Background Reading (and Movie) List
FICTION
…about Jews in Poland and/or the Holocaust
- H.G. Adler, The Wall
- Martin Amis, The Zone of Interest
- Aharon Appelfeld, For Every Sin
- V.R. Barkowski, A Twist of Hate
- James Carroll, The Cloister
- Natalie Danford, Inheritance: A Novel
- Tatiana de Rosnay, Sarah’s Key
- Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See
- Dasa Drndic, Trieste
- Gwen Edelman, The Train to Warsaw
- Linda Grant, The Clothes on their Backs
- Georgia Hunter, We Were the Lucky Ones
- Binnie Kirshenbaum, Hester among the Ruins
- Jodi Picoult, The Storyteller
- Saskia Sarginson, The Other Me
- Rachel Seiffert, A Boy in Winter
- Rachel Seiffert, The Dark Room
- B.A. Shapiro, The Muralist
- Jim Shepard, The Book of Aron
- Isaac Bashevis Singer, Scum
- Isaac Bashevis Singer, Shosha: A Novel
- Mark Slouka, The Visible World
- Daniel Torday, The Last Flight of Poxl West
…about Polish (non-Jewish) culture and history
- Jennifer Haigh, Baker Towers: A Novel
- Keith Maillard, The Clarinet Polka
- Eva Mekler, The Polish Woman
- Bathsheba Monk, Now You See It: Stories from Cokesville, PA
NONFICTION
- Masha Gessen, Ester and Ruzya
- Jan T. Gross, Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland
- Yisrael Gutman and Ezra Mendelsohn, The Jews of Poland between Two World Wars
- Eva Hoffman, Shtetl
- Jonathan Kaufman, A Hole in the Heart of the World: Being Jewish in Eastern Europe
- R.D. Rosen, Such Good Girls: The Journey of the Holocaust’s Hidden Child Survivors
- Mary Fulbrook, A Small Town near Auschwitz: Ordinary Nazis and the Holocaust
- Theo Richmond, Konin: A Quest
- Louise Steinman, The Crooked Mirror
- Christine Zamoyska-Panek, Have You Forgotten? A Memoir of Poland, 1939-1945
AND SOME MOVIES…
- Aftermath (2012), director Wladyslaw Pasikowski
- Ida (2013), director Pawel Pawlikowski
- The Pianist (2002), director Roman Polanski
- Schindler’s List (1993), director Steven Spielberg