Everything Is Photograph: A Life of André Kertész
By Patricia Albers (Other Press)

Throughout his career, the late photographer André Kertész zigzagged between renown and obscurity before staging major exhibitions of his work around the world. This first complete biography of the man many consider the father of modern photography is impressively researched and beautifully written. Born in Budapest in 1894, Kertész was a secular Jew who never forgot the pogroms he witnessed while fighting in the trenches in World War I. Always curious, he began taking photographs at age 18 and observed deeply, finding emotional resonance in ordinary things. He died at 91, still making exquisite photographs.

The Star Society
By Gabriella Saab (Harper)

This historical novel tells of a pair of Dutch twin sisters who reunite after World War II. One had been involved with the Dutch Resistance and imprisoned by the Gestapo; the other fled before the Nazi invasion. They each feared the other had been killed but find each other in the United States, where the former is an actor and the latter a private investigator in Washington, D.C. The narrative, told from alternating points of view, is set in Hollywood during the Red Scare.

Once There Was a Town: The Memory Books of a Lost Jewish World
By Jane Ziegelman (St. Martin’s)

Yizkor books are works of collective history, providing footnotes to the Jewish past. While the tradition of writing these books dates to 1926, most of the approximately 1,500 that exist today were created from the 1950s to 1970s by Holocaust survivors to memorialize their hometowns and those killed by the Nazis. The writers of these “monuments of paper and ink” filled large volumes with information gathered from survivors across six continents, determined to preserve memory. Jane Ziegelman combines memoir and research into Yizkor books, with a particular interest in Luboml, her ancestral shtetl in Ukraine.

The Dark-Robed Mother: A Memoir
By Rachel Tzvia Back (Wesleyan University Press)

A poet, translator and professor, Rachel Tzvia Back says she hadn’t intended to produce a memoir of depression, but the book, she writes, “announced itself” to her as necessary and potentially helpful to others. Weaving poetry and mythology into her narrative, she writes powerfully of the darkness of depression, although she stipulates that she is high functioning and “passes as normal.” She also includes the experiences of her now adult children, reflecting on what it was like for them to be raised by a mother with depression.

The End of Romance
By Lily Meyer (Viking)

Lily Meyer’s memorable main character, Sylvie, learned from her resilient, open-hearted survivor grandparents about pursuing joy in life—although for Sylvie, it is not easy, as she finds herself trapped in a difficult marriage. This is an anti-romantic novel filled with smart philosophical theorizing about love, morality, sex and feminism that then shifts into multiple love stories that upend many of those theories.

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.