"A photograph with faint writing on the back. A traveling chess set. A silver pin. These objects and the memories they evoke are among the threads that scholar and writer Susan Rubin Suleiman uses to weave back together the story of her early life as a Holocaust refugee and American immigrant. In this coming-of-age story that probes the hopes parents have for their children and the inevitability of loss, Susan looks to her own life as a case study...

A fascinating look into the life and work of controversial French novelist Irène Némirovsky. Irène Némirovsky succeeded in creating a brilliant career as a novelist in the 1930s, only to have her life cut short: a “foreign Jew” in France, she was deported in 1942 and died in Auschwitz. But her two young daughters survived, and as adults they brought their mother back to life. In 2004, Suite française, Némirovsky’s posthumous novel, became...