Writings on Yiddish and Yiddishkayt, the War Years, 1939-1945
by Isaac Bashevis Singer. Translated and edited by David Stromberg (White Goat Press)

Originally published in the Yiddish Forverts during World War II, this collection of essays by the Nobel laureate is both timely and a window to the past. Among the varied topics Singer, who died in 1991, addresses are Jewish holidays and customs. As Stromberg, editor of the Singer Literary Trust, explains, the writer felt an urgency to get these down on paper just as the people who closely observed those customs were being murdered. For Singer, spirituality, mysticism, art and politics were all connected. He also writes about the modern Jew as well as the danger of “indifferent Jews,” making a case for Jewish education and spreading an appreciation of Yiddish and Hebrew literature.

My Name Is Barbra
by Barbra Streisand (Viking)

From her Brooklyn roots to her superstar career to her present-day advocacy, Barbra
Streisand reflects on her successes and struggles in her much anticipated, almost 1,000-page memoir. The multi-award-winning singer, actress and director describes her first appearances in subterranean New York City nightclubs, her breakthrough performances on stage (and then on film) in Funny Girl and the trajectory of her great career and friendships.

Tinocchia: The Adventures of a Jewish Puppetta
edited and translated by Curt Leviant (Livingston Press/University of West Alabama)

Memoir or folk tale? Award-winning writer Leviant, author of many works of fiction, tells of finding and translating a 120-year-old handwritten manuscript in the Siena Municipal Public Library archive in Italy. It is a companion to the Pinocchio story, told in the voice of a girl puppet, Tinocchia, her name a play on the Hebrew word for baby, tinok. The event-filled chapters involve Purim and a Purimshpiel and a love story. “Everything is possible in an impossible world” is how Leviant both begins and ends his playful tale.

The Passover Protocols
by Ellen Frankel (Wicked Son)

Ellen Frankel’s third offering in her Jerusalem-set mystery series opens with a murdered boy whose body, drained of blood, is found outside the Belzer Great Synagogue. As in Frankel’s two previous crime novels, intelligence agent Maya Rimon and Chief Police Inspector Sarit Levine are rivals in solving the case, which involves blood libel, antisemitism, white supremacists and Russian mobsters. In the background are office politics, Ethiopian rituals, Hasidic customs, Krav Maga, Israeli food in its great variety and romance.

The Winthrop Agreement
by Alice Sherman Simpson (Harper)

What begins as a somewhat predictable immigrant story—a young Lithuanian woman arrives alone at Ellis Island, and her new husband, who had left earlier for America, doesn’t show up to meet her—takes an unusual twist. Pregnant, hungry and exhausted, Rivkah joins up with another abandoned bride, and the two work in sweatshops. Rivkah is determined that her daughter, Mimi, will have a better life. The Winthrops of the book title are a wealthy uptown family, and through a ruthless Winthrop son, Mimi has an opportunity for that better life—with a secret.