Metropolitan Library System

Ester Velasquez is an emigrant from Amsterdam who is permitted to scribe for a blind rabbi, just before the plague hits the city. Helen Watt is an ailing historian with a love of Jewish history. When Helen is summoned by a former student to view a cache of seventeenth-century Jewish documents newly discovered in his home during a renovation, she enlists the help of Aaron Levy, an American graduate student as impatient as he is charming. In a race...

For starters, Jared Leiman is home for the holidays. Because though he and Caroline Weiss were high school sweethearts, their postcollege lives took them in different directions. Jared became a big-time entertainment lawyer in LA, while Caroline became a fitness instructor and stayed in town to care for her sick mother. And though her mother passed away three years ago, Caroline is finally free to go where she chooses. Meanwhile Jared, who inherited...

"Rachel Rubenstein-Goldblatt is a nice Jewish girl with a shameful secret: she loves Christmas. For a decade she's hidden her career as a Christmas romance novelist from her family. Her talent has made her a bestseller even as her chronic illness has always kept the kind of love she writes about out of reach. But when her diversity-conscious publisher insists she write a Hanukkah romance, her well of inspiration suddenly runs dry. Hanukkah's not magical....

Journalist Jessica Sacks's career is on the line if she doesn't ace this next assignment. She must interview firefighter Thomas Carville, Browerville's celebrated hero--and her forever crush since childhood. When Jessica returns home for Hanukkah, handsome Thomas takes her breath away. And rudely shuts her down when she asks for an interview. Thomas knows he and the man he saved are both lucky to be alive, regardless of his actions. And now Jessica...

"Twenty-nine-year-old Penina longs for true love and marriage, but being infertile in the Orthodox Jewish community means she's rarely matched with the cream of the crop--or even skim milk two weeks past its expiration date. Matchmakers either set her up with men twice her age or those with serious mommy issues. At this point, she might as well wear a sign around her neck that says "professional virgin." As if things weren't bad enough, her sister...

"Venice, 1958. Peggy Guggenheim, heiress and now legendary art collector, sits in the sun at her white marble palazzo on the Grand Canal. She's in a reflective mood, thinking back on her thrilling, tragic, nearly impossible journey from her sheltered, old-fashioned family in New York to here, iconoclast and independent woman. Rebecca Godfrey's Peggy is a blazingly fresh interpretation of a woman who defies every expectation to become an original....

1863: In a small Creole cottage in New Orleans, an ingenious young Black woman named Stella embroiders intricate maps on repurposed cloth to help enslaved men flee and join the Union Army. Bound to a man who would kill her if he knew of her clandestine activities, Stella has to hide not only her efforts but her love for William, a Black soldier and a brilliant musician. Meanwhile, in New York City, a Jewish woman stitches a quilt for her husband,...

"It was a misty Wednesday morning. Inside the Gestapo headquarters, you could cut the tension with a knife. There was a traitor in their midst: someone had leaked a list of the SS to the British press. The head of the Gestapo called me into his office. Panelled oak walls, a grand piano in the corner, rugs lining the floor--the place where he ordered executions every day. I sat at the desk, reaching for the typewriter and adjusting the paper. On the...

"Elisheva Cohen has just returned to New York after almost a decade. The wounds of abandoning the Orthodox community that raised her, then shunned her because of her substance abuse, are still painful. But when she gets an amazing opportunity to study photography with art legend Wyatt Cole, Ely is willing to take the leap. On her first night back in town, Ely goes out to the infamous queer club Revel for a celebratory night of dancing. Ely is swept...

A story of a Russian-Jewish immigrant family living on New York's Lower East Side follows the lives of three generations of Roths, from Manya, the long-widowed matriarch and heart of the family, to her granddaughter Elka.