In "Law Lit," acclaimed novelist and law professor Thane Rosenbaum delves into our cultural obsession with the law, exploring how the legal system has historically captivated the imagination of artists and the attention of readers--from Oedipus Rex to today's courtroom thrillers.
This handsome volume, which TV anchor Jack Ford called "marvelously entertaining and enlightening," collects the iconic and the unexpected, each piece reminding us of the passion for justice, the struggle to do right, and the belief in the power of language that lie at the heart of the law. Were you inspired by Atticus Finch's closing remarks in "To Kill a Mockingbird"? Read them here, along with Portia's poetic maneuverings in "The Merchant of Venice," the famously heated cross-examination from "A Few Good Men," and Bob Dylan's controversial protest song "Hurricane."
With dozens of selections, including fiction, essays, and even film scripts, "Law Lit" is a dazzling collection that transcends place and time, from ancient Greece and foggy London to the narrow streets of Prague and the spectacle of an Alabama courthouse, offering an enlightening look at how lives can be laid bare before the bench.

The smoke that once hovered over the concentration camps of Poland never left this world. It followed the survivors of the Holocaust wherever they went, and then settled in the lungs of their children. In the seamy atmosphere of Miami Beach's Collins Avenue, Mila Katz, a streaky card shark and confidante of mobsters, lives by the wits with which she survived the Holocaust. The secret about her son, Isaac Borowski, whom she abandoned in Poland, remains buried until it is slowly revealed in a series of deathbed confessions to her nurses.

But there is another son, Duncan Katz, born in America and raised as an avenging vigilante, a Jewish fighting machine, a prisoner of inherited rage who becomes a Nazi-hunter, driven by the crimes committed against his parents. He loses his job with the government when he botches a case against a former concentration camp guard, Feodor Malyshko. And he loses his family when his wife leaves him in order to shield their daughter from the Katz legacy of pain and unmourned loss. Duncan is exiled to New York City, where he stalks Malyshko and reenacts the family's tragedy in another generation.

Through his godfather, Mafia chieftain Larry Breibart, Duncan learns of his half-brother, Isaac, a yoga master, healer, and messianic figure in Jewless Poland. Duncan decides to travel to Poland and find his brother. Together they retrace the family's derailed path, walking among the ghosts of the Holocaust, confronting real and imaginary demons. Only then is Duncan finally ready to begin the slow process of healing, the dissipation of rage, and the search for his ultimate redemption.

Told with equal bursts of fractured realism and dark comedy, Second Hand Smoke is a postmodern mystery of deep insight, and emotional resonance.

Winner of the Wallant Prize

With the publication of Elijah Visible, Thane Rosenbaum emerged as a fresh and important new voice on the American literary scene, a young writer in the great Jewish storytelling tradition of Isaac Bashevis Singer and Isaac Babel. In this haunting debut, Rosenbaum weaves together nine postmodern tales about Adam Posner, a young man determined to climb the American corporate ladder, who finds himself paralyzed by the legacy of the Holocaust. Encumbered by the psychic screams of his deceased parents, Posner embodies the disintegration, as well as the spiritual search, of the modern Jewish family. Rosenbaum's portrait of the post-Holocaust world will resonate with contemporary readers of all backgrounds.

Twelve-year-old Sarah Stein loves life in New York. Who wouldn't, growing up in a cool TriBeCa loft with an artist dad and a chocolate-maker mom, rollerblading in Central Park, hanging out with friends? That is, until the day her parents tell her they're divorcing. Forced to shuttle each day by bicycle between their separate residences on either side of the Brooklyn Bridge, Sarah soon discovers that the parents she thought she knew are as opposite as their new homes. She takes on a bizarrely split identity-one day she's the daughter of the prim, social-climbing chocolatier, the next the streetwise, smart-aleck child of the downtown abstract painter. Sarah Stein becomes a stranger to herself. But that's not the only thing that's strange. Colliding with the cart of a homeless man one day while pedaling across the bridge, Sarah tumbles through a magical portal and into an upside-down world of double identities and second chances. Through her friendship with the homeless Clarence Wind, a disgraced fireman missing since 9/11, and the love of her grandmother, a wise Holocaust survivor with her own hidden past, Sarah unlocks the mysteries behind the strangeness that she and Clarence share. In this witty, wonder-filled novel about broken homes and disconnected lives, with the majestic Brooklyn Bridge as backdrop and the legacies of the Holocaust and the Twin Towers as backstory, Sarah Stein's adventures prove both heartbreaking and heartwarming, an enchantment for readers of all ages.

A Physician Under the Nazis are the memoirs of the first forty years (1909-1948) of the life of Henry Glenwick. It focuses on his experiences as a physician in Russian-occupied Ukraine after the outbreak of World War II, his return to the Warsaw ghetto, and his subsequent journey through labor and concentration camps in Poland and Germany. Following a post-war period in Displaced Persons camps in Germany, the book concludes with the writer's cross-Atlantic trip to New York and the beginnings of his life in the United States. This memoir provides the rarely-heard perspective on the Holocaust of a Jewish physician who served both Russian and German occupiers during the war.

We are obsessed with watching television shows and feature films about lawyers, reading legal thrillers, and following real-life trials. Yet, at the same time, most of us don't trust lawyers and hold them and the legal system in very low esteem.

In The Myth of Moral Justice, law professor and novelist Thane Rosenbaum suggests that this paradox stems from the fact that citizens and the courts are at odds when it comes to their definitions of justice. With a lawyer's expertise and a novelist's sensability, Rosenbaum tackles complicated philosophical questions about our longing for moral justice. He also takes a critical look at what our legal system does to the spirits of those who must come before the law, along with those who practice within it.

Many years have passed since Oliver Levin -- a bestselling mystery writer and a lifetime sufferer from blocked emotions -- has given any thought to his parents, Holocaust survivors who committed suicide. But now, after years of uninterrupted literary output, Oliver Levin finds himself blocked as a writer, too. Oliver's fourteen-year-old daughter, Ariel, sets out to free her father from his demons by summoning the ghosts of his parents, but, along the way, the ghosts of Primo Levi, Jerzy Kosinski, and Paul Celan, among others, also materialize in this novel of moral philosophy and unforgettable enchantment.