Jake’s life is turned upside down when his father gets caught up in the Socialist fervor washing over their Finnish mining community in Minnesota. His father decides to move their family to a new, Finnish state inside the Soviet Union, a change that fills Jake with dread. Where his father dreams of creating a worker’s paradise, Jake and his family find disappointment and hardship. The story culminates with a thrilling escape–on skis–from Russia to Finland.
In 1989, when fifteen-year-old Jude’s mother wins a Fulbright fellowship to study art in Czechoslovakia, the family postpones a planned move to Utah to join her, but the political situation and the move itself are too much for Jude, who is overwhelmed by a previously undiagnosed psychological disorder.
In 1722, after arriving with her brother at the family’s Jamaican plantation where she is to be married off, sixteen-year-old Nancy Kington escapes with her slave friend, Minerva Sharpe, and together they become pirates traveling the world in search of treasure.
When her German hometown becomes part of Poland after World War I, Lene, a young German Jew, struggles to come to terms with the anti-Semitism and anti-German hatred that seems to be growing around her.
After the German occupation of the Netherlands, Benjamin leaves the Christian family with whom he had been living and reunites with his real parents who returned from hiding.
“Didn’t the gas ovens finish you all off?” is the response that meets Ruth Mendenberg when she returns to her village in Poland after the liberation of Buchenwald at the end of World War II. Her entire family wiped out in the Holocaust, the fifteen-year-old girl has nowhere to go. Members of the underground organization Brichah find her, and she joins them in their dangerous quest to smuggle illegal immigrants to Palestine. Ruth risks her life to help lead a group of children on a daring journey over half a continent and across the sea to Eretz Israel, using secret routes and forged documents — and sheer force of will.
By the time WWII ended in Europe, the Blumenthal family–Marion, her brother Albert, and their parents–had lived in a succession of refugee, transit, and prison camps for more than six years, not only surviving but staying together. This memoir is written in spare, powerful prose that vividly depicts the endless degradation and humiliation suffered by the Holocaust’s innocent victims, as well as the unending horror of life in the camps.
Escaping the Warsaw Ghetto to a life of danger and freedom as a partisan in the forest of Parczew, fourteen-year-old Misha Edelman learns a harsh lesson about survival that parallels the story of the mythical phoenix.
In 1944, an Upstate New York teenager named Christine meets and falls in love with Adam, a Yugoslavian Jew living in a refugee camp, despite their parents’ conviction that they do not belong together.
In February 1938, in Vienna, twelve-year-old Greta Radky is devastated to learn that her mother plans to sell the family piano. Greta’s brother, a concert pianist, died the previous April, and her mother thinks of the piano as his. But Greta is an equally committed musician, and when she meets a mysterious piano teacher who agrees to work with her, she proves it. With his help the piano is saved, and inspired by his tiny angel doll, Greta practices furiously for her first recital. Then, on the day of the performance, the Nazis invade Austria. Suddenly Greta discovers her teacher’s secret and knows that his life is in danger. Having stood up to her mother, Greta must now confront the Nazis.