more

During the brutal occupation of Holland by the Germans, the brave sisters Janny and Lien Brilleslijper joined the Resistance and used a safe house in the woods as the basis for their operations. Called “the High Nest,” this secret refuge would become one of the most important safe havens in the country. Eventually, the occupants of the house were betrayed and sisters were sent off on one of the last trains to Auschwitz. Decades later, when Dutch writer Roxane Van Iperen and her family moved into the High Nest, she immediately was pulled into the history of the house and began to investigate.&n ..read more