I’m a Lot: Surviving Myself and All the People I’ve Been
By Alison Leiby (The Dial Press)

Alison Leiby hooked me with Loehmann’s. The Jewish comedian and award-winning television writer, who has worked on Broad City and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, among other shows, describes how the store was her meditation, her “Zen garden where the rest of the world washed away.” Her memoir-in essays is hilarious, candid and tender as she recounts episodes in her life—including a near-death experience—of shifting identities and roles.

Peddlers, Merchants, and Junk Dealers:Jewish Life in Small-Town Vermont
By Margaret K. Nelson (NYU Press)

The stories of immigrant Jews who traveled to isolated towns in Vermont in the late-19th century as scrap dealers or peddlers are not well known. Some of these pioneers turned their businesses into small shops and then department stores. Margaret K. Nelson, a distinguished sociologist, considers the “ways they were—and were not—integrated into local communities.” The author, whose own great grandfather peddled aprons sewn by his wife, describes her own move to Vermont in the 1970s to teach at Middlebury College—a time when there were few Jews in the state.

Are They Dead Yet?: The Art of the Obit
By Sam Roberts (Bloomsbury)

New York Times journalist Sam Roberts has spent more than a decade on “the dead beat,” writing obituaries. These are powerful life-affirming memorials that detail episodes and accomplishments over a lifetime. Roberts is master not only of writing obits but also of writing about the art of writing obits. He shares the stories behind the stories, many of Jewish leaders and cultural figures, with undertones of humor. This is a book about journalism, including aspects of Roberts’ own Jewish background. The first funeral he remembers is that of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, when he and his father watched the hearse carrying their bodies pass through their neighborhood in Brooklyn.

The Renoir Girls: A Hidden History of Art, War & Betrayal
By Catherine Ostler (Atria)

In 1881, the Impressionist artist Pierre-Auguste Renoir painted The Pink and the Blue, a gorgeous double portrait of the two youngest daughters of the Cahen d’Anvers family, a Jewish banking dynasty then at the center of Parisian society. The girls, Alice and Elizabeth, wore lace dresses with pink and blue sashes and held hands. Catherine Ostler traces the provenance of the famous painting, now in a museum in Brazil, and the history of the girls’ extended family, as their privileged lives were upended by antisemitism and betrayal. Six decades after Renoir painted the sisters, Elizabeth, the girl in blue, was sent to Auschwitz and murdered. The author understands how “excruciatingly relevant” the story is today.

Hotel Exile: Paris in the Shadow of War
By Jane Rogoyska (W.W. Norton)

Through the history of one elegant Parisian hotel, Jane Rogoyska robustly captures an era. The Hotel Lutetia, opened in 1910, was long a meeting place for artists, intellectuals and politicians. It then became a place of disruption and dislocation during the German occupation of Paris, when regular guests were replaced by Nazi officers and spies. After the war, the hotel served as a place of shelter and healing for returning deportees, including Jews arriving from concentration camps. Writing in the present tense, Rogoyska creates immediacy, pulling together many threads and overlapping lives and losses.

Sandee Brawarsky is 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.