Lila Perl: 5 books

Germany on the cusp of World War II. Hitler has risen to power, and the Jews are being taken away from their homes in the middle of the night, forced to wear yellow stars, their businesses smashed, their lives in ruins. In the middle of all this is Lilli Frankfurter, a half-Jewish girl on the cusp...

In a stunning new novel completed just before her death in 2013, award-winning author Lila Perl introduces us to Isabel Brandt, a French-phrase-dropping twelve-year-old New Yorker who's more interested in boys and bobbing her nose than the distant war across the Pacific—the one her parents keep...

The buttoned-up town of Havenhurst isn’t ready for the Mayberrys, especially when they roll in on a garbage truck piled high with their trash sculptures. Their daughter Sara who longs for conventional living, finds a friend in Fat Glenda, a larger-than-life character. In Lila Perl’s 1972 comedy, Sara learns to cope with her family’s unorthodoxy and a small town’s prejudice.

Brooklyn in the 1930s … Bryna Davis is fifteen and she’s never really been anywhere on her own. But this summer is going to be different. At far-from-home Camp Chickasaw, as a counselor trainee, Bryna discovers her own astonishing emotional and physical responses to an attractive young man. Will...

The twentieth-anniversary edition of Marion Blumenthal Lazan’s acclaimed Holocaust memoir features new material by the author, a reading group guide, a map, and additional photographs. “The writing is direct, devastating, with no rhetoric or exploitation. The truth is in what’s said and in what...