World War II -

Her Jewish grandfather’s shame inspired a prize-winning novel

August 24, 2025August 24, 2025Jesse Orine

Sasha Vasilyuk was surprised to be named a finalist for the 2025 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, wondering if the judges were going to honor an author whose “last name isn’t Jewish, and whose main character avoided being Jewish.” Nevertheless, her debut novel, “Your Presence Is Mandatory,” won the $100,000 prize for a story […]

Two middle-aged women defied the Nazis. One ‘wrote’ a book that betrayed the other.

March 9, 2025March 9, 2025Jesse Orine

There’s an ignoble tradition of falsified memoirs. “The Hitler Diaries,” a forgery published in 1983, fooled even a Hitler expert. “Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years,” published in 1997, was sold as a survivor’s testimony but turned out to be a hoax (the part where the author was raised by wolves might have been […]