Here are 100 books that The Art of Blessing the Day fans have personally recommended if you like
The Art of Blessing the Day.
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A poet for fifty years, I'm proud to say that nobody's ever said, "I didn't understand your poem." The rhythms, images, and words in these books are in plain English. They have feeling and authenticity in common. They make connections. After a reading once, a woman said, "I feel as if I know your whole family." I feel the same about the authors of these books. I'm also interested in my quirky kind of American Jewishness at a time when it's in the news but complicated and misunderstood. Some of the books I chose reflect that.
I love this book because it goes straight for the gut.
These poems tell the truth no matter what. I never have to wonder what they mean. I love how authentic the poet is and how she gives everyday life a mythic quality, whether she's talking about her eggs and childbirth, or her awful parents, or going fishing with her kids.
This 45th anniversary hardback collector's edition of the bestselling debut collection of poetry by Sharon Olds includes a new interior design and an introduction by Diane Seuss. Satan Says received the inaugural San Francisco Poetry Center Award in 1980.
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
A poet for fifty years, I'm proud to say that nobody's ever said, "I didn't understand your poem." The rhythms, images, and words in these books are in plain English. They have feeling and authenticity in common. They make connections. After a reading once, a woman said, "I feel as if I know your whole family." I feel the same about the authors of these books. I'm also interested in my quirky kind of American Jewishness at a time when it's in the news but complicated and misunderstood. Some of the books I chose reflect that.
I love this book because it was the first book of poetry I ever read that made me realize I could get it, that poems could be about me, women, feelings, relationships, my experience. It blew my mind.
I was an English major, and when the professors talked about modern poetry by men, I always felt baffled. These were poems I could understand and relate to. I read them shouting with joy, even though they were not happy poems.
It was okay to write and read poems about all kinds of feelings, and they didn't have to be in mysterious language. The language of these poems is wonderful, but it's also clear.
From Wikipedia: Sexton's eighth collection of poetry is entitled The Awful Rowing Toward God. The title came from her meeting with a Roman Catholic priest who, although unwilling to administer last rites, told her "God is in your typewriter." This gave the poet the desire and willpower to continue living and writing. The Awful Rowing Toward God and The Death Notebooks are among her final works and both centre on the theme of dying.
A poet for fifty years, I'm proud to say that nobody's ever said, "I didn't understand your poem." The rhythms, images, and words in these books are in plain English. They have feeling and authenticity in common. They make connections. After a reading once, a woman said, "I feel as if I know your whole family." I feel the same about the authors of these books. I'm also interested in my quirky kind of American Jewishness at a time when it's in the news but complicated and misunderstood. Some of the books I chose reflect that.
I loved this book because it proved that you can write poems about the simplest, most everyday experiences and make them fresh, funny, fascinating, and new.
The whole book consists of poems based on the poet's experience working in a grocery store in the Midwest. I've never looked at groceries the same again.
And who knows? Inside every ordinary-looking clerk, maybe there's a poet.
A Duke with rigid opinions, a Lady whose beliefs conflict with his, a long disputed parcel of land, a conniving neighbour, a desperate collaboration, a failure of trust, a love found despite it all.
Alexander Cavendish, Duke of Ravensworth, returned from war to find that his father and brother had…
A poet for fifty years, I'm proud to say that nobody's ever said, "I didn't understand your poem." The rhythms, images, and words in these books are in plain English. They have feeling and authenticity in common. They make connections. After a reading once, a woman said, "I feel as if I know your whole family." I feel the same about the authors of these books. I'm also interested in my quirky kind of American Jewishness at a time when it's in the news but complicated and misunderstood. Some of the books I chose reflect that.
I loved this anthology of poems for its authenticity and depth of feeling.
It was written by and for widows—of all genders and ages, in all kinds of committed relationships. The anthology demonstrates that there are an infinite number of ways to grieve and survive.
I have given this book as a gift to a number of friends dealing with the loss of a spouse or partner (not necessarily right away!), and they have told me they got a lot of comfort from it.
I think the quality of the poems and how different from every other every voice and experience described is give the book as a whole enormous power. It says, "This is something we all go through, we can each find our own way to grieve, and we are not alone."
The Widows' Handbook is the first anthology of poems by contemporary widows, many of whom have written their way out of solitude and despair, distilling their strongest feelings into poetry or memoir. This stirring collection celebrates the strategies widows learn and the resources they muster to deal with people, living space, possessions, social life, and especially themselves, once shock has turned to the realization that nothing will ever be the same. As Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg says in her foreword, losing one's partner is "a loss like no other.",
The Widows' Handbook is a collection of poetry from…
I’m a bicultural writer from the U.S. who has always loved reading historical novels, and I recently “found” my writing genre when I published a debut novel, set in Ukraine during the Holocaust. Writing about that horrific time is fraught with difficulty and is often a frightening endeavor. As writers, we’re obligated to get every fact right, as the truth honors the victims and survivors. To that end, I read dozens and dozens of books—history, biographies, art books, memoirs, and fiction. There are many worthy books that could be on this list, but with just 5 to pick, these made a large impact on me beyond just factual research.
Appelfeld is considered one of Israel’s foremost writers. He writes fluidly in beautiful, spare, fable-like prose. Appelfeld himself was a child survivor who escaped a camp and hid in the countryside and woods, making his “faction” all the more authentic and powerful. The title character, Tzili, is a young Jewish girl who hides from the Germans in a country not specified (but is likely Ukraine). This novel brings to light the harsh conditions and horrors that “free” survivors faced, both during and after the war.
The youngest, least-favored member of an Eastern European Jewish family, Tzili is considered an embarrassment by her parents and older siblings. Her schooling has been a failure, she is simple and meek, and she seems more at home with the animals in the field than with people. And so when her panic-stricken family flees the encroaching Nazi armies, Tzili is left behind to fend for herself. At first seeking refuge with the local peasants, she is eventually forced to escape from them as well, and she takes to the forest, living a solitary existence until she is discovered by another…
I’ve always been drawn to stories about Jewish survival. My mother’s family were Yiddish-speaking Jews from Belarus, and as a child I was often asking questions about what their world was like before it was destroyed. I later studied at Brandeis University where I earned my doctorate in Hebrew and Yiddish Literature, and then taught Jewish Literature at the University of Toronto. When my novel Come Back for Me was published, it felt as though many of my lifelong passions had finally come together in one book. Yet I’m still asking questions. My second novel (almost completed!) continues my quest to further my knowledge of all that was lost.
When I read They Were Like Family to Me (originally titled In the Land of Armadillos), I came to understand how magic realism can be used to illuminate that which ultimately cannot be described—in this case, the horror of human depravity during the Holocaust.
This technique also reflects the inability of the victims to grasp what is happening around them, causing them to escape into a world of fantasy. The novel is comprised of a series of interconnected tales about victims and perpetrators, with each chapter telling a story that is simultaneously realistic and dreamlike. It is utterly unique and unlike most other books in this genre.
Finalist for the 2017 Story Prize Honorable Mention in the 2017 ALA Sophie Brody Medal for achievement in Jewish Literature
“An absolutely dazzling triumph…A singularly inventive collection” (Jewish Book Council) of linked stories set in a German-occupied town in Poland during World War II, where tales of myth and folklore meet the real-life monsters of the Nazi invasion.
1942. With the Nazi Party at the height of its monstrous power, Hitler’s SS fires up the new crematorium at Auschwitz and the occupying army empties Poland’s towns and cities of their Jewish citizens. As neighbor turns on neighbor and survival depends…
The Duke's Christmas Redemption
by
Arietta Richmond,
A Duke who has rejected love, a Lady who dreams of a love match, an arranged marriage, a house full of secrets, a most unneighborly neighbor, a plot to destroy reputations, an unexpected love that redeems it all.
Lady Charlotte Wyndham, given in an arranged marriage to a man she…
I’ve always been drawn to stories about Jewish survival. My mother’s family were Yiddish-speaking Jews from Belarus, and as a child I was often asking questions about what their world was like before it was destroyed. I later studied at Brandeis University where I earned my doctorate in Hebrew and Yiddish Literature, and then taught Jewish Literature at the University of Toronto. When my novel Come Back for Me was published, it felt as though many of my lifelong passions had finally come together in one book. Yet I’m still asking questions. My second novel (almost completed!) continues my quest to further my knowledge of all that was lost.
As one of the most distinguished writers of Jewish fiction, Cynthia Ozick is known for her work that is both linguistically spellbinding and profoundly thought-provoking.
After reading her two-part novella, The Shawl and Rosa, I believe that it stands out as one of her finest. It tells the story of two women whose survival during World War Two is painfully intertwined, to the point that they cannot separate their horrific experiences from the way they view each other. This penetrating psychological portrait of the devastating effects of victimhood is unparalleled in Jewish literature.
Both my parents were born in Leipzig, Germany and were survivors of the Holocaust. I grew up in Upstate New York with stories my mother recounted about her family’s dramatic escape and the many harrowing moments they endured. I was fortunate enough to interview her before her death and to acquire the memoirs of her two sisters. I've always wanted to publish their astonishing story, and I'm thrilled that my readership spans many countries.This book highlights the many individual, family, and village rescuers that saved the lives of my mother’s family. I have stayed connected to the descendants of many of these rescuers and am forever grateful for the risks these heroic people took to save the lives of the Kroch family.
This fascinating account offers an in-depth look into the hearts and minds of ten Dutch people who saved the lives of thousands of Jewish children during the Nazi occupation of Holland. Less than 1 percent, 55,000 Dutch citizens stood up to the Nazis with active resistance, shouldering the responsibility of saving 140,000 innocent people. As he interviews rescuers, Mr. Klepner, himself a child of a Holocaust survivor, comes to understand the circumstances that led rescuers to make the choices to risk their lives to save Jews.
"You can't let people be treated in an inhuman way around you....Otherwise you start to become inhuman." So declares rescuer Hetty Voûte in this updated edition of THE HEART HAS REASONS, an acclaimed historical account that offers an in-depth look into the hearts and minds of the Holocaust rescuers and explores the meaning that their lives and deeds have for us today. Individually or in small "humanitarian cells," the ten Dutch people profiled in this Kindle book saved the lives of thousands of Jewish children during the Nazi occupation of Holland. How did they do what they did—and why did…
The books I’ve recommended here range from scholarship, young adult historical fiction, literary fiction, and a good spy mystery—all set in World War II. I’ve read widely in the field since I’ve written several nonfiction books for young readers and teens about World War II. Along with We Must Not Forget, these include Courage & Defiance, about the Danish resistance, Dive!, about the submarine war in the Pacific, D-Day: The World War II Invasion that Changed History, and We Had to Be Brave: Escaping the Nazis on the Kindertransport. I’m currently working on a book about a 1945 POW rescue in the Philippines.
The late Jacob Presser (1899-1970) was a historian, scholar, and a Holocaust survivor himself. His wife was deported and died, and he survived by going into hiding He spent fifteen years researching the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands and the plight of the Dutch Jews.
He speaks movingly of finding small scraps of paper, messages thrown from trains leaving Westerbork (an internment camp and later a transit camp in the Netherlands), noting that “Before me, hardly anyone has read them and, after me, they are locked into the archives and it’s possible nobody else will see them.” They awoke in him, he said, an awareness that one of the tasks of the historian is to “give the dead a voice.”
Beginning in 1940, 110,000 Jews were deported from the Netherlands to concentration camps. Of those, fewer than 6,000 returned.
Ashes in the Wind is a story of murder on a scale never known before. It is a monumental history of the Jewish victims of the Holocaust, and a detailed and moving description of how the Nazi party first discriminated against Jews, before segregating them and finally deporting them to the gas chambers (a process fully outlined in the mass of administrative documents discovered by Dr Presser).
At a time when there are increasingly few survivors of the Holocaust, the eye-witness…
This book follows the journey of a writer in search of wisdom as he narrates encounters with 12 distinguished American men over 80, including Paul Volcker, the former head of the Federal Reserve, and Denton Cooley, the world’s most famous heart surgeon.
In these and other intimate conversations, the book…
Both my parents were born in Leipzig, Germany and were survivors of the Holocaust. I grew up in Upstate New York with stories my mother recounted about her family’s dramatic escape and the many harrowing moments they endured. I was fortunate enough to interview her before her death and to acquire the memoirs of her two sisters. I've always wanted to publish their astonishing story, and I'm thrilled that my readership spans many countries.This book highlights the many individual, family, and village rescuers that saved the lives of my mother’s family. I have stayed connected to the descendants of many of these rescuers and am forever grateful for the risks these heroic people took to save the lives of the Kroch family.
This beautifully written and impeccably researched book is a spellbinding account of rescuers during the Holocaust. Coming from the perspective of a psychotherapist and social psychologist Dr. Fogelman explores the commonalities of rescuers and their motivations that compels them to risk their lives to save others. Dr. Fogelman paints in-depth accounts of some of the many rescuers she interviewed. One of them, Jean Kowalyk, is a Polish 19-year-old woman who hid and saved the lives of seven Jews. One of the men she hides in the attic of her small farmhouse later marries Jean and they move to America, where Dr. Fogelman continued to stay friends with both.
In this brilliantly researched and insightful book, psychologist Eva Fogelman presents compelling stories of rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust--and offers a revealing analysis of their motivations. Based on her extensive experience as a therapist treating Jewish survivors of the Holocaust and those who helped them, Fogelman delves into the psychology of altruism, illuminating why these rescuers chose to act while others simply stood by. While analyzing motivations, Conscience And Courage tells the stories of such little-known individuals as Stefnaia Podgorska Burzminska, a Polish teenager who hid thirteen Jews in her home; Alexander Roslan, a dealer in the black market…
