Life & Death, Orphanages & Escapes, Rescues & Friendship

Julius Lester brings us a thrilling Hebrew heroine who midwifes the Jewish people. Ellen Carson Levine draws on fairy tale tradition and her Sephardi father’s childhood in an orphanage. Mirjam Pressler offers a fictionalized diary of a tough young Jewish girl who was removed from her abusive Holocaust survivor mother. Anthropologist-turned-novelist novelist Joan Abelove left Jewish footprints in her first novel, Go and Come Back, in which an anthropologist in her 20s observing jungle village life in Peru reveals that she comes from a culture where people are sad for seven days after a person dies and even tear their clothes. In her new young adult novel, the Jewish content is more overt: keeping kosher and whether a teen should date a non-Jew. Irene Gut Opdyke offers hope by example of her own brave deeds. Also, unusual picture books about circumcision…