Noble Books
About the Nobel laureates featured
Ana Forman and Mindy Gold
Sidney Altman
Sidney Altman was born in 1939 in Montreal, Canada. Altman received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1989 for discovering the enzymatic properties of RNA. Altman shared the award with Thomas R. Cech. Altman earned his bachelor’s degree in physics from MIT and Ph.D. in biophysics from the University of Colorado. He joined the faculty of Yale University in 1971. From 1983 until 1985 Altman was the department chairman of biology and from 1985 until 1989 he served as the dean of Yale College. Altman teaches molecular, cellular and developmental biology and chemistry at Yale.
Robert J. Aumann
Robert J. Aumann was born into an Orthodox Jewish family in Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany at the start of the Nazi regime. Aumann and his family narrowly escaped Crystalnacht when they immigrated to New York in 1938. Aumann completed a Bachelor of Science degree in mathematics at the City College of New York in 1950 and went on to MIT where he studied knot theory, a branch of algebraic topology. After receiving his Ph.D. in knot theory from MIT in 1955, Aumann began research with other mathematics scholars at the Analytical Research Group, associated with Princeton University’s mathematics department. In 1956, Aumann moved to Israel with his family and began teaching mathematics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In 2005, Aumann received the Nobel Prize in Economics for his analysis of game theory and his work on Neo-Walrasian economics. He shared the prize with Thomas Schelling. Aumann is a professor emeritus at Hebrew University.
Avram Hershko
Winner of the 2004 Nobel Prize in Chemistry Avram Hershko was born in Karcag, Hungary in 1937. When he was seven, Germany occupied Hungary. Hershko and his family were first forced into a ghetto in Szolnok, Hungary and then transported to Austria to work in a labor camp, which was liberated by the Soviet Army in 1945. In 1950, Hershko immigrated to Israel with his family. He earned his M.D. and his Ph.D. from Hebrew University-Hadassah Medical School in Jerusalem. He later studied with Gordon Tompkins at the Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics at the University of California, San Francisco, where he began his research on protein degradation. Hershko received his Nobel for the discovery of ubiquitin-mediated protein degradation, which he shared with Irwin Rose and Aaron Ciechanover. Hershko is a professor at the Rappaport Family Institute for Research in Medical Sciences at the Technion (Israel Institute of Technology) in Haifa.
Eric R. Kandel
Born in 1929 in Vienna, Austria, Eric R. Kandel immigrated at age 10 to New York with his family to escape anti-Semitism. He earned his medical degree from New York University and was an associate professor at NYU’s School of Medicine from 1965 to 1974, when he began his career at Columbia University. In 2000, he received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his research on the physiological basis of memory storage in neurons. His work furthered the understanding of memory and emotion in the brain. He shared the prize with Arvid Carlsson and Paul Greengard. Kandel’s 2007 autobiography, In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind, traces his life, research and his native Austria’s refusal to acknowledge its role in the Holocaust. Kandel teaches physiology, cellular biophysics and psychiatry, among other subjects, at Columbia University Medical Center.
Eric S. Maskin
Erik S. Maskin was born in Alpine, New Jersey. After receiving his Ph.D. in applied mathematics with an emphasis in economics from Harvard in 1976, Maskin taught as an assistant professor and then a professor at MIT until 1984. Maskin returned to Harvard to teach economics from 1985 until 2000, when he joined the Institute for Advanced Study. In 2007, Maskin received the Nobel Prize in Economics for his work on mechanism design theory, an economic theory that looks at markets that do not work effectively. Maskin is a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study and is a visiting lecturer at Princeton University.
Martin L. Perl
Born in 1927, Martin L. Perl followed his childhood love of mechanics to the Polytechnic Institute in Brooklyn to study chemical engineering. As a requirement for his job at General Electric, he enrolled in physics courses and quickly fell in love. He went on to earn a Ph.D. in physics at Columbia University and joined the faculty at University of Michigan and later Stanford University. Between 1974 and 1977, Perl and his colleagues at Stanford Linear Accelerator Center and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory conducted a series of experiments that ultimately led to the discovery of the tau lepton. Also known as the tau particle, the tau lepton is a negatively charged third generation elementary particle essential for completing the standard model of particle physics and thought to make up all matter in the universe. In 1995, Perl received the Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery. Perl is a professor emeritus at Stanford.
Robert M. Solow
Robert M. Solow, winner of the 1987 Nobel Prize in Economics, was born in Brooklyn in 1924 and was among the first generation of his family to be university-educated. Solow attended Harvard College on a scholarship from 1940 until 1942, at which point he entered the United States Army. Solow served in North Africa and Italy. Upon returning to Harvard after World War II, Solow completed his B.A. and in 1949 accepted a position in the economics department as an assistant professor at MIT. With his colleague Paul Samuelson, Solow worked on landmark theories including von Neumann growth theory (1953), capital theory (1956), linear programming (1958) and the Phillips Curve (1960). Solow is a professor emeritus at MIT.
Elie Wiesel
Elie Wiesel was born on September 30, 1928 in Sighet, Transylvania, now in Romania. In the spring of 1944, Wiesel and his family were deported first to the ghettos, then to Auschwitz-Birkenau, and ultimately to Buchenwald. Wiesel lost his mother, his father and one of his sisters in the death camps. After American liberation of the concentration camp, Wiesel moved to France, where he studied philosophy at the Sorbonne from 1948 until 1951 and worked as a journalist.
Wiesel came to New York in 1955 and three years later published Night, a memoir of his experience in the camps, his most influential work. Wiesel authored more than 40 books of fiction and non-fiction, including A Beggar in Jerusalem, The Testament, The Fifth Son and two volumes of his memoirs.
He joined Boston University in 1976 as the Andrew Mellon Professor of the Humanities and chaired the President’s Commission on the Holocaust under Jimmy Carter. Wiesel’s recommendations for the creation of a national day of remembrance of the Holocaust and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum were both realized.
Wiesel co-founded Moment Magazine with Leonard Fein in 1975. He received the 1986 Nobel Prize for Peace for speaking out against violence, repression and racism. Following the award, he established Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity, of which he is the president, to continue his work on behalf of human rights and world peace. Wiesel teaches at Boston University and is the United Nations Messenger of Peace.
About the Nobel laureates' favorite books
About Zionism: Speeches and Lectures by Professor Albert Einstein
Once asked to step in as Israel’s president, Albert Einstein worked tirelessly on behalf of the Jews and Zionist movement. This collection of passionate letters and public speeches is a tribute to Einstein’s irrefutable commitment to the Jewish state.
The Bridal Canopy by S.Y. Agnon
Reb Yudel, a Galician Jew, wanders in search of bridegrooms for his three daughters during the early 19th century. Considered one of the first classics of modern Hebrew literature, this novel’s heart is in the stories Yudel shares with his companion Nuta during their travels.
The Confessions of Zeno by Italo Svevo
A pupil of James Joyce, Italo Svevo brings his interest in the work of Sigmund Freud to this novel set in Svevo’s hometown of Trieste, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Businessman Zeno Cosini, a nicotine-addicted adulterer, writes an autobiography at the request of his psychiatrist. Revelations surface that force the reader to contemplate the validity of Zeno’s story and ponder the torturous road to self-revelation.
Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
15-year-old Anne Frank’s intimate diary tells her story of 25 months of hiding in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam with her family until their deportation to concentration camps in August 1944.
Fateless by Imre Kertesz
14-year-old György “Gyuri” Köves is taken from his home in Budapest, Hungary and sent to Auschwitz during the Holocaust. 2002 Nobel laureate Imre Kertesz gives a semi-autobiographical account of growing up as an outsider even among his fellow prisoners from the perspective of childhood innocence.
A Guest for the Night by S.Y. Agnon
1966 Nobel laureate S.Y. Agnon depicts Eastern European Jewish life prior to the Holocaust. This is a story of a man painfully learning that life will never be the same after WWI; faith, values and trust have slipped from the grasp of millions that have been displaced. Hope for the future inspires the characters, who have no idea of the tragedy that lies ahead.
Guide for the Perplexed by Maimonides
This 12th century work by Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon, better known as Maimonides, is published as a three-part letter to his student Rabbi Joseph ben Judah of Ceuta. This treatise of Maimonides’ philosophical views has exerted tremendous influence on Jewish, Christian and Muslim thinkers alike.
Herzog by Saul Bellow
After a turn of unfortunate events, Moses E. Herzog’s second wife leaves him for his best friend. Herzog is left alone and forced to reevaluate his life. This novel is told through a series of letters to everyone and anyone who might bring him closer to a sense of peace.
If This Is a Man by Primo Levi
In his autobiography, Levi describes being captured by Italian fascist forces in 1944 and surviving life in Auschwitz for nearly 10 months. 650 people arrived on the train with him but only 135 even made it into the camp.
Josephus by Lion Feuchtwanger
This trilogy of historical novels traces the life of the controversial Jewish historian-soldier Flavius Josephus, who documented the fall of the Second Temple in Jerusalem. Josephus is torn between his loyalty to the Jewish people, his surrender and service to the Romans and his quest for a cosmopolitan world.
The Last of the Just by Andre Schwarz-Bart
Part non-fiction and part fiction, this novel begins as a historical documentation of the pogrom against Jews in 12th century England and transforms into the story of fictional character Ernie Levy during the Holocaust.
Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman
Considered one of the greatest Russian novels of the 20th century, Life and Fate follows the family of Jewish physicist Viktor Shtrum during the Battle of Stalingrad. Grossman draws parallels between the totalitarianism regimes of Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin and provides a fierce indictment of both. Grossman’s manuscript and notes were seized by the KGB in the 1960s. Life and Fate wouldn’t be published until 1986, more than two decades after the author’s death.
Night by Elie Wiesel
Elie Wiesel struggles with his lost faith 10 years after his experience in the Nazi concentration camps. The 1986 Nobel laureate tells his story of survival from the age of 12 in Transylvania to the liberation of Buchenwald four years later.
The Odessa Tales by Isaac Babel
The short stories of Isaac Babel chronicle Jewish life in the Black Sea port of Odessa before and after the Bolshevik Revolution. By no means immune from anti-Semitism and pogroms, the Odessa Jewish community nevertheless had unprecedented rights in tsarist Russia and became one of its most lively and assertive. Through colorful characters, like the gangster Benya Krik, the reader gets an unforgettable view of Odessa’s Jewish underworld. Babel, who perished in Stalin’s purges, does justice to his hometown’s famed and quintessentially Jewish humor.
Royte Pomerantsen or How to Laugh in Yiddish by Immanuel Olsvanger
Immanuel Olsvanger’s Royte Pomerantsen or How to Laugh in Yiddish is a collection of 249 humorous Yiddish stories. Published in 1947, Olsvanger’s book preserves classic Jewish folk humor.
Shadows on the Hudson by Isaac Bashevis Singer
Each character in Isaac Bashevis Singer’s novel starts out on a journey of personal discovery after their lives are shattered during the Holocaust. Protagonist Boris Makaver, equally devoted to carpentry and Talmud, experiences the familiar feelings of guilt, abandonment, blame and deep contemplation that plague each of the other refugees as they attempt to re-establish their lives and their faith in God.
The Tales of Rabbi Nachman
Martin Buber’s retelling of Rabbi Nachman’s fables in The Tales of Rabbi Nachman is an elegant portrayal of the beauty and imagination behind his stories. Rabbi Nachman of Breslov (1772-1810) fostered the Breslov Hasidic dynasty. These multi-dimensional stories convey lessons of Torah that are simple but also analytically complex.
The Trial by Franz Kafka
On the morning of his 30th birthday, Josef K. awakens, and for reasons never revealed, is suddenly arrested. The book follows K. through his trial, which spans a year, by a powerful and yet mysteriously invisible law enforcement system. Published after Kafka’s death in 1924, his unfinished manuscript was made into a novel. Kafka’s work hauntingly foreshadows the totalitarian ideologies of Stalinism and Nazism that would grip Europe in the 1930s.
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