Library Corner
Unlikely Allies: Historical Fiction for Middle Grade Readers
June 18, 2021
By Robin Jacobson. Historical fiction inhabits the sweet spot between history and fiction. It invites us to journey to the past and then return to our own time with new …
Anyone Out There?
April 15, 2021
By Robin Jacobson. The bestselling new science memoir, Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth by Avi Loeb, probes a thrilling possibility – that a mysterious object that …
Shtetl Stories of Danger and Suspense
April 14, 2021
By Robin Jacobson. Tevye the Dairyman would fit right in among the rabbis, matchmakers, candlemakers, tailors, and other shtetl types who populate two recent prize-winning novels: The Lost Shtetl by …
Reading Geraldine Brooks in 2021
March 9, 2021
By Robin Jacobson. Like many, I’m a longtime fan of the historical novels of Geraldine Brooks – Year of Wonders, March, Caleb’s Crossing, People of the Book, and The Secret …
The House We Inherit
February 1, 2021
By Robin Jacobson. As a child, learning in school about the American Civil War, I felt relieved that my family bore no guilt for American slavery. During the sad centuries …
Out of Egypt
January 12, 2021
By Robin Jacobson. To many Jewish families with memories of hard times, Meyerland in the 1970s was the Promised Land. This Jewish neighborhood in Houston, Texas, was home to big …
Israel in Translation
December 13, 2020
By Robin Jacobson. Here’s literary news to celebrate: new novels from two of Israel’s best-known authors – A.B. Yehoshua and Eshkol Nevo – have arrived in American bookstores and libraries …
The Jewish Dynasties of Shanghai
December 1, 2020
By Robin Jacobson. The intertwined history of two Baghdadi Jewish families in China – the Sassoon and Kadoorie families – is the stuff of epic novels. The Last Kings of …
Mystery, Suspense & Troublesome Texts
November 2, 2020
By Robin Jacobson. A fun suspense novel topped with a generous scoop of Jewish history is a winning combination, even if the history relates to the origins of dark anti-Jewish …
Novel Experiments
September 21, 2020
Every book browser knows that libraries and bookstores typically separate books broadly into fiction and non-fiction – fiction in these bookcases and non-fiction in the bookcases over there. But some …