Award Winning Author:
LEAH GARRETT
X Troop: The Secret Jewish Commandos of World War Two
X TROOP: THE SECRET JEWISH COMMANDOS OF WORLD WAR TWO
ISBN-10 : 0358172039
X Troop was a secret Jewish commando unit that fought for the British against the Nazis on the front lines of all the major battles of World War Two. The commandos were Holocaust survivors from Austria and German who came to the UK on Kindertransport. When the war started, these German Jewish refugees were rounded up and interned in the UK,Australia, and Canada
as 'enemy aliens'. Desperate to turn the tide of war, in 1942 Churchill created this top secret commando unit, where all of the men had to take on fake British names and personas. The men of X Troop were used both as commandos--killing the Nazis--and in counterintelligence--interrogating the enemy on the battlefield. And one of the commandos, remarkably, even rescued his own parents from Theresienstadt concentration camp. To uncover this remarkable story I declassified top-secret files, interviewed living commandos and their families, and went through archives all over the world. The story is particularly important during these difficult days because it shows how a group of rag tag Jewish refugees could come together and effectively fight evil.
YOUNG LIONS: HOW JEWISH AUTHORS REVINVENTED THE AMERICAN WAR NOVEL
ISBN-10 : 0810131757
WINNER OF THE JORDAN SCHNITZER AWARD FOR MODERN JEWISH HISTORY
FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARD
Young Lions: How Jewish Authors Reinvented the American War Novel shows how Jews, traditionally castigated as weak and cowardly, for the first time became the popular literary representatives of what it meant to be a soldier and what it meant to be an American. Revisiting best-selling works ranging from Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead to Joseph Heller's Catch-22, and uncovering a range of unknown archival material, Leah Garrett shows how Jewish writers used the theme of World War II to reshape the American public's ideas about war, the Holocaust, and the role of Jews in postwar life. In contrast to most previous war fiction these new "Jewish" war novels were often ironic, funny, and irreverent and sought to teach the reading public broader lessons about liberalism, masculinity, and pluralism.