Lit by the sublime beauty and tragedy of classical Arabic poetry, a Palestinian falafel seller in New York sets out to shape fragments of his family history Weaving history, memory, and poetry, this unforgettable novel—and the 1st book in a trilogy—provides a sprawling memorial to the Nakba and the strangled lives left in its wake. Long exiled in New York, Palestinian ex-pat Adam Dannoun thought he knew himself. But an encounter with Blind Mahmoud, a father figure from his childhood, changes everything. It is when Adam encounters his former teacher that Adam discovers the story he must tell. Ma’moun’s testimony brings Adam back to the first years of his life in the ghetto of Lydia, in Palestine, where his family endured thirst, hunger, and terror in the aftermath of unspeakable horror. With unmatched literary craft and empathy, Khoury peels away layers of lost stories and repressed memories to unveil Adam’s story. Oscillating between two narrators—the self-reflexive "Elias Khoury" and Adam himself—Children of the Ghetto: My Name is Adam engages real (and invented) scholarly texts, Khoury’s own work, and Adam’s lost notebooks in an intertextual account of a life shadowed by atrocity.

She risked her life while helping to spirit Jewish children out of the Warsaw Ghetto during World War II.

Recounts Irena's days in hiding and her secret return to the heroic mission she still pursued despite her miraculous escape from execution by the Nazis who occupied war-torn Warsaw

Presents the story of a Holocaust rescuer to reveal the formidable risks she took to her own safety to save some 2,500 children from death and deportation in Nazi-occupied Poland during World War II.

A New York Times Notable Book of 2016 Winner of the Zócalo Public Square Book Prize On March 29, 1516, the city council of Venice issued a decree forcing Jews to live in il geto—a closed quarter named for the copper foundry that once occupied the area. The term stuck. In this sweeping and original account, Mitchell Duneier traces the idea of the ghetto from its beginnings in the sixteenth century and its revival by the Nazis to the present. As Duneier shows, we cannot comprehend the entanglements of race, poverty, and place in America today without recalling the ghettos of Europe, as well as earlier efforts to understand the problems of the American city. Ghetto is the story of the scholars and activists who tried to achieve that understanding. As Duneier shows, their efforts to wrestle with race and poverty cannot be divorced from their individual biographies, which often included direct encounters with prejudice and discrimination in the academy and elsewhere. Using new and forgotten sources, Duneier introduces us to Horace Cayton and St. Clair Drake, graduate students whose conception of the South Side of Chicago established a new paradigm for thinking about Northern racism and poverty in the 1940s. We learn how the psychologist Kenneth Clark subsequently linked Harlem’s slum conditions with the persistence of black powerlessness, and we follow the controversy over Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s report on the black family. We see how the sociologist William Julius Wilson redefined the debate about urban America as middle-class African Americans increasingly escaped the ghetto and the country retreated from racially specific remedies. And we trace the education reformer Geoffrey Canada’s efforts to transform the lives of inner-city children with ambitious interventions, even as other reformers sought to help families escape their neighborhoods altogether. Duneier offers a clear-eyed assessment of the thinkers and doers who have shaped American ideas about urban poverty—and the ghetto. The result is a valuable new estimation of an age-old concept.