Third Ear: Reflections on the Art and Science of Listening
By Elizabeth Rosner (Counterpoint)

In this work of scientific inquiry, observation and memoir told in brief takes, novelist and poet Elizabeth Rosner tunes her attention to the soundscape of life. The idea of deep listening, she explains, is the sonic version of reading between the lines and listening with heart and empathy. The daughter of Holocaust survivors, she grew up in a home where six languages were spoken and, in this new work, shares stories about learning to interpret whispers, accents, hums and silence and, as she writes, “eavesdrop on the world.”

The Concealment of Endless Light
By Yehoshua November (Orison Books)

Yehoshua November is an award-winning poet who writes with rare ease, honesty, humility and beauty about the Divine as well as the mundane; worlds come together in his writing. His poems tell stories drawn from his life and are sometimes laced with mystical Hasidic teachings. This collection of spiritual poetry is one that even secularists and skeptics will find engaging and powerful.

 
Still Life with Remorse: Family Stories
By Maira Kalman (Harper)

Through poetic words and vibrant illustrations, Maira Kalman expresses complicated thoughts about family, love, regret, remorse and the possibility of joy and hope. She shares short, illustrated stories of relatives transplanted from shtetls in Belarus to Tel Aviv, of brothers who didn’t speak, of love that was silent and of iconic artists, such as writers Leo Tolstoy and Franz Kafka and composer Gustav Mahler. She is playful and bittersweet, as she understands that we can’t change the past. In her distinctive style, her paintings—of arrangements of flowers, furniture, hats and books, empty rooms and rooms with people—burst with details and evoke memories both personal and collective.

 
Roman Year: A Memoir
By André Aciman (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) 

André Aciman’s latest book follows his lyrical 1994 memoir, Out of Egypt, and picks up after his family is expelled from Egypt and he arrives in Rome, along with his deaf mother and younger brother, in 1964. In richly detailed and intimate prose, Aciman returns to the themes that compel him: exile, identity, language, love, loss and memory. In books and bookshops, he finds comfort and challenge. Then a young teen, he comes to love the timeless nature of Rome and writes of its narrow streets, the rhythms and rituals of daily life and the habits of his eccentric extended family.

Only in America: Al Jolson and The Jazz Singer
By Richard Bernstein (Knopf)

For distinguished journalist Richard Bernstein, Al Jolson’s story is the American immigration story at its finest. In his heyday, from about 1912 to 1934, the Lithuanian-born Jewish star of stage and film was the most famous and highest-paid entertainer in America. Bernstein looks into Jolson’s life story as well as the making of the 1927 film, The Jazz Singer, a national sensation that was groundbreaking for its time.

Sandee Brawarsky is a longtime columnist in the Jewish book world as well as an award-winning journalist, editor and author of several books, most recently of 212 Views of Central Park: Experiencing New York City’s Jewel From Every Angle.