In The Seventh Gate, the fourth volume of Richard Zimler’s series, Isaac Zarco, a distant relative of the 16th-century Portuguese kabbalist, becomes convinced by the pact between Hitler and Stalin that an apocalyptic prophesy made by his ancestor is about to come terribly true. Is he mad to believe that by decoding these ancient texts he might be the one to save the world? A love story, tragedy and a tale of ferocious heroism set in 1930s Berlin.

Two strikingly new voices came to JBW 2011, original and poetic, revisit the themes of loss and belonging, nourished by their own experiences. In Jenny Erbenbeck’s haunting novel, Visitation the inhabitants of a house by a lake are displaced by history, one family after the other. Julya Rabinovich’s Splithead traces the story of a young girl is taken on a plane from Leningrad, without knowing that she is leaving the country for good. We discovered how beautiful writing is borne from the p...

How do a historian and a literary critic recreate the pasts of people they have never met, with little more than papers and a few objects to go on? Orlando Figes and Nancy K. Miller shared the challenges of building a picture of ordinary lives, with their Jewish Book Week audience, in a discussion of his new collection of letters home from the Gulag and her American family chronicle. Just Send Me Word: A True Story of Love and Survival in the Gulag and What they Saved: Pieces of a Jewi...

Bo Lidegaard’s Countrymen is the first full history of how the Danish people managed to rescue the lives of 95% of the country’s Jewish population. Like her Danish counterparts, Gertrude van Tijn, the subject of Bernard Wasserstein’s The Ambiguity of Virtue, rescued Jewish lives. Working for the Nazi-appointed Jewish Council in Amsterdam, however, she was denounced by some as a collaborator. Both are exceptionally heroic tales of bravery, attesting to the incredible moral fortitude of s...