Helen Plum Library

Hedy Kiesler is lucky. Her beauty leads to a starring role in a controversial film and marriage to a powerful Austrian arms dealer, allowing her to evade Nazi persecution despite her Jewish heritage. But Hedy is also intelligent. At lavish Vienna dinner parties, she overhears the Third Reich's plans. One night in 1937, desperate to escape her controlling husband and the rise of the Nazis, she disguises herself and flees her husband's castle. She lands...

A story "about family ties and values, friendship and feminism told through the eyes of a young Jewish woman growing up in Boston in the early twentieth century. Addie Baum is The Boston Girl, born in 1900 to immigrant parents who were unprepared for and suspicious of America and its effect on their three daughters. Growing up in the North End, then a teeming multicultural neighborhood, Addie's intelligence and curiosity take her to a world her parents...

Becoming a spy for the resistance after the Nazi's invade Poland, Emma Bau, taking on a new identity as a gentile, becomes a high-ranking Nazi official's assistant and, leading a double life, compromises her marriage vows, her safety, and the lives of those she loves for the cause

Anita Diamant's international bestseller The Red Tent brilliantly re-created the ancient world of womanhood. Diamant brings her remarkable storytelling skills to Good Harbor -- offering insight to the precarious balance of marriage and career, motherhood and friendship in the world of modern women. The seaside town of Gloucester, Massachusetts is a place where the smell of the ocean lingers in the air and the rocky coast glistens in the Atlantic sunshine....

"It is the autumn of 1943, and life is becoming increasingly perilous for Italian Jews like the Mazin family. With Nazi Germany now occupying most of her beloved homeland, and the threat of imprisonment and deportation growing ever more certain, Antonina Mazin has but one hope to survive--to leave Venice and her beloved parents and hide in the countryside with a man she has only just met. Nico Gerardi was studying for the priesthood until circumstances...

When her publisher insists that she write a Hanukkah romance, Rachel Rubenstein-Goldblatt, a Jewish woman with a secret career as a Christmas romance novelist, unexpectedly finds inspiration when she encounters a childhood acquaintance at the Matzah Ball, a Jewish music celebration on the last night of Hanukkah For a decade Rachel Rubenstein-Goldblatt has hidden her career as a Christmas romance novelist from her family. Her talent has made her a...

"It is 1946 when Vera Frankel and her best friend Edith Ban arrive in Naples. Refugees from Hungary, they escaped from a train headed for Auschwitz and were hidden by farmers until the end of the war while the rest of their families perished. Now, they want to start new lives abroad, and armed with a letter of recommendation from an American general, Vera finds work at the United States embassy and falls in love with Captain Anton Wight. But as Vera...

"WAYFARING STRANGER begins in West Texas in 1934. At age sixteen, Weldon Holland encounters Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker traveling with their accomplices after having just pulled off one of their notorious armed robberies. Weldon is smitten by Bonnie, but because of Clyde and Bonnie's duplicity and the disrespect they show his grandfather, Weldon ends up putting a bullet through the rear window of Clyde's stolen automobile. The story then jumps...

"Historian Jonathan Ned Katz uncovers the forgotten story of radical lesbian feminist Eve Adams, and her long-lost book Lesbian Love. Born Chawa Zloczewer into a Jewish family in Poland, Eve Adams emigrated to the United States in 1912, took a new name, befriended anarchists, sold radical publications, and ran lesbian-and-gay-friendly speakeasies in Chicago and New York. Then, in 1925, Adams risked all to write and publish a book titled Lesbian Love....

"The acclaimed and beloved author of Hourglass now gives us a new memoir about identity, paternity, and family secrets--a real-time exploration of the staggering discovery she made last year about her father, and her struggle to piece together the hidden the story of her own life"--