Moses E. Herzog suffers from the breakup of his second marriage, the general failure of his life, and the specter of growing up Jewish in the middle of the 20th century. He responds to his personal crisis by writing a series of letters never to be sent, examining his life and times and asking "the piercing questions".

Eliza Naumann, a seemingly unremarkable nine-year-old, expects never to fit into her gifted family: her autodidact father, Saul, absorbed in his study of Jewish mysticism; her brother, Aaron, the vessel of his father's spiritual ambitions; and her brilliant but distant lawyer-mom, Miriam. But when Eliza sweeps her school and district spelling bees in quick succession, Saul takes it as a sign that she is destined for greatness. In this altered reality,...

"In 1940, Varian Fry - a Harvard educated American journalist - traveled to Marseille carrying three thousand dollars and a list of imperiled artists and writers he hoped to rescue within a few weeks. Instead, he ended up staying in France for thirteen months, working under the veil of a legitimate relief organization to procure false documents, amass emergency funds, and set up an underground railroad that led over the Pyrenees, into Spain, and finally...

Gold accepts a government post in Washington, considers leaving his wife, and all the while he is also searching for material to write his book on the Jewish experience in America, without realizing he is going through that experience.

Chava, a golem brought to life by a disgraced rabbi, and Ahmad, a jinni made of fire, form an unlikely friendship on the streets of New York until a fateful choice changes everything.

"Published together for the first time as the author intended, Nemeses is a quartet of novels whose terrain is the human body and whose subject, the common experience that terrifies us all."--Dust jacket.

In the winter of 1996, more than a hundred women and men of diverse nationality, background, and belief gather at the site of a former concentration camp for an unprecedented purpose: a weeklong retreat during which they will offer prayer and witness at the crematoria and meditate in all weathers on the selection platform, while eating and sleeping in the quarters of the Nazi officers who, half a century before, sent more than a million Jews to their...