The Book of Aron
A Novel
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Narrated by:
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Michael Goldstrom
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By:
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Jim Shepard
About this listen
The acclaimed National Book Award finalist—“one of the United States’ finest writers,” according to Joshua Ferris, “full of wit, humanity, and fearless curiosity”—now gives us a novel that will join the short list of classics about children caught up in the Holocaust.
Aron, the narrator, is an engaging if peculiar and unhappy young boy whose family is driven by the German onslaught from the Polish countryside into Warsaw and slowly battered by deprivation, disease, and persecution. He and a handful of boys and girls risk their lives by scuttling around the ghetto to smuggle and trade contraband through the quarantine walls in hopes of keeping their fathers, mothers, brothers, and sisters alive, hunted all the while by blackmailers and by Jewish, Polish, and German police, not to mention the Gestapo.
When his family is finally stripped away from him, Aron is rescued by Janusz Korczak, a doctor renowned throughout prewar Europe as an advocate of children’s rights who, once the Nazis swept in, was put in charge of the Warsaw orphanage. Treblinka awaits them all, but does Aron manage to escape—as his mentor suspected he could—to spread word about the atrocities?
Jim Shepard has masterfully made this child’s-eye view of the darkest history mesmerizing, sometimes comic despite all odds, truly heartbreaking, and even inspiring. Anyone who hears Aron’s voice will remember it forever.
©2015 Jim Shepard (P)2015 Random House AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
Winner of the 2016 PEN New England Award
An ALA Notable Book of 2015
Winner of the Sophie Brody Medal for Excellence in Jewish Literature
Finalist for the Jewish Book Award
“Shepard’s harrowing, comic, and deeply human story of a boy in the Warsaw ghetto crushed me. This book needs to be read.” —Anthony Doerr (Favorite Reads of 2015)
“A masterpiece. . . a remarkable novel destined to join the shelf of essential Holocaust literature. . . . a story of such startling candor about the complexity of heroism that it challenges each of us to greater courage. . . . Shepard has created something transcendent and timeless.” —Ron Charles, The Washington Post
“Shepard is a flat-out brilliant and deeply empathetic writer [who] puts the reader inside a known enclosure and yet makes us feel anew the bewilderment and horror of that time and place. . . . The Book of Aron is a worthy, necessary addition to the literature of the Holocaust.” —Rob Spillman, Guernica
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Beyond the Pale - winner of the Lambda Literary Award - tells the stories of two Jewish women living through times of darkness and inhumanity in the early 20th century, capturing their undaunted love and courage in luminous and moving prose. The richly textured novel details Gutke Gurvich's odyssey from her apprenticeship as a midwife in a Russian shtetl to her work in the suffrage movement in New York.
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great historical fiction with a lesbian twist
- By Kelly on 11-25-13
By: Elana Dykewomon
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The Walking People
- By: Mary Beth Keane
- Narrated by: Sile Bermingham
- Length: 16 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Greta Cahill never believed she would leave her village in the west of Ireland until she found herself on a ship bound for New York, along with her sister Johanna and a boy named Michael Ward. Labeled a "softheaded goose" by her family, Greta discovers that in America she can fall in love, raise her own family, and earn a living.
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Irish immigratn story
- By Chrissie on 09-10-13
By: Mary Beth Keane
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The Vagrants
- By: Yiyun Li
- Narrated by: Jackie Chung
- Length: 11 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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Yiyun Li is the winner of the prestigious Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award. The Vagrants, set in 1979 China, is the story of those affected by the execution of a 28-year-old counterrevolutionary. Though suffering, Li's characters nevertheless struggle to maintain hope amid cruel circumstance.
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Lovely prose, good story, deadly narration
- By Athene on 05-10-13
By: Yiyun Li
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William & Rosalie
- A Holocaust Testimony (Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Series)
- By: William Schiff, Rosalie Schiff, Craig Hanley
- Narrated by: Michael Fischbein
- Length: 4 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1941, newlyweds William and Rosalie Schiff are forcibly separated and sent on their individual odysseys through a surreal maze of hate. Terror in the Krakow ghetto, sadistic SS death games, cruel human medical experiments, eyewitness accounts of brutal murders of men, women, children, and even infants, and the menace of rape in occupied Poland make William & Rosalie an unusually explicit view of the chaos that World War II unleashed on the Jewish people.
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Speachless, I wont forget this book
- By Shad on 12-17-14
By: William Schiff, and others
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Courage to Run: A Story Based on the Life of Young Harriet Tubman
- Daughters of the Faith Series
- By: Wendy Lawton
- Narrated by: Shilynne Cole
- Length: 3 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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Harriet Tubman was born a slave on a Maryland plantation in the 1800s. She trusts in God, but her faith is tested at every turn. Should she obey her masters or listen to her conscience? This story from Harriet's childhood is a record of courage. Even more, it's the story of God's faithfulness as He prepares her for her adult calling to lead more than 300 people out of slavery through the Underground Railroad.
By: Wendy Lawton
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The Girl from the Train
- By: Irma Joubert
- Narrated by: Sarah Zimmerman
- Length: 11 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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Six-year-old Gretl Schmidt is on a train bound for Auschwitz. Jakób Kowalski is planting a bomb on the tracks. As World War II draws to a close, Jakób fights with the Polish resistance against the crushing forces of Germany and Russia. They mean to destroy a German troop transport, but Gretl's unscheduled train reaches the bomb first. Gretl is the only survivor.
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Excellent story covering the middle of the 20th C.
- By john on 04-12-16
By: Irma Joubert
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A Long, Long Time Ago and Essentially True
- By: Brigid Pasulka
- Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell
- Length: 14 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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The novel opens on the eve of World War II. In the mountain village of Half-Village, a young man nicknamed the Pigeon, under the approving eyes of the entire village, courts the beautiful Anielica Hetmanska. But the war's arrival wreaks havoc in all their lives and delays their marriage for six long years.
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The Old & New Worlds Converge & Transcend Time
- By Sara on 11-22-16
By: Brigid Pasulka
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Stars Between the Sun and Moon
- One Woman's Life in North Korea and Escape to Freedom
- By: Lucia Jang, Susan McClelland
- Narrated by: Janet Song
- Length: 7 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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Born in 1970s North Korea, Lucia Jang grew up in a typical household - her parents worked in the factories, and the family scraped by on rations. Nightly she bowed to her photo of Kim Il-Sung. It was the beginning of a chaotic period with a decade-long famine. Jang married an abusive man who sold their baby. She left him and went home to help her family by illegally crossing the river to China to trade goods. She was caught and imprisoned twice.
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Fantastic story. Well read.
- By Jfm on 02-20-16
By: Lucia Jang, and others
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Our Crime Was Being Jewish
- Hundreds of Holocaust Survivors Tell Their Stories
- By: Anthony S. Pitch
- Narrated by: Malk Williams, Fenella Fudge
- Length: 13 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Our Crime Was Being Jewish contains 576 vivid memories of 358 Holocaust survivors. These are the true, insider stories of victims, told in their own words. They include the experiences of teenagers who saw their parents and siblings sent to the gas chambers; of starving children beaten for trying to steal a morsel of food; of people who saw their friends commit suicide to save themselves from the daily agony they endured.
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Shocking, sad, a real eye opener!!
- By Jim on 08-31-17
By: Anthony S. Pitch
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Helga's Diary
- A Young Girl’s Account of Life in a Concentration Camp
- By: Helga Weiss, Neil Bermel - translator
- Narrated by: Emily Bevan
- Length: 5 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1938, when her diary begins, Helga is eight years old. Alongside her father and mother and the 45,000 Jews who live in Prague, she endures the Nazi invasion and regime: Her father is denied work, schools are closed to her, she and her parents are confined to their flat. Then deportations begin, and her friends and family start to disappear.
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New Perspective
- By Caroline D. Hayes on 02-21-15
By: Helga Weiss, and others
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After the Roundup
- Escape and Survival in Hitler’s France
- By: Joseph Weismann
- Narrated by: J. Clark Allison
- Length: 5 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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On the nights of July 16 and 17, 1942, French police rounded up 11-year-old Joseph Weismann, his family, and 13,000 other Jews. After being held for five days in appalling conditions in the Vélodrome d'Hiver stadium, Joseph and his family were transported by cattle car to the Beaune-la-Rolande internment camp and brutally separated. A thousand children were left behind to wait for a later train. The French guards told the children that they would soon be reunited with their parents, but Joseph and his new friend, Joe Kogan, chose to risk everything in a daring escape attempt.
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A “must-listen” book
- By Jonathan R Scupin on 09-25-18
By: Joseph Weismann
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A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
- By: Betty Smith
- Narrated by: Kate Burton
- Length: 14 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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A moving coming-of-age story set in the 1900s, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn follows the lives of 11-year-old Francie Nolan, her younger brother Neely, and their parents, Irish immigrants who have settled in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. Johnny Nolan is as loving and fanciful as they come, but he is also often drunk and out of work, unable to find his place in the land of opportunity.
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Book: flawless. SKIP THE RECORDED INTRO!!
- By Wild Wise Woman on 09-04-11
By: Betty Smith
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My Brother's Voice
- How a Young Hungarian Boy Survived the Holocaust: A True Story
- By: Stephen Nasser, Sherry Rosenthal
- Narrated by: Maxwell Glick
- Length: 9 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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Stephen 'Pista' Nasser was 13 years old when the Nazis whisked him and his family away from their home in Hungary to Auschwitz. His memories of that terrifying experience are still vivid, and his love for his brother Andris still brings a husky tone to his voice when he remembers the terrible ordeal they endured together. Stephen's account of the Holocaust, told in the refreshingly direct and optimistic language of a young boy, will help every listener to understand that the Holocaust was real.
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my favorite I've read it 5 times
- By Anonymous User on 04-15-18
By: Stephen Nasser, and others
What listeners say about The Book of Aron
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Amazon Customer
- 03-03-21
heartbreaking masterpiece
I had to read this book for school, but I really loved it. it's deviating. so beautifully written though. I would absolutely recommend this book
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- Audiobook Lover :)
- 05-10-18
Reading doesn’t do the writing justice
Jim Shepard is understated, nuanced, and smart. In order to get his dark sense of humor, it’s important to read with a certain pace and tone. I stopped listening to the audiobook about a third of the way through and finished it in print. The dialogue moves much faster in print. The reader goes too slowly and misses the punchiness. The book is so damn good.
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- D. Witscher
- 07-04-16
A Child of our times
What did you love best about The Book of Aron?
Aron's experience opens up an entirely new perspective on the tragedy of WWII and most specifically, the Warsaw Ghetto.
What was one of the most memorable moments of The Book of Aron?
When Aron betrays his friend to the Nazis
Have you listened to any of Michael Goldstrom’s other performances before? How does this one compare?
good performance
Was there a moment in the book that particularly moved you?
Every second, every moment, every description and action in the book are terribly moving and important.
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- Cynthia Bazinet
- 04-27-17
Absolutely heartbreaking.
The clarity of the prose, the starkly candid voice of Aron, and the unbearably sad historical circumstances make this an unforgettable experience. Beautifully read; beautifully written.
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- joyce
- 07-06-15
a different view of the Holocaust horror
I've read a number of WWII books, describing both the European and the Pacific theatres. This is the first one that offers an almost neutral viewpoint (I know, I didn't read any other reviews that agree with me, either) . There are Jews who betray each other and there are Nazis who are sympathetic towards the Jews. It seemed more like a study of how human beings might choose to behave when challenged, rather than another indictment of the Third Reich. As either one--a psychological invention or a 'Holocaust novel'--I found it weak and uninvolving. Read anything by Elie Wiesel instead.
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