The author's Jewish father reached England from Latvia in 1939, only to be shipped to Canada as an enemy alien; his parents were deported from Bavaria to the Riga Ghetto, where they died. In... read more
This fascinating account of a forgotten moment in history is part family memoir, part the telling of a Texan offshoot of the early Zionist movement, when 10,000 Jews set sail for Galveston b... read more
A Crimean War hero's divorce & remarriage causes two lines of descendants, who meet up again one summer in Devon in the 1970s. Ructions ensue. Shrewdly observed and compelling.
Brought up in Germany as a good National Socialist, KF was repatriated with her half-English mother to England. A poignant account of the C20th political buffetings navigated by three genera... read more
The contents of a shoebox in America led the author to discover her grandmmother's family, from Picasso in Paris, Dior and Chagall to a farmhouse in the Auvergne, Auschwitz and Long Island. ... read more
A memoir by the half-Italian, half-Latvian writer about returning to Riga, to her childhood there and to her murdered Jewish father, told through the careful piecing-together of memory, docu... read more
The post-war eclipse of the rural by the urban. Joyce interweaves his own Irish family history into wider story of European peasantry to create a rich and varied cultural account of what it ... read more
The rise and fall of the Bacris and Busnachs, two Jewish families whose prominence in trade and banking led them to play a small but crucial diplomatic and logistical role in the Napoleonic ... read more
SM's parents were German Jewish refugees; he was raised a Catholic and forbidden to identify as Jewish or German or British. His maternal aunts concealed their origins too and had very diffe... read more
The fascinating story of a language known as 'Rotwelsch', associated with vagabonds - linked to Yiddish and Romani - that the author learned from his father and uncle. His grandfather, a Naz... read more
A panoramic account by the distinguished Harvard historian of five generations of a French provincial family originally from Angouleme, crammed with stories and archival research. ER has a d... read more
From the author of the biography of Shchukin comes the story of another extraordinary pre-Revolutionary Russian collector of European art. He spent 1.5 million francs on 486 paintings, which... read more
MS is an outstanding literary voice in contemporary Russia: here she creates a portrait of three Russian-Jewish generations sifted from the detritus in a late aunt's flat. This book is diff... read more
The remarkable story of the author's Jewish grandmother, whose bestselling Viennese cookbook was expropriated by the Nazis after the Anschluss in 1938 and republished for decades under a fal... read more
As a young man in Germany, AW's grandfather published Kafka and several other depraved authors whose work the Nazis were keen to burn. He fled in 1933, eventually settling in New York where ... read more