Washoe County Library System

As a member of the strictly religious Satmar sect of Hasidic Judaism, Deborah Feldman grew up under a code of relentlessly enforced customs governing everything from what she could wear and to whom she could speak to what she was allowed to read. Yet in spite of her repressive upbringing, Deborah grew into an independent-minded young woman whose stolen moments reading about the empowered literary characters of Jane Austen and Louisa May Alcott helped...

"The captivating memoir of a spirited and glamorous young Jewish fashion designer who survived the Holocaust, with an afterword by her daughter, Helen Epstein"--

An account of how one family of Polish Jews, narrowly survived Hitler's atrocities and managed to emerge anew amid the bewildering landscape of Manhattan's Upper West Side and the Bronx in the 1950s and 1960s. Vividly recreating his parents' harrowing experiences in the light of his own childhood among refugees in America, "Displace Persons" speaks directly to a little-known slice of Holocaust history, the plight of 140,000 refugees who came to the...

"In 2009, at the age of twenty-three, Deborah Feldman packed up her young son and their few possessions and walked away from her insular Hasidic roots. She was determined to forge a better life for herself, away from the rampant oppression, abuse, and isolation of her Satmar upbringing in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Out of her experience came the incendiary, bestselling memoir Unorthodox, and now, just a few years later, Feldman has embarked on a triumphant...

"A New York Times bestselling author traces her father's life from turn-of-the-century Warsaw to bustling New York City in an intimate memoir about family, memory, and the stories we tell. Long before she was the acclaimed author of a groundbreaking book about women and men, and praised by Oliver Sacks as having "a novelist's ear for the way people speak," Deborah Tannen was a little girl who adored her father. Though he was often absent during her...