The Baltimore Jewish Book Club

Beloved bestselling author Mitch Albom returns with a powerful novel of hope and forgiveness that moves from a coastal Greek city during WWII to America in the golden age of Hollywood, as the intertwined lives of three young survivors are forever changed by the perils of deception and the grace of redemption.
Eleven-year-old Nico Krispis has never told a lie. His schoolmate, Fannie, loves him because of it. Nico’s older brother Sebastian resents him for both these facts. When their young lives are torn apart during the war, it will take them decades to find each other again.
Nico’s innocence and goodness is used against his tightly knit community when a German officer barters Nico’s reputation for honesty into a promise to save his loved ones. When Nico realizes the consequences of the betrayal, he can never tell the truth again. He will spend the rest of this life changing names, changing locations and identities, desperate to find a way to forgiveness—for himself and from the people he loves most.
Albom’s extraordinary storytelling is at its powerful best in his first novel to confront the destruction that lying can wreak both on the world stage as well as on the individual lives that get caught up in it. As The Stranger in the Lifeboat spoke to belief, The Little Liar speaks to hope, in a breathless page-turner that will break your heart open and fill it with the power of the human spirit and the goodness that lies within us all.
Narrated by the voice of Truth itself, The Little Liar is a timeless story about the power of love to ultimately redeem us, no matter how deeply we blame ourselves for our mistakes.

Inspired by family lore, a young writer embarks on an epic quest through the Argentine Andes in search of a heritage spanning hemispheres and centuries, from the Jewish Levant to turn-of-the-century trade routes in South America

One Thanksgiving afternoon at his grandparents’ house, Jordan Salama discovers a large binder stuffed with yellowing papers and old photographs—a five-hundred-year wandering history of his Arab-Jewish family, from Moorish Spain to Ottoman Syria to Argentina and beyond.

One story in particular captures his attention: that of his great-grandfather, a Syrian-born, Arabic-speaking Jewish immigrant to Argentina who in the 1920s worked as a traveling salesman in the Andes—and may have left behind forgotten descendants along the way. Encouraged by his grandfather, Jordan goes in search of these “Lost Salamas,” traveling more than a thousand miles up the spine of South America’s greatest mountain range.

Combining travelog, history, memoir, and reportage, Stranger in the Desert transports readers from the lonely plains of Patagonia to the breathtaking altiplano of the high Andes; from the old Jewish quarter of Damascus to today’s vibrant neighborhoods of Buenos Aires. It is also a fervent journey of self-discovery as Salama grapples with his own Jewish, Arab, and Latin American identities, interrogating the stories families tell themselves, and to what end.

From two New York Times bestselling authors, a timely, disarmingly honest, and thought-provoking investigation into antisemitism that connects the dots between the tropes and hatred of the past to our current complicated moment.
For Emmanuel Acho and Noa Tishby no question about Jews is off-limits. They go there. They cover Jews and money. Jews and power. Jews and privilege. Jews and white privilege. The Black and Jewish struggle. Emmanuel asks, Did Jews kill Jesus? To which Noa responds, “Why are Jewish people history’s favorite scapegoat?” They unpack Judaism itself: Is it a religion, culture, a peoplehood, or a race? And: Are you antisemitic if you’re anti-Zionist?
The questions—and answers—might make you squirm, but together, they explain the tropes, stereotypes, and catalysts of antisemitism in America today.
The topics are complicated and Acho and Tishby bring vastly different perspectives. Tishby is an outspoken Israeli American. Acho is a mild-mannered son of a Nigerian American pastor. But they share a superpower: an uncanny ability to make complicated ideas easy to understand so anyone can follow the straight line from the past to our immediate moment—and then see around corners. Acho and Tishby are united by the core belief that hatred toward one group is never isolated: if you see the smoke of bigotry in one place, expect that we will all be in the fire.
Informative and accessible, Uncomfortable Conversations with a Jew has a unique structure: Acho asks questions and Tishby answers them with deeply personal, historical, and political responses. This book will enable anyone to explain—and identify—what Jewish hatred looks like. It is a much-needed lexicon for this fraught moment in Jewish history. As Acho says, “Proximity breeds care and distance breeds fear.”

A dazzling Sephardic multigenerational saga that moves from Istanbul to Barcelona, Havana, and New York, exploring displacement, endurance, and family as home.
A kaleidoscopic portrait of one family’s displacement across four countries, Kantika―“song” in Ladino―follows the joys and losses of Rebecca Cohen, feisty daughter of the Sephardic elite of early 20th-century Istanbul. When the Cohens lose their wealth and are forced to move to Barcelona and start anew, Rebecca fashions a life and self from what comes her way―a failed marriage, the need to earn a living, but also passion, pleasure and motherhood. Moving from Spain to Cuba to New York for an arranged second marriage, she faces her greatest challenge―her disabled stepdaughter, Luna, whose feistiness equals her own and whose challenges pit new family against old.
Exploring identity, place and exile, Kantika also reveals how the female body―in work, art and love―serves as a site of both suffering and joy. A haunting, inspiring meditation on the tenacity of women, this lush, lyrical novel from Elizabeth Graver celebrates the insistence on seizing beauty and grabbing hold of one’s one and only life.