Holocaust Museum LA to Partner With Barnes & Noble at The Grove for June Book Talks

Holocaust Museum LA and Barnes & Noble at The Grove have partnered for Bookfair, which will include three author talks at the store. Holocaust Museum LA will receive a percentage of sales of any books sold to customers who use a promotional code for their in-store purchases between June 1-30 at The Grove or any other Barnes & Noble location

On Sunday, June 9, at 2 p.m., the museum will present a talk with Joseph Samuels, author of the memoir, "Beyond the Rivers of Babylon: My Journey of Optimism and Resilience in a Turbulent Century." Born in Iraq, at age 19 Samuels left his family and was smuggled out of the country in the secret hold of a riverboat, escaping violent and repressive antisemitism. "Beyond the Rivers of Babylon" follows Samuels' remarkable journey, from his colorful childhood in the Old Jewish Quarter of Baghdad, to his life-altering service in the Israeli Navy to starting a family and building a real estate empire in Montreal and Los Angeles.

On Sunday, June 23, at 2 p.m., Holocaust Museum LA will present a talk with acclaimed author Tara Ison about her historical novel, "At the Hour Between Dog and Wolf," the story of a 12-year-old Parisian Jewish girl in World War II France living "in hiding" as a Catholic orphan with a family in a small village. In addition to stellar reviews for this book in both the New York Times and People magazine, Ison has received prestigious recognition for other work, including the PEN Southwest Book Award for Best Creative Nonfiction, both a 2020 and 2008 National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship and a 2008 COLA Individual Artist Grant. The conversation at Barnes & Noble will be moderated by Jonathan Kirsch, noted author and book reviewer.

On Sunday, June 30, at 2 p.m., Holocaust Museum LA will present "Illustrating the Holocaust," a talk with Sammy Savos and Susan Gal, illustrators of Holocaust graphic novels. Savos illustrated "The Girl Who Sang," a powerful graphic memoir about a young Jewish girl's fight for survival in Nazi-occupied Poland. Written by Estelle Nadel with Bethany Strout, the book has been celebrated by School Library Journal and Kirkus Reviews.

Gal is the illustrator of "The Tower of Life: How Yaffa Eliach Rebuilt Her Town in Stories and Photographs," written by Chana Stiefel. The biography of the woman who created the "Tower of Faces" at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., "The Tower of Life" traces Yaffa's childhood in Nazi-occupied Poland to her adulthood, where her life's mission was to recover thousands of her town's photographs from around the world. "The Tower of Life" was awarded the Sydney Taylor Book Award from the Association of Jewish Libraries, the Margaret Wise Brown Prize in Children's Literature and the 2023 Malka Penn Award for Human Rights in Children's Literature.

For more information on Bookfair and the individual events, visit https://holocaustmuseumla.org/bn2024.

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