One day in 1943, the Nazis liquidated the Kielce labour camp in the heart of Poland. The inhabitants were made to stand in two columns while the German commandant led his soldiers between them to take the children away from their parents. When those parents tried to hold on to their children, literally for dear life, they were brutally beaten.

Amid this infernal drama, the father of one nine-year-old boy marched his son up to the commandant, to whom the boy declared: “Herr Hauptmann, ich kann arbeiten (Captain, I can work).”

Adam Resurrected

By Yoram Kaniuk (Trans: Seymore Simckes)
Atlantic, £7.99

The World A Moment Later

By Amir Gutfreund (Trans: Jessica Cohen)
Toby Press, £14.99

These are both big, ambitious novels about Israel, each with a rich cast of fascinating, eccentric characters. But they and their writers are very different. Kaniuk, almost 80, is a distinguished author of nearly 20 novels. Gutfreund, still in his 40s, is just starting out. More importantly, the two novels reflect different times and attitudes to writing.

Midnight Convoy & Other stories
By S Yizhar
Toby Press, £9.99

Preliminaries
By S Yizhar
Toby Press, £14.99

S Yizhar (Yizhar Smilansky) was born in 1916 in Rehovot. When he was one, the British conquered the land from the Turks and issued the Balfour Declaration in support of a Jewish homeland. Over the next 30 years, British rule had momentous consequences not just in the evolution of the Jewish state but also in the revival of Hebrew language and literature.

By Eliane Strosberg
Somogy Art, £29

For years, it was believed that the injunction against “graven images” contained in the Second Commandment prohibited Jews from producing figurative art. However, recent research has shown that this taboo was not as strong as previously thought and difficulties in accessing training was a more likely cause for the lack of Jews working as artists.

By Joel Kotek
Vallentine Mitchell

Joel Kotek cites Napoleon’s observation that “A good sketch is worth more than a long discussion” as an indication of the potency of the cartoon form and the danger that results when it promotes hatred. First published in French, this study investigates the portrayal of antisemitic themes in cartoons in the Arab and Muslim world, the echoing of these subjects and images in Western media, and observes how they contribute to the increase in antisemitism.

By Richard Evans
Allen Lane, £30

In most Second World War histories that appeared in Britain from the 1940s until the 1980s there was little about antisemitism or the persecution and mass murder of Europe’s Jews. Few biographies of Hitler made this central to his world view or a determining influence on his conduct of the war. British researchers tended to focus on social history. Some of the best were constrained by a Marxist or functionalist approach that demoted the significance of ideology, including Nazi racism.