Background Reading (and Movie) List
FICTION
…about Jews in Poland and/or the Holocaust
H.G. Adler, The Wall (translated by Peter Fill-ins)
Martin Amis, The Zone of Interest
Aharon Appelfeld, For Every Sin (translated by Jeffrey M. Green)
V.R. Barkowski, A Twist of Hate
James Carroll, The Cloister
Michael Chabon, Moonglow
Natalie Danford, Inheritance: A Novel
Joan Dempsey, This Is How It Begins
Luce D'Eramo, Deviation: A Novel (translated by Anne Milano Appel)
Tatiana de Rosnay, Sarah’s Key
Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See
Dasa Drndic, Trieste (translated by Ellen Elias-Bursac)
Gwen Edelman, The Train to Warsaw
Jennifer Cody Epstein, Wunderland
Linda Grant, The Clothes on their Backs
Kristin Hannah, The Nightingale
Georgia Hunter, We Were the Lucky Ones
Nancy Huston, Fault Lines
Martha Hall Kelly, Lilac Girls
Binnie Kirshenbaum, Hester among the Ruins
Julie Orringer, The Flight Portfolio
Leonardo Padura, Heretics (translated by Anna Kushner)
Jodi Picoult, The Storyteller
Charles Powers, In the Memory of the Forest
Saskia Sarginson, The Other Me
Rachel Seiffert, A Boy in Winter
Rachel Seiffert, The Dark Room
Helen Maryles Shankman, In the Land of Armadillos: Stories
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
Roxanne Veletzos, The Girl They Left Behind
…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
Nora Krug, Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home
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
Disobedience: The Sousa Mendes Story (2009). Joel Santoni
Ida (2013), director Pawel Pawlikowski
The Pianist (2002), director Roman Polanski
Schindler’s List (1993), director Steven Spielberg