Typewriter Beach
By Meg Waite Clayton (Harper)

An inventive tale of family love across generations, Meg Waite Clayton’s new mystery novel is a portrait of Hollywood in the 1950s and a story of buried secrets. Set mostly in a California cottage near cliffs overlooking the Pacific Ocean, the novel’s two narratives shift mostly between 1957 and 2018. The titular typewriter belongs to an Oscar-nominated—and blacklisted—Jewish screenwriter who escaped the Nazis as a child.

 

Fools for Love: Stories
By Helen Schulman (Knopf)

The 10 stories in best-selling novelist and screenwriter Helen Schulman’s new collection are not only linked thematically but some characters also make their way across the borders into different tales. The author is skilled at observing, often with humor, the mysteries and messiness of attachment, connection and love. Set in Paris, “The Shabbos Goy,” for example, follows a single American mother visiting the city to help a friend shutter her bookstore; she encounters—through a shared love of poetry—a married Orthodox rabbi.

 

Together in Manzanar: The True Story of a Japanese Jewish Family in an American Concentration Camp
By Tracy Slater (Chicago Review Press)

In the town of Manzanar, Calif., people of Japanese descent, young and old, American citizens and non-citizens, were imprisoned behind barbed wire during World War II. A Jewish woman, Elaine Buchman Yoneda; her Japanese American husband, Karl Yoneda; and their 3-year-old son were among the prisoners. They remained outspoken about their incarceration after their release. Slater’s account of the family’s experience is distressing and timely.

 

A Flower Traveled in My Blood: The Incredible True Story of the Grandmothers Who Fought to Find a Stolen Generation of Children
By Haley Cohen Gilliland (Avid Reader Press)

In this impressive debut, journalist Haley Cohen Gilliland digs through the heartbreaking history of corruption and brutality in Argentina in the 1970s to reveal the story of Las Abuelas Plaza de Mayo—the grandmothers of May Square. These women worked fearlessly to locate their children and grandchildren who were “disappeared” under the country’s military dictatorship and given to allies of the regime. One woman Cohen Gilliland focuses on is the Jewish Rosa Roisinblit, whose pregnant daughter and son-in-law were violently kidnapped; the couple’s son was born in prison. Roisinblit and the other abuelas protested, confronted the military and worked with a scientist pioneering genetic testing to find their families.

 

Milena and Margarete: A Love Story in Ravensbrück
By Gwen Strauss (St. Martin’s Press)

“To have found love in a concentration camp is extraordinary,” Gwen Strauss writes. Indeed, this is the true story of a “passionate friendship” between two women who met in 1940 in Ravensbrück, the only concentration camp built for women. The Czech Milena Jesenská had been Kafka’s first translator. She was also a resistance fighter—recognized by Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations—and a bisexual feminist. Margarete Buber-Neumann was German and had been married to the son of Martin Buber; she was a political prisoner who had been exiled to the Soviet Gulag, then traded by Stalin to Hitler. At Ravensbrück, the two daring women were inseparable.

 

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Sandee Brawarsky is a longtime columnist in the Jewish book world as well as an award-winning journalist, editor and author of several books, most recently of 212 Views of Central Park: Experiencing New York City’s Jewel From Every Angle.