Lev raphael biography spain

Follow Lev Raphael and explore their bibliography from Amazon's Lev Raphael Author Page.
LEV RAPHAEL: This is called “The Borgias and Their Enemies.” It's by Christopher Hibbert.
Lev Raphael is the author of 26 books including nine Nick Hoffman mysteries, most recently State University of Murder.

•

Monthly Archives: May 2009

by Van “Zev” Wallach (Stamford, CT)

I wear a chai — the Jewish letter symbolizing life — around my neck. I’ve studied Hebrew and Yiddish, have visited Israel, subscribe to Jewish newspapers, and have been told I look rabbinical. In fact, my great-great-grandfather, Heinrich Schwarz, was the first ordained rabbi in Texas.

Hearing this religious background, you would never imagine my spiritual journey began as a New Testament-reading, hell-fearing member of the First Baptist Church of Mission, Texas. How the heck, so to speak, did that happen? And how did I return to Judaism?

The story began when my mother’s German ancestors moved to Texas in the 1870s, settling in small towns amidst Christians who enjoyed nothing as much as hectoring Jews until they saw the light. My mother married my St. Louis-born father, son of Russian immigrants, in Temple Emanuel in McAllen, Texas. They moved to France, where their union produced two sons.

As in other spheres, the Russians and the Germans couldn’t get along, so my parents divorced and my mother returned

•

A Good Morning America Pick of the Week!

Born a German Jew in 1915, Rudy Baum was eighty-six years old when he sealed the garage door of his Dallas home, turned on the car ignition, and tried to end his life. After confronting her father’s attempted suicide, Karen Baum Gordon, Rudy’s daughter, began a sincere effort to understand the sequence of events that led her father to that dreadful day in 2002. What she found were hidden scars of generational struggles reaching back to the camps and ghettos of the Third Reich.

In The Last Letter: A Father’s Struggle, a Daughter’s Quest, and the Long Shadow of the Holocaust, Gordon explores not only her father’s life story, but also the stories and events that shaped the lives of her grandparents—two Holocaust victims that Rudy tried in vain to save in the late 1930s and early years of World War II. This investigation of her family’s history is grounded in eighty-eight letters written mostly by Julie Baum, Rudy’s mother and Karen’s grandmother, to Rudy between November 1936 and October 1941. In five parts, Gordon examines pieces of thes

•

I'm like most Americans, according to the New York Times: I read more printed books than ebooks.

I have two different tablets with lots of ebooks and take one or the other on trips, especially book tours where I'm gone for a week or two.

But despite the ability to download an impulse purchase at 3 AM, I keep adding to my library of thousands of printed books in history, fiction, biography, politics for these reasons:

One is production quality. I've found books with illustrations or maps can be a little wonky in ebook form. And though typos show up all the time in printed books, I rarely find problems like whole pages incorrectly printed in italics.

I also tend to forget that I actually have a specific ebook, whereas my new printed books are clearly visible in various TBR piles in my study.

Another is health-related. Because I have maintenance insomnia, I've been advised to avoid computer and tablet screens for at least an hour before bed.

Physical books take me back to the joy of being a kid with my first library card in a magnificent Gilded Age Manhat