This Women’s History Month, celebrate with a propulsive read! Ten writers recommend books to dig into this month. From captivating contemporary fiction, to engrossing memoirs of survival, to thrilling historical fiction, these fifteen titles are sure to scintillate. And be sure to check out the authors’ own fantastic works!
Sasha Vasilyuk, author, forthcoming, of Your Presence is Mandatory
Mother Doll by Katya Apekina
Mother Doll by Katya Apekina is the story of Irina, a young Russian Jewish girl in St. Petersburg who gets swept up by the Russian Revolution, and her great-granddaughter Zhenia, a pregnant twenty-something in today’s Los Angeles. Zhenia is forced to listen to Irina’s ghost as she seeks forgiveness for her bad deed as a mother. Apekina, who is a Russian Jewish immigrant herself, brings wit and virtuosity to this twisty tale of intergenerational trauma.
The Possibilities by Yael Goldstein-Love
The Possibilities by Yael Goldstein-Love is a stunner of a story, following Hannah, a Berkeley mother of an eight-month-old who can’t fully forget her harrowing birth experience. She ends up falling down the rabbit hole of psychoanalysis, self-doubt, string theory and parallel worlds to save her son and herself. A suspenseful page-turner and intricate puzzle box, The Possibilities explores motherhood with the radical brushstrokes of the 2010 film Inception.
Monika Zgustová , author, forthcoming, of A Revolver to Carry at Night
Suite Francaise by Irène Némirovsky, translated by Sandra Smith
Irène Nemirovsky’s mother and father decided to flee the Russian Revolution to Paris. Irène lived there for the rest of her short life: two and a half decades filled with writing and literary success, with two daughters and a loving husband who typed her manuscripts. Her mother came to life in her novels as a worldly, cruel woman.
Irène ignored her father’s attempts to persuade her to move to the United States where antisemitism had not taken root because she had blind faith in the ethical integrity of France. She only regretted not listening to her father when it was too late: after the German occupation she and her entire family were persecuted. In the summer of 1942 she was arrested and sent to Auschwitz. A month later Irène died, at the age of thirty-nine. She is the author of the novel Suite Française, among many others.
Lisa Barr, author, most recently, of Woman on Fire
This past year, I took a deep dive into the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising for my upcoming historical thriller, The Goddess of Warsaw. My focus for Women’s History Month is on two powerfully written books — one by a woman who writes about history during this time, and the other who lived through it.
The Light of Days: The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitler’s Ghettos by Judy Batalion
Judy Batalion’s award-winning The Light of Days: The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitler’s Ghettos is a must-read to understand the role many women played during the Holocaust. Batalion explores with meticulous detail the lives of these “Ghetto Girls,” ordinary young women – many in their teens – who risked their own lives to serve as couriers, smugglers, and bombers, becoming leaders in the resistance. I felt as though I was there alongside many unsung heroes – those who succeeded in their endeavors and others who fell during acts of resistance. In every chapter, the author reminds us that survival is about rising above the hatred and doing those things that one would never do if life were normal.
Transcending Darkness: A Girl’s Journey Out of the Holocaust by Estelle Glaser Laughlin
I devoured Estelle Glaser Laughlin’s memoir, Transcending Darkness: A Girl’s Journey out of the Holocaust. Estelle, ninety-four years old, is a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto (at thirteen years old) and three concentration camps. Her story is a harrowing tale of love, fear, hope, and resiliency. It comes down to this, in her own words: “Dream with me of a world where no child goes hungry, and hate is unknown.” Born into a well-to-do family, her father insisted on her continuing education in the Warsaw Ghetto, even giving her French lessons. The deeper meaning is that he wanted his daughter to envision her own survival – a full, rich life. Her beloved father did not survive the Nazis, but his teachings and lessons did, and remained the foundation to Estelle’s will to survive.
Robin Judd, author, most recently, of Between Two Worlds: Jewish War Brides After the Holocaust
All But My Life: A Memoir by Gerda Weissmann Klein
I first read All But My Life when I was in college and have returned to it countless times since then. I recommend it when visiting high schools and assign it in my own courses. It sat next to my computer as I began researching my recent book, and it remained there while I labored through the writing process. One of the first memoirs published by a Jewish female survivor in the US, Weissmann Klein’s memoir takes readers from pre-war life in Bielsko, Poland, through the Nazi invasion, into the ghetto, to several labor camps, on a death march, and then to liberation. With each step, the survivor asks pressing questions concerning the meanings of occupation, brutality, friendship, family, and love.
Carlie Hoffman, author, most recently, of When There Was Light
One Strange Country by Stella Hayes
In Stella Hayes’s haunting debut poetry collection, One Strange Country, Hayes illuminates her family’s refugee experience as Jews from Soviet Ukraine to the United States in 1978 with lyrical urgency. Hayes maps a story of identity, exile, and belonging during the Cold War era. The query about where literature fits into day-to-day life during the immigrant struggle to survive manifests in “the shared breath” of a mother teaching her daughter “the right way to slay a chicken.”
Rabbits for Food by Binnie Kirshenbaum
Rabbits for Food by Binnie Kirshenbaum is a heart wrenching and darkly funny novel following a woman suffering from clinical depression and, after reaching a breaking point on New Year’s Eve, her subsequent stay at a prestigious New York City psychiatric hospital. Kirshenbaum’s prose is piercing, hilarious, and unforgettable as she examines with profound insight the experience of feeling alienated from friends and family, and the excruciation in not being able to “point to where it hurts.” This book questions what art and truth provide for us in this state of being. Rabbits for Food is exquisite, brilliant, and true to life.
Francine Klagsbrun, author, most recently, of Henrietta Szold: Hadassah and the Zionist Dream
The Book of V. by Anna Solomon
With Purim at this month’s end, I have been rereading this inventive book, which reimagines the story of Esther by intertwining the lives of three women across space and time. As different as these lives are, they ultimately converge around universal issues of female power and women’s place in society.
Ladies’ Lunch and Other Stories by Lore Segal
In this new collection of short stories, older women take center stage. Five friends who have been meeting regularly for decades are sometimes forgetful now, but still sharp and smart. Segal, herself ninety-five, writes with grace and wry humor as she peruses the landscape of aging.
Sarah Seltzer, author, forthcoming, of The Singer Sisters
The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. by Adelle Waldman
Adelle Waldman wowed readers with her pitch-perfect examination of Brooklyn literary life with 2013’s The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. Her new book, Help Wanted, takes a similarly sharp yet humane approach to the schemes and dreams of workers at an upstate NY big box store, which takes aim at late-stage capitalism beneath its humor and pathos.
Human Blues by Elisa Albert
No one does voice like Elisa Albert. Aviva, the narrator of her novel Human Blues, is a rock’n’roller with fertility problems. She calls her therapist the Rabbi among other Homeric epithets, and has been in my head since I met her on the page. Aviva is often right, quite frequently wrong, and a funny, fierce, and unforgettable literary creation.
Janine P. Holc, author, most recently, of The Weavers of Trautenau: Jewish Female Forced Labor in the Holocaust
Between Two Worlds: Jewish War Brides After the Holocaust by Robin Judd
Robin Judd opens up the postwar dynamics of Jewish young women who survived the Holocaust in Europe as they encounter Allied soldiers and pursue marriage and immigration. Using interviews and documentation, Judd shows us how both women and men coped with military and national regulations on marriage and migration, and the painful compromises of creating a new future while living with unspeakable losses.
Ayelet Brinn, author, most recently, of A Revolution in Type: Gender and the Making of the American Yiddish Press
I Belong to The Working Class: The Unfinished Autobiography of Rose Pastor Stokes edited by Herbert Stokes and David L. Sterling
When researching the history of the Yiddish press, it is often difficult to find texts highlighting the experiences of women who worked for these publications. That is why Rose Pastor Stokes’s unfinished memoir, I Belong to The Working Class, is such a valuable resource. Before becoming a radical activist, Stokes worked as a writer and secretary for the English page of the Jewish Daily News. Her memoir not only recounts her experiences working for the newspaper, but uncovers a world of women working behind the scenes to ensure that the newspaper would appear each day.
Lihi Lapid, author, forthcoming, of On Her Own
The Red Tent by Anita Diamant
When I was a young woman asking questions about my identity, this book had a big role in the woman I became. It tells the story of Dinha, the sister of Joseph. The Bible didn’t give voice to women, as most of the storytellers until a few decades ago were all men. The Red Tent was the first time I had a chance to read history, and to look at the stories of the Bible from the point of view of a woman. As a female writer, I think it’s important to give voice to women’s stories in history, since they were written by men for so long.
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