Meyer Levin

The Old Bunch chronicles the lives of nineteen Jewish men and women on Chicago's west, a spawling-yet-intimate portrait of American life during the Great Depression, by an author the LA Times hailed as "the most significant American Jewish writer of his time." Among the various lives depicted so vividly are those of Joe Feeman, a wayward artist who loses the love of his life to a doctor whose future path is as clear as Joe's is uncertain. Sam Eisen...

Eva: A Novel of the Holocaust, first published in 1959, is a fictionalized account of Ida Loew, a young Jewish girl from Poland who survived the Jewish pogroms of the Nazis and the Auschwitz camp. The book opens with the girl at age 16 leaving her home in southeastern Poland and posing as a gentile from the Ukraine named Katya. The story follows Eva as she works as a maid in the home of a prominent Austrian family in Linz (the husband is an SS officer),...

Johnnie didn't plan on falling for Frankie. She was too young, too naïve, and his best friend's sister to boot. But from the moment he sees her, Johnnie knows that Frankie is the only girl for him. There's only so much pretending he can do before he admits it. And there's so much to learn-about her, about himself, about life-when he does. Meanwhile, Frankie used to think all boys were the same, wild and reckless. But sweet, sincere Johnnie is proving...

In 1951, Meyer Levin's wife gave him a copy of The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank, which had just been published in France. Levin was already a successful writer in his mid-forties, searching for a way to bear witness to his experiences as a war correspondent in Europe. In Anne Frank's diary, he found the voice he had been waiting for. The Obsession, widely regarded as one of Meyer Levin's finest works, is a candid account of his struggle to...

Judd Steiner and Artie Straus have it all: wealth, intelligence, and the world at their feet as part of the elite, upper-crust Jewish community of 1920s Chicago. Artie is handsome, athletic, and popular, but he possesses a hidden, powerful sadistic streak and a desire to dominate. Judd is a weedy introvert, a genius who longs for a companion whom he can idolize and worship. Obsessed with Nietzsche's idea of the superhuman, both boys decide to prove...

Lauded as the most profound novel of Jewish life ever written by an American, Call It Sleep seamlessly weaves together the searing pains and subtle joys of immigrant life in New York's Lower East Side. It is the story of David Schearl, a dangerously imaginative little boy who arrives from Eastern Europe in 1907. Shock by shock, he is exposed to the blows-and occasional pleasures-of life in the crowded tenements.

On cover: Hagadah shel pesah. "Songs": p. 102-126.