Max's War: The Story of a Ritchie Boy

Max's War: The Story of a Ritchie Boy

Author: Libby Fischer Hellmann

Publisher: The Red Herrings Press

Published: 2024-04-09

Total Pages: 416

ISBN-13:

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A sweeping World War 2 saga in which a young German Jew flees Europe, emigrates to America, and joins the Army to fight Nazis As the Nazis sweep across Europe, Jewish teen Max and his parents flee persecution in Germany for Holland, where Max finds friends and romance. But when Hitler invades in 1940, Max escapes to Chicago, leaving his parents and friends behind. When he learns of his parents' murder in Sobibor, Max immediately enlists in the US Army. After basic training he is sent to Camp Ritchie, Maryland, where he is trained in interrogation and counterintelligence. "Hellmann expertly marries heaps of historical detail with a thoughtful illustration of the dangers of nationalism. This ranks with the author's best work." Publishers Weekly Deployed to the OSS, Max carries out dangerous missions in Occupied countries. He also interrogates scores of German POWs, especially after D-Day and the Battle of the Bulge, where, despite life-threatening conditions, he elicits critical information about German troop movements. "Libby Hellmans's WW2 is meticulously, enviably researched, with an unerring eye for detail. It's the 20th century at its worst, and it's a story everyone should know, everyone should read." John Lawton, author of the Joe Wilderness series Post-war, he works for the Americans in the German denazification program, bringing him back to his Bavarian childhood home of Regensburg. Though the city avoided large-scale destruction, the Jewish community was decimated. Max roams familiar yet strange streets, replaying memories of lives lost to unspeakable tragedy. While there, however, he reunites with someone from his past, who, like him, sought refuge abroad. Can they rebuild their lives… together? This epic story about a Ritchie Boy is Libby Hellmann’s tribute to her late father-in-law who was active with the OSS and interrogated dozens of German POWs. If you enjoy the historical novels of Ken Follett, Kristin Hannah, and Kate Quinn, you'll love the Revolution Sagas by Libby Hellmann.


Into the Forest

Into the Forest

Author: Rebecca Frankel

Publisher: St. Martin's Press

Published: 2021-09-07

Total Pages: 222

ISBN-13: 125026765X

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A 2021 National Jewish Book Award Finalist One of Smithsonian Magazine's Best History Books of 2021 "An uplifting tale, suffused with a karmic righteousness that is, at times, exhilarating." —Wall Street Journal "A gripping narrative that reads like a page turning thriller novel." —NPR In the summer of 1942, the Rabinowitz family narrowly escaped the Nazi ghetto in their Polish town by fleeing to the forbidding Bialowieza Forest. They miraculously survived two years in the woods—through brutal winters, Typhus outbreaks, and merciless Nazi raids—until they were liberated by the Red Army in 1944. After the war they trekked across the Alps into Italy where they settled as refugees before eventually immigrating to the United States. During the first ghetto massacre, Miriam Rabinowitz rescued a young boy named Philip by pretending he was her son. Nearly a decade later, a chance encounter at a wedding in Brooklyn would lead Philip to find the woman who saved him. And to discover her daughter Ruth was the love of his life. From a little-known chapter of Holocaust history, one family’s inspiring true story.


On the Eve

On the Eve

Author: Bernard Wasserstein

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2012-05-01

Total Pages: 576

ISBN-13: 1439101698

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On the Eve is the portrait of a world on the brink of annihilation. In this provocative book, Bernard Wasserstein presents a new and disturbing interpretation of the collapse of European Jewish civilization even before the Nazi onslaught. In the 1930s, as Europe spiraled toward the Second World War, the continent’s Jews faced an existential crisis. The harsh realities of the age—anti-Semitic persecution, economic discrimination, and an ominous climate of violence—devastated Jewish communities and shattered the lives of individuals. The Jewish crisis was as much the result of internal decay as of external attack. Demographic collapse, social disintegration, and cultural dissolution were all taking their toll. The problem was not just Nazism: In the summer of 1939 more Jews were behind barbed wire outside the Third Reich than within it, and not only in police states but even in the liberal democracies of the West. The greater part of Europe was being transformed into a giant concentration camp for Jews. Unlike most previous accounts, On the Eve focuses not on the anti-Semites but on the Jews. Wasserstein refutes the common misconception that they were unaware of the gathering forces of their enemies. He demonstrates that there was a growing and widespread recognition among Jews that they stood on the edge of an abyss. On the Eve recaptures the agonizing sorrows and the effervescent cultural glories of this last phase in the history of the European Jews. It explores their hopes, anxieties, and ambitions, their family ties, social relations, and intellectual creativity—everything that made life meaningful and bearable for them. Wasserstein introduces a diverse array of characters: holy men and hucksters, beggars and bankers, politicians and poets, housewives and harlots, and, in an especially poignant chapter, children without a future. The geographical range also is vast: from Vilna (the “Jerusalem of the North”) to Amsterdam, Vienna, Warsaw, and Paris, from the Judeo-Espagnol-speaking stevedores of Salonica to the Yiddish-language collective farms of Soviet Ukraine and Crimea. Wasserstein’s aim is to “breathe life into dry bones.” Based on comprehensive research, rendered with compassion and empathy, and brought alive by telling anecdotes and dry wit, On the Eve offers a vivid and enlightening picture of the European Jews in their final hour.


Managing Bubbie

Managing Bubbie

Author: Russel Lazega

Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform

Published: 2015-02-05

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781499126297

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"She escaped the almost certain death of a concentration camp, so breaking out of a nursing home is small potatoes. She beat it out of a Polish ghetto by refusing to take orders, so she won't likely take that medication. Just how is one Jewish family in Miami Beach going to make sure their matriarch, Bubbie, gets something she would never have dreamed of needing ... help surviving? Managing Bubbie is the family memoir by grandson Russel Lazega that recounts the vexing days in the 1980's when his family banded together to attempt the insurmountable. Full of wit, warmth, and awe-inspiring will, Managing Bubbie offers a rarely seen glimpse at the deep reserves of compassion, courage, and even comic relief that emerged during the darkest days of the Holocaust. Anyone seeking a new perspective on this defining time, or who share the challenges of managing a difficult family member's health, will find so much in this poignant book."--


Becoming Dr. Ruth

Becoming Dr. Ruth

Author: Mark St. Germain

Publisher: Dramatists Play Service, Inc.

Published: 2014-06-04

Total Pages: 40

ISBN-13: 0822231182

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Everyone knows Dr. Ruth Westheimer from her career as a pioneering radio and television sex therapist. Few, however, know the incredible journey that preceded it. From fleeing the Nazis in the Kindertransport and joining the Haganah in Jerusalem as a sniper, to her struggle to succeed as a single mother newly-arrived in America, Mark St. Germain deftly illuminates this remarkable woman's untold story. BECOMING DR. RUTH is filled with the humor, honesty, and life-affirming spirit of Karola Ruth Siegel, the girl who became "Dr. Ruth," America’s most famous sex therapist.


All the Horrors of War

All the Horrors of War

Author: Bernice Lerner

Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press

Published: 2020-04-14

Total Pages: 279

ISBN-13: 1421437708

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The first book to pair the story of a Holocaust victim with that of a liberator, All the Horrors of War compels readers to consider the full, complex humanity of both.


Salvage Poetics

Salvage Poetics

Author: Sheila E. Jelen

Publisher: Wayne State University Press

Published: 2020-04-14

Total Pages: 460

ISBN-13: 0814343198

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An interdisciplinary approach to American Jewish ethnic identity in post-Holocaust America. This volume explores how American Jewish post-Holocaust writers, scholars, and editors adapted pre-Holocaust works, such as Yiddish fiction and documentary photography, for popular consumption by American Jews in the post-Holocaust decades. These texts, Jelen argues, served to help clarify the role of East European Jewish identity in the construction of a post-Holocaust American one. In her analysis of a variety of "hybrid" texts—those that exist on the border between ethnography and art—Jelen traces the gradual shift from verbal to visual Jewish literacy among Jewish Americans after the Holocaust. S. Ansky's ethnographic expedition (1912–1914) and Martin Buber's adaptation and compilation of Hasidic tales (1906–1935) are presented as a means of contextualizing the role of an ethnographic consciousness in modern Jewish experience and the way in which literary adaptations and mediations create opportunities for the creation of folk ethnographic hybrid texts. Salvage Poetics looks at classical texts of the American Jewish experience in the second half of the twentieth century, such as Maurice Samuel's The World of Sholem Aleichem (1944), Abraham Joshua Heschel's The Earth Is the Lord's (1950), Elizabeth Herzog and Mark Zborowski's Life Is with People(1952), Lucy Dawidowicz's The Golden Tradition(1967), and Roman Vishniac's A Vanished World (1983), alongside other texts that consider the symbiotic relationship between pre-Holocaust aesthetic artifacts and their postwar reframings and reconsiderations. Salvage Poetics is particularly attentive to how literary scholars deploy the notion of "ethnography" in their readings of literature in languages and/or cultures that are considered "dead" or "dying" and how their definition of an "ethnographic" literary text speaks to and enhance the scientific discipline of ethnography. This book makes a fresh contribution to the fields of American Jewish cultural and literary studies and art history.


A Bend In The River: 2 Sisters Struggle to Survive the Vietnam War

A Bend In The River: 2 Sisters Struggle to Survive the Vietnam War

Author: Libby Fischer Hellmann

Publisher: The Red Herrings Press

Published: 2020-10-07

Total Pages: 439

ISBN-13: 1938733681

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A Bend in the River is #5 in the Revolution Sagas. IS THERE A WARNING MOMENT BEFORE LIFE SHATTERS INTO PIECES? In 1968 two young Vietnamese sisters flee to Saigon after their village on the Mekong River is attacked by American forces and burned to the ground. The sole survivors of the brutal massacre that killed their family, the sisters struggle to survive but become estranged, separated by sharply different choices and ideologies. Mai ekes out a living as a GI bar girl, but Tam’s anger festers, and she heads into jungle terrain to fight with the Viet Cong. "A polished segue into historical fiction…simple but elegant prose… offers nuance and depth to a war we thought we knew but did not entirely understand.” A.E. Feldman, BookTrib For nearly ten years, neither sister knows if the other is alive. Do they both survive the war? And if they do, can they mend their fractured relationship? Or are the wounds from their journeys too deep to heal "This is a beautifully done depiction of two very real young women living through incredible hardships and challenges. It's the Vietnam war, from not an anti-American, but from simply a Vietnamese perspective--the viewpoint of ordinary people trying to survive, not a particular ideological perspective. It's very moving, and I'm finding it staying in my head, actively." Elizabeth Carey, Reviewer If you enjoy historical novels of Ken Follett, Kristin Hannah, and Kate Quinn, you'll love Libby Hellmann's Compulsively Readable Thrillers. Scroll down and make sure to read them all!


Set the Night on Fire

Set the Night on Fire

Author: Libby Fischer Hellmann

Publisher:

Published: 2010-11-12

Total Pages: 349

ISBN-13: 098406768X

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Someone is trying to kill Lila Hilliard. As she desperately tries to determine who is after her she uncovers information about the past that threatens to destroy her. An unforgettable portrait of Chicago during the turbulent late 1960s: the riots at the Democratic Convention, the struggle for power between the Black Panthers and SDS, and a group of young idealists who tried to change the world.