Jewish Bios & Memoirs

Faith, strength, and resilience shine through powerful, haunting memoirs from Holocaust survivors,
accounts of rabbinical leaders, and moving stories of devoted Jewish families.

In this posthumous memoir, Joanie Holzer Schirm elegantly recreates her father's youthful voice as he comes of age as a Jew in interwar Prague, escapes from a Nazi-held army unit, practices medicine in China's war-ravaged interior, and settles in the United States to start a family....

On June 6, 1944, Werner T. Angress parachuted down from a C-47 into German-occupied France with the 82nd Airborne Division. Nine days later, he was captured behind enemy lines and, concealing his identity as a German-born Jew, became a prisoner of war....

This superbly crafted biography draws on recently uncovered documents and archives of personal correspondence...

A Promise at Sobibór is the story of Fiszel Bialowitz, a teenaged Polish Jew who escaped the Nazi gas chambers....

My Rebbe explores the evolution of Chabad's global success, its central beliefs and practices, the Rebbe's personal history, and his vision to inspire change....

Beautifully and evocatively rendered, this memoir endures as an example of post-war narrative at its finest. Jankele Kuperblum was just nine years old when he returned home and found his family gone. The night before, Germans had come to his town in rural Poland and taken away all the Jews. Now...

This biography uncovers the roots of the dedication and sacrifice that nurture the current Lubavitch movement....

"Our Crowd" is the fascinating story of this rarefied society. Based on letters, documents, diary entries, and intimate personal remembrances of family lore by members of these most illustrious clans, it is an engrossing portrait of upper-class Jewish life over two centuries....

Happy childhood, horrors of war, and the miraculous rescue of the only child survivor from Obertyn. Krystyna Carmi's childhood in Obertyn was full of happy moments. Her childhood was filled with friends, both Polish and Ukrainian, and she attended a Ukrainian school. Krystyna Carmi was...

An acclaimed writer on her mother’s tumultuous life as a Jewish immigrant in 1930s New York and her life-long guilt when the Holocaust claims the family she left behind in Latvia....

Golda Meir was a world figure unlike any other. Born in tsarist Russia in 1898, she immigrated to America in 1906 and grew up in Milwaukee, where from her earliest years she displayed the political consciousness and organizational skills that would eventually catapult her into the inner circles...

That a Jew living in Nazi Berlin survived the Holocaust at all is surprising. That he was a homosexual and a teenage leader in the resistance and yet survived is amazing....

Israel Meir Lau, one of the youngest survivors of Buchenwald, was just eight years old when the camp was liberated in 1945. Descended from a 1,000-year unbroken chain of rabbis, he grew up to become Chief Rabbi of Israel - and like many of the great rabbis, Lau is a master storyteller. Out of...

The breathtaking memoir by a member of "Nicky's family", a group of 669 Czechoslovakian children who escaped the Holocaust through Sir Nicholas Winton's Kindertransport project....

This first comprehensive biography of Jewish American writer and humorist Harry Golden (1903-1981)....

At 14, Bronislaw Huberman played the Brahms "Violin Concerto" in Vienna, winning high praise from the composer himself. Instantly famous, Huberman began touring all over the world and received invitations to play for royalty across Europe. But after witnessing the tragedy of World War I, he...

The Great Mission presents authentic accounts of the Baal Shem Tov's life and teachings, culled from the vast oral and written tradition of chabad-chasidic literature....

Olga Lengyel tells, frankly and without compromise, one of the most horrifying stories of all time. This true, documented chronicle is the intimate, day-to-day record of a beautiful woman who survived the nightmare of Auschwitz and Birchenau....