A barrage of tragedies have further darkened this already chilly winter season, but there’s one advantage to the short days and long dark nights of the year’s end: They offer more time for reading and reflection. If that’s your turn of mind, you could do worse than pick up one of the year’s many acclaimed memoirs. The field in 2025 was rich and varied, with far-flung historical adventures and deep dives into specialized knowledge, mixed with somber explorations of bereavement and solitude. There’s one for every mood—or gift recipient. Here are a few (and a few more that sneaked by me in 2024) that, for better or worse, took me far away from the problems of today.
Melting Point: Family, Memory, and the Search for a Promised Land, by Rachel Cockerell (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 400 pp.)
This sprawling family history is told entirely through a remarkable experiment in form. London-born author Rachel Cockerell set out to research the life of her great-grandfather, David Jochelmann, who knew Theodor Herzl in the heady early days of Zionism and partnered with the novelist and activist Israel Zangwill in the Galveston Project, a quixotic attempt to ship the Jews of Eastern Europe to Galveston, TX (a topic memorably written about in Moment’s own pages by Calvin Trillin).
In a preface, Cockerell explains how, after several years of tracking down contemporary accounts of the events and people who shaped Jochelmann’s life and milieu, she quailed at the thought of subsuming them into a narrative. A friend suggested she simply arrange the sources in chronological order and let them speak for themselves. The result is astonishing. Without a narrator, the voices of contemporary observers—19th-century newspaper columnists, statesmen keeping diaries, secretaries taking minutes at the First Zionist Conference in Basel, Switzerland, in 1897—leap into life with startling immediacy, building up the lively world through which Jochelmann (himself largely silent to posterity) moved.
The reader is thrown back into the fears and controversies of the day. Can the news reports of atrocities in Kishinev possibly be true? Will the Jews accept the British government’s offer of a parcel of land in East Africa rather than insist on Palestine? Herzl is a romantic figure—“Tall, handsome, black-bearded, clear-eyed, erect in bearing, suave in manner, he looked like kings ought to look,” gushes philanthropist Cyrus L. Sulzberger. When he speaks at the First Zionist Conference, observer Jacob de Haas writes, “No man perhaps in this generation has been listened to with such spell-bound, tense, ear-straining attention as Dr. Herzl as he delivered his first address.” Zangwill, a novelist once considered “the Jewish Dickens” and later famous for his play The Melting Pot, cuts a very different figure: As the Elmira Evening Gazette remarks in covering his arrival in the United States, “You have seen his pictures. He looks like them.”
Cockerell follows her family through subsequent generations, and they witness many more dramas—the war, emigration to Palestine, the birth of the State of Israel—but what stays with the reader is the intense immediacy of these early years, when no one knew what would happen in the 20th century, and it all could have gone quite differently.
Memorial Days, by Geraldine Brooks (Viking, 207 pp.)
More traditional in structure, this Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist’s take on the grief journal nonetheless uses a measure of literary technique to hold the agony of memory at arm’s length. Brooks’s account of the loss of her husband, fellow writer Tony Horwitz, braids together two narratives—one, Horwitz’s sudden death and the horrific days that followed; the other, her belated attempt to come to grips with it. Five years after she lost him, she flees to remote Flinders Island in her native Australia “to uncover every memory of that time and experience the full measure of the grief I had denied myself.” Her movement through the six months of self-searching provides the forward motion for this slim and aching volume.
Horwitz—also a beloved, prize-winning author—was felled at age 60 by a heart attack on a suburban street near his childhood home in Bethesda, MD. He’d been visiting the DC area as part of a speaking tour for his last book, Spying on the South; he’d had heart problems, but Brooks didn’t know it. The two had lived an idyllic life together. They first met as students at the Columbia School of Journalism, traveled the world together as foreign correspondents and later settled into an 18th-century farmhouse on Martha’s Vineyard to raise their sons and write their books.
Dealing with the paraphernalia of death and with her sons’ emotions made Brooks push away her own anguish, her fury at fate and at a clumsy system that made everything more difficult—family insurance plans canceled without notice, coldly inconsiderate hospital and morgue staff. Finally, half a decade later, she carves out the time for her solitary pilgrimage, and there, in alternating chapters, walks and writes her way to some grasp of her grief.
Most of the book traces Tony and Geraldine’s own love story, while spiraling out to consider the wider world of loss and mourning. A reporter by temperament and a Jew by choice who converted when she married Horwitz, Brooks naturally finds herself researching and comparing the paths different cultures take through the thickets of bereavement. She reflects on the Jewish year of saying Kaddish and the customs surrounding Muslim, Hindu and Aboriginal widows. But in the end what serves her best is the alchemy of her own voice and the landscape: “I swam, I wrote, I read Tony’s journals, I visited the Mother Rock and offered whatever comes closest to prayer for someone without a recipient address.”
Going Out with Knots: My Two Kaddish Years with Hebrew Poetry, by Wendy I. Zierler (Jewish Publication Society, 305 pp.)
Within the genre of grief memoirs, the Kaddish year journal has developed into a subgenre all its own. It makes sense: The rhythms of the Kaddish year, uncannily well suited to support the heart’s psychological trajectory through grief, also echo the movement from an initial emotional blow through the months of gradual softening, distancing, reframing. Wendy I. Zierler’s Going Out with Knots takes this concept to a whole new level: It’s a narrative of the process of ritually mourning her parents—her mother died in the last week of her eleven-month Kaddish period for her father—that also functions as a brilliant introductory anthology of women’s poetry in Hebrew.
Zierler is a teacher of Hebrew literature and also an early graduate of the Yeshivat Maharat in Riverdale, NY, the first institution to ordain female Orthodox clergy. Despite her previous immersion in Orthodox ritual, or maybe because of it, she was stung by the exclusion she felt in daily minyan, where the male congregants relegated her to a separate space and even appointed a man to “cover” her voice when she was the only one reciting the Kaddish. Seeking a deeper connection to the experience, she found herself “turning to Hebrew poetry as an alternative liturgy, theology and Torah,” plunging into poems that illuminated the prayers, and eventually, as her comfort with the community deepened, translating and sharing a poem with the group every Tuesday. When the minyan went virtual during COVID, her discussions evolved into written source sheets, which became the core of this book.
The result is an amazingly accessible introduction to a wide range of Hebrew and Israeli poetry that often escapes English-speaking readers. As Zierler learned from renowned Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai, nearly all poetry in modern Hebrew riffs constantly off religious texts; this makes it exceptionally resonant when used as an extension of prayer. Zierler’s volume includes more than 50 such poems, with her own translations and commentary. Sometimes the connection is explicit: A famous Lea Goldberg poem taught to schoolchildren in Israel, for instance, “By Three Things,” alludes to a well-known passage in Pirkei Avot (Ethics of the Fathers) and “provided the beginnings of a Pirkei Imahot, a ‘chapters of the mothers,’ for my searching soul.”
You don’t need to be bereaved to learn from this compilation, but, as the author comes to appreciate, “I was reminded that death remains the central conundrum of human life and Jewish theology, and thus there can never be enough meditating on its meaning and relevance to our lives.”
Secret Agent Man, by Margot Singer (Barrow Street Press, 156 pp.)
What happens when the parent you think you know is wrapped in a mystery that he himself feeds with sly asides over the years? Is it real, or is it all a game? And can you ever know your father, whether he’s a spy or not? Margot Singer, whose award-winning fiction includes the novel Underground Fugue and the short-story collection The Pale of Settlement, pursues these and other conundrums of family and memory with a delicate touch. The nine essays in this collection oscillate back and forth in time, with the layered vibrations of the different decades—their changing conventional wisdoms, her own illusions and disillusions—building up into a rich hum.
Music and nostalgia are frequent themes, along with the inevitable weightier issues—violence, misogyny, shaming—that come with having lived the last half-century-plus as a thinking woman. A seemingly light-hearted meditation on the power suit, as worn to the consulting jobs the author held in the 1980s, turns wistful as she offers one to her daughter for dress-up. An extended reflection on a lifetime of glancing encounters with sexual coercion in “Call It Rape” becomes a piercing meditation on agency and freedom. A decidedly non-Marie-Kondo attitude toward her parents’ home is a satisfying affirmation of the persistence of memory through material objects.
The title essay about Singer’s father—a Czech-born refugee who alluded mysteriously over the years to his work with the Mossad—is entwined with the story of an earlier essay, one she’d published as a young writer in the most obscure of literary journals only to be blindsided by his furious accusations that she’d “blown his cover.” Here, too, there is reconciliation; the book is dedicated to him. These are essays for slow sipping, with layers that emerge over time.
Unpacking My Father’s Bookstore, by Laurence Roth (Rutgers University Press, 260 pp.)
If a Kaddish memoir can be an introduction to Hebrew poetry, why shouldn’t a family chronicle double as a deep immersion in the joys and adventures of Jewish bookselling? The arc of Laurence Roth’s memoir tracing the history of his father’s landmark Los Angeles bookstore, J. Roth/Bookseller of Fine & Scholarly Judaica, is that of a rise and fall of a golden era that now feels distant, though it’s not quite gone—bricks-and-mortar bookstores everywhere, hold-in-your-hand books heaped up like treasure. From 1966 to 1994, Roth’s father, the eponymous J. Roth, ran a cultural institution that anchored, served and helped shape L.A.’s thriving Jewish community.
The book starts with father and son looking back with nostalgia, trying to remember exactly how the store happened to acquire a rare Copenhagen Haggadah that ended up auctioned off by Sotheby’s for ten times the price they paid. Many bibliographic and literary adventures later, the book concludes with a long fade and struggle, as successive waves of change rock the Jewish book-buying public—not just the encroaching wave of the Internet, but a specifically Jewish evolution as the community drifts toward polarization. Those who want to buy strictly religious volumes and Orthodox liturgical texts become increasingly uncomfortable sharing store and shelf space with the works of secular Jewish literature and critical scholarship that had brought orders from the universities and long constituted a pillar of bookstore commerce. Roth, under pressure from the more religious sectors of the community, begins wearing a kippah in the store; casting around for other ways to entice customers, he dabbles in non-book Judaica and pushes back against pressure from the superstores, then from online sales.
Book lovers will find some aspects of the Roth family story universal while also coming to appreciate one of the less visible forces that build a Jewish community and bind it together. Even the less bibliographically inclined will learn a great deal from this account of a rich history and a challenged present. And if it makes you feel a wave of appreciation for the book on your lap, all the better.
Nearly Departed: Adventures in Loss, Cancer, and Other Inconveniences, by Gila Pfeffer (The Experiment, 272 pp.)
At first glance, this looks like another grief memoir. But after making my way through a few chapters that should have been heartbreaking but instead left me chortling, I had to give the author credit for creating a cancer memoir that’s also a rousing and intermittently hilarious tale—no, really—of family solidarity and self-actualization.
As Pfeffer’s the first to point out, she could have milked her story for tragedy. Daughter and granddaughter of women who died young of breast cancer, carrier of the BRCA1 gene that indicates her high risk of the same fate, she emerges hellbent on undergoing the preventive bilateral mastectomy that Angelina Jolie had not yet made a household word. Her mother was diagnosed at age 40, but Pfeffer’s in a rush, so she plunges in at age 32 after weaning her fourth child. “My breasts weren’t sexy to me; they were live sticks of dynamite that had to go…I would thank them for their service and give them an honorable discharge before they tried to do me in.”
Her troubles are only beginning, but the earthy tones in which she pokes fun at herself make things bearable—as does her heartfelt appreciation for the close-knit observant Jewish community that enfolds her. She’s even jovial about everyone’s least favorite health care chore, filling out the questionnaire in the waiting room: “Do you have a family history of breast cancer? Do I ever! Which side of the family? Both! We are an equal opportunity breast cancer conglomerate… Do you have a history of other cancers? Yes! I feel like I am winning this game. Will there be prizes?” Most improbably, there are.
My Life in Recipes: Food, Family and Memories, by Joan Nathan (Knopf, 450 pp.)
Over a long career, Joan Nathan has been perhaps the era’s greatest popularizer of Jewish cuisine as a sophisticated, varied, international palette. Her 11 previous cookbooks tracing Jewish cuisine around the world—Morocco, France, Israel and more—have made a generation of grateful cooks and eaters broadly familiar with the outlines of her life and travels. But this handsome volume fills in the gaps, with the recipes interspersed with longer than usual personal stories about her childhood, her marriage, her family rituals and her journalistic encounters with some of the food world’s most savory personalities. Her career breakthroughs are here too, such as the day a publicity staffer from Schocken Books called gasping, “You have arrived!” after fielding a call from the famously well-connected Leo Lerman, who wanted to write about her in Gourmet Magazine.
Many will buy this book for the recipes, which are, as you’d expect, glorious. But some of the best stories come with the simplest classic dishes, from the slightly al dente matzah balls that were Nathan’s mother’s specialty to the omelet her husband Allan cooked for an aged M.F.K. Fisher while Nathan interviewed Fisher in her bedroom. When she describes the family Passover seders, it’s not just about the food but about the way the table becomes an altar, sanctifying communal life.
Hiding in Holland: A Resistance Memoir, by Shulamit Reinharz (Amsterdam Publishers, 318 pp.)
Of course, the vast shadow of Holocaust memory, and memoir, still hangs as a backdrop to all these varied and successful Jewish lives. The stream of memoirs by survivors and their children is inevitably beginning to dwindle, but original and surprising stories keep turning up. The prominent Brandeis sociologist Shulamit Reinharz wasn’t looking to write a memoir, let alone a Holocaust memoir about her survivor father, Max Rothschild: For one thing, her father, who had passed much of the war underground, doing resistance work in Holland, had later become a journalist and then a rabbi and, unlike some survivors who keep silence, often recounted his adventures and tragedies. But then the author’s husband went to fix a stuck boiler one day in her parents’ New Jersey home and stumbled on boxes and boxes of her father’s wartime journals that had been forgotten in the cellar. Here was a way to get beyond the anecdotes.
Decades passed before the author, newly retired from a distinguished academic career at Brandeis and Oxford (she won the 2024 Leo Baeck Medal for the study of German-Jewish culture) returned to the family project, but even the rich trove of primary sources didn’t fully capture the story she wanted to tell. The result is a dialogue between father and daughter, with journals excerpts interspersed with further interviews and analysis by both of them. As Reinharz discovers, the sheer abundance of material sometimes makes the underlying facts feel wobbly. In a striking moment, she reflects on finding copies of the multiple resumes her father constructed over the years while trying to find work in the chaotic postwar Netherlands, then to emigrate, then to work in America. The story he told about himself, not surprisingly, kept changing. Early resumes “erased my father’s formative experiences in Germany and Holland,” even his imprisonment at Buchenwald: “His life in the Netherlands sounds almost normal.” Not till 1958 does a resume mention his work with the American Joint Distribution Committee and his underground work placing Jewish children in Christian foster homes. “These variations illustrate that there is no single account of a person’s life,” the author reflects. “Autobiographies are unstable. Each version is designed to meet the needs of the reader and writer in the moment, and each version reflects the time in which it was written.”
Tell Me Something, Tell Me Anything, Even If It’s a Lie: A Memoir in Essays, by Steve Wasserman (Heyday, 377 pp).
After all these heartfelt journeys into what makes life meaningful, it’s time for a chaser. Can there be anyone Steve Wasserman hasn’t met, or about whom he can’t muster up a juicy anecdote? Wasserman edited the world’s boldface names at an assortment of publishing houses and newspaper book review and op ed sections—the Los Angeles Times Book Review, Random House, Farrar Straus and Giroux, New Republic Books—during a mostly faded golden age of publishing. Bouncy accounts of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis (an editing colleague at Doubleday) and Random House’s Jason Epstein, who figures in a sly tale about the struggle to edit the voluminous output of the scholar Benzion Netanyahu, father of Israel’s current prime minister. (The senior Netanyahu declined all edits and insisted on bringing out the opus at 1,400 pages; reviews were “respectful.”)
Last words are a leitmotif. Wasserman once successfully solicited an obituary of the filmmaker Jean Renoir from the usually inaccessible Orson Welles—the last thing Welles ever wrote. The title quote is from one of his heroes, a Cuban poet named Pablo Fernando Armandez, greeting Wasserman from his deathbed at age 90. But the mood is merry, and the stories are endlessly fun. Keep this one for coffee break reading, a little dash of memory to brighten your day.
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(Top image credit: Vecteezy)