Plunkett Lake Press: 163 books

Wartime New York was the city where French Symbolism — Maurice Maeterlinck — came to live out its last productive years; where French surrealism — André Breton — came to survive; and where French structuralism — Claude Lévi-Strauss — came to be born. From the largely forgotten prewar...

The Holocaust, the French and the Jews by Susan Zuccotti (143,000 words, 16 illustrations) Drawing on the extensive memoir literature of Jews who survived the Nazi period in France, Zuccotti paints a collective portrait of the victims, of those who tried to help them, of those who persecuted...

In this memoir, Fraenkel writes as a member of an enclosed minority: German Jew within a predominantly Lithuanian Jewish community which was part of a white settler community, itself a minority in a predominantly black African territory. A young settler reprimanded him for stepping out of the way...

Elegant and concise, this childhood memoir of Andy Grove, one of the pioneers of Silicon Valley, begins in Budapest, Hungary where the author was born into a secular Jewish family in 1936. As a small child, Andris Grof was told, “Jesus Christ was killed by the Jews, and because of that, all of the...

American Cassandra: The Life of Dorothy Thompson by Peter Kurth (197,000 words, 83 illustrations) Dorothy Thompson (1893-1961) was America’s first internationally famous female foreign correspondent. Born outside of Buffalo, New York, she graduated from Syracuse University in 1914 and honed...

The Meaning of Hitler by Sebastian Haffner (translated from the German by Ewald Osers; 53,000 words) In this succinct, fact-based, insightful analysis of Hitler and his impact on the world, Sebastian Haffner displays his skills as a first-class journalist and a student of German and modern...

Germany: Jekyll and Hyde — An Eyewitness Analysis of Nazi Germany by Sebastian Haffner (translated from the German by Wilfrid David, with an introduction by Neal Ascherson; 97,000 words) In this book written in early 1940 in England, Sebastian Haffner, a recent refugee from Nazi Germany,...

Failure of a Revolution: Germany 1918-1919 by Sebastian Haffner (translated from the German by Georg Rapp; 67,000 words and 16 illustrations) The masterfully told story of what happened in Germany following its defeat in the first world war: the Kaiser’s exit from the stage, the sailors’...

Written in the tradition of Stefan Zweig’s biographical studies, Haffner’s Churchill is a concise, effective, warts-and-all analysis of one of the giants of the twentieth century. Beginning with a brief history of the Churchill family, Haffner examines the future Prime Minister’s childhood;...

The Liberation of the Jew by Albert Memmi (translated from the French by Judy Hyun; 86,000 words) In this book, written after The Colonizer and the Colonized and Portrait of a Jew, Albert Memmi writes, “It is true that all oppression has a strong tendency to become a total oppression, but...

Portrait of a Jew by Albert Memmi (translated from the French by Elisabeth Abbott; 99,000 words) In this memoir and extended meditation on Jewish identity and anti-Semitic stereotypes written in France in the early 1960s, Albert Memmi paints a portrait of himself as a secular Jew. The book...

Sensation Fair: Tales of Prague by Egon Erwin Kisch (translated from the German by Guy Endore, 121,000 words) Sensation Fair: Tales of Prague (Marktplatz der Sensationen) is the memoir of the writer who elevated journalism to the status of literature in 20th century Europe. Taking his cue from...

Exiled In Paradise: German Refugee Artists and Intellectuals in America from the 1930s to the Present by Anthony Heilbut (Second, 1997 revised edition; 173,000 words) The fascinating story of émigré intellectuals, writers, artists, scientists, movie directors, and scholars — including Bertolt...

In Search of Sugihara: The Elusive Japanese Diplomat Who Risked His Life to Rescue 10,000 Jews from the Holocaust by Hillel Levine (130,000 words, 19 illustrations) Chiune Sugihara, the Japanese consul in Kovno, Lithuania, honored in 1984 by Yad Vashem as a “Righteous Among the Nations,”...