Orem Library

Ester Velasquez is an emigrant from Amsterdam who is permitted to scribe for a blind rabbi, just before the plague hits the city. Helen Watt is an ailing historian with a love of Jewish history. When Helen is summoned by a former student to view a cache of seventeenth-century Jewish documents newly discovered in his home during a renovation, she enlists the help of Aaron Levy, an American graduate student as impatient as he is charming. In a race...

Though Iris Stern considers herself a modern woman, with a successful academic career and a happy marriage, she still holds steadfast to her old-fashioned sensibilities. But as the mother of three adult children, each with their own lives and burdens to bear, she often finds those sensibilities called into question when confronted with the choices her children have made.

"From the two-time National Book Award winning author of The Snow Leopard and Shadow Country, a short, powerful novel about an American professor of Holocaust Studies who, over the course of a weeklong spiritual retreat at Auschwitz, is forced to grapple with his own past and a family secret: the Jewish mother abandoned to her doom by his Gentile father"--

Drawing on a vast array of sources, including interviews with the last surviving seamstress, this powerful book tells the story of the brave women who used their sewing skills to survive the Holocaust, exposing the greed, cruelty and hypocrisy of the Third Reich. At the height of the Holocaust, young inmates of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp-- mainly Jewish women and girls-- were selected to design, cut, and sew beautiful fashions in a...

"Addie Baum is The Boston Girl, born in 1900 to immigrant parents who were unprepared for and suspicious of America and its effect on their three daughters. Growing up in the North End, then a teeming multicultural neighborhood, Addie's intelligence and curiosity take her to a world her parents can't imagine--a world of short skirts, movies, celebrity culture, and new opportunities for women. Addie wants to finish high school and dreams of going to...

"A public defender turned stay-at-home mom, Juliet Applebaum is bored with playdates and trips to the park--so near the end of her second pregnancy she gets off the mommy track to track down a murderer ... Juliet isn't too surprised when her feisty, tantrum-throwing two-year-old daughter doesn't get into Hollywood's premier preschool--but she's shocked and suspicious when the school's principal is killed in a hit-and-run accident. Against the advice...

Follows the quest of Sophie Applebaum for her own identity--who she is, what she loves, whom she loves, and occasionally whom she feels others should love--over the course of 25 years.

One Jewish woman's true story of surviving the Holocaust by marrying a Nazi officer. Narrated by Susan Sarandon, this documentary provides a unique perspective in its story of defiance and strength.

"What does it mean to be a mother? Professional woman? Wife and partner? Sister, daughter...? How do we discover the true meaning of identity? As a child, Susan Silverman was surrounded with a loving family--even if her parents weren't happily married, they were devoted to their kids. Not a terribly faith-based family, social justice was the religion practiced at the Silvermans' home. Susan's vibrant, funny, imminently relatable voice tells of a family...