Erika Dreifus

It’s hopeless. I will never be caught up with all the reading that I want to do—not even within the subset of my reading that can be categorized as “reading of Jewish interest.”

And yet! I haven’t yet given up on assembling lists like this one, of brand-new (as in published this week) and soon-to-be-published titles on my radar for the first half of 2021. (Again, let’s try to ignore the fact that I have yet to finish reading all the titles I’ve shared on previous lists of this sort!)

I couldn’t fit cover images from all 18 titles within this pretty image. Please scroll down to find the full list, listed (more or less) in chronological order, with January’s releases posted first.

You’ll find here a mix of prose and poetry; short-story collections, novels, memoirs, and more; and books for children and grown-ups.

1. I Wish My Father by Lesléa Newman, Headmistress Press (January)
2. Sergeant Salinger: A Novel by Jerome Charyn, Bellevue Literary Press (January)
3. Nicky & Vera: A Quiet Hero of the Holocaust and the Children He Rescued written and illustrated by Peter Sís, Norton Young Readers (January)
4. The Albert Memmi Reader edited by Jonathan Judaken and Michael Lejman, University of Nebraska Press (February)
5. Osnat and Her Dove: The True Story of the World’s First Female Rabbi by Sigal Samuel, illustrated by Vali Mintzi, Levine Querido (February)
6. City of a Thousand Gates: A Novel by Rebecca Sacks, Harper (February)
7. The Man Who Loved His Wife by Jennifer Anne Moses, Mayapple Press (March; this one I’ve actually had the chance to preview, and it provided me with my most recent #SundaySentence)
8. Plunder: A Memoir of Family Property and Nazi Treasure by Menachem Kaiser, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (March)
9. Meiselman: The Lean Years by Avner Landes, Tortoise Books (March)
10. Small Bibles for Bad Times: Selected Poems and Prose of Liliane Atlan, bilingual edition translated by Marguerite Feitlowitz, Mandel Vilar Press/Dryad Press (March)
11. At the End of the World, Turn Left by Zhanna Slor, Agora Books (April)
12. Antiquities by Cynthia Ozick, Knopf (April)
13. 37 Days at Sea: Aboard the M.S. St. Louis, 1939 by Barbara Krasner, Kar-Ben (May)
14. Summer of Stolen Secrets by Julie Sternberg, Viking Books for Young Readers (May; this one I previewed when the author came to me for a publicity consultation)
15. Letters to Camondo by Edmund de Waal, Farrar, Straus & Giroux (May)
16. Wolf Lamb Bomb: Poems by Aviya Kushner, Orison Books (June)
17. Address Unknown by Kathrine Kressmann Taylor, Ecco (June; as noted in my piece for The American Scholar, this is a re-release, with an introduction by Margot Livesey)
18. The Vixen: A Novel by Francine Prose, Harper (June)

Any titles of Jewish interest on your radar that aren’t listed here? Please tell us!