WOMEN ON THE MOVE LAUREN GRODSTEIN

As half a million Jews were crammed into the 1.3 square miles of the Warsaw Ghetto in 1940, life became an endless struggle to barter for food, to find a route to escape, to maintain a sense of humanity in an upside-down world.

Inspired by the real-life archives of writers and poets, rabbis and scholars who collected ghetto inhabitants’ stories, Lauren Grodstein has produced an intimate novel of defiance about a young poet who trades his verse for children’s testimonies and learns not just how to survive but to find joy in a place of such darkness.

Lauren Grodstein is the author of five novels, including a New York Times bestseller and a Washington Post Book of the Year. She teaches in the MFA Program at Rutgers University-Camden. We Must Not Think of Ourselves was Jenna Bush Hager’s December 2023 book club pick.