top of page
Background Reading 
About Jews in Poland and/or the Holocaust:

Aharon Appelfeld, For Every Sin (translated by Jeffrey M. Green)

Aharon Appelfeld, To the Edge of Sorrow (translated by Stuart Schoffman)

Michal Ben-Naftali, The Teacher (translated by Daniella Zamir)

L. Annette Binder, The Vanishing Sky

Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz, The Passenger (translated by Philip Boehm)

Natalie Danford, Inheritance: A Novel

Gwen Edelman, The Train to Warsaw

Jennifer Cody Epstein, Wunderland

Linda Grant, The Clothes on their Backs

Georgia Hunter, We Were the Lucky Ones

Walter Kempowski, All for Nothing (translated by Anthea Bell)

Binnie Kirshenbaum, Hester among the Ruins

Jodi Picoult, The Storyteller

Charles Powers, In the Memory of the Forest

Helen Maryles Shankman, In the Land of Armadillos: Stories

Jim Shepard, The Book of Aron

Isaac Bashevis Singer, Shosha

Mark Slouka, The Visible World

Aleksandar Tisma, Kapo (translated by Richard Williams)

Szczepan Twardoch, The King of Warsaw (translated by Sean Gasper Bye) 

About Polish (non-Jewish) culture and history:

Jennifer Haigh, Baker Towers

Keith Maillard, The Clarinet Polka

Eva Mekler, The Polish Woman

Bathsheba Monk, Now You See It: Stories from Cokesville, PA

FICTION
Click on the links to see my reviews in The New York Journal of Books
NONFICTION

Masha Gessen, Ester and Ruzya: How My Grandmothers Survived Hitler's War and Stalin's Peace

Jan T. Gross, Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland

Yisrael Gutman and Ezra Mendelsohn, The Jews of Poland between Two World Wars

Eva Hoffman, Shtetl

Jonathan Kaufman, A Hole in the Heart of the World: Being Jewish in Eastern Europe

Noah Lederman, A World Erased: A Grandson’s Search for His Family’s Holocaust Secrets

Livia Manera Sambuy, In Search of Amrit Kaur: A Lost Princess and Her Vanished World

Judy Rakowsky, Jews in the Garden

R.D. Rosen, Such Good Girls: The Journey of the Holocaust’s Hidden Child Survivors

Theo Richmond, Konin: One Man's Quest for a Vanished Jewish Community

Geraldine Schwarz, Those Who Forget: My Family’s Story in Nazi Europe — A Memoir, A History, A Warning

Louise Steinman, The Crooked Mirror: A Memoir of Polish-Jewish Reconciliation

Christine Zamoyska-Panek, Have You Forgotten? A Memoir of Poland, 1939-1945

AND SOME MOVIES…

Aftermath (2012), director Wladyslaw Pasikowski

Disobedience: The Sousa Mendes Story (2008), director Joel Santoni

Ida (2013), director Pawel Pawlikowski

The Pianist (2002), director Roman Polanski

Schindler’s List (1993), director Steven Spielberg

  • Instagram
  • Twitter
  • goodreads
  • LinkedIn
  • email3

©2022 by Fran Hawthorne

bottom of page