The National Jewish Book Awards were announced this morning, and the University of Nebraska Press has a winner. The Holocaust in the Soviet Union, written by Yitzhak Arad and translated by Ora Cummings, won in the Writing Based on Archival Material category, one of 18 categories in which awards were given.

In The Holocaust in the Soviet Union, Arad uses documents previously unavailble in English to trace the Holocaust in the German-occupied territories of the Soviet Union through three separate periods in which German political and military goals in the occupied territories dictated the treatment of Jews. It's a complete and moving account, and the University of Nebraska Press congratulates the author and translator.

UNP author S. L. Wisenberg was quoted in a Washington Post story today about the death of Miep Gies, one of the people who helped hide Anne Frank and her family from the Nazis between 1942 and 1944. It was also Miep who recovered Anne's famous diary from "the secret annex" after Frank's family was discovered.

Wisenberg told reporter Monica Hesse that she first read The Diary of Anne Frank in 1964, which served as inspiration for her critically acclaimed essay collection Holocaust Girls, which the University of Nebraska Press published as a hardcover in 2002 and as paperback in 2006. In the collection, Wisenberg addresses the question of what it means to be an American Jew trying to negotiate overlapping identities—woman, writer, and urban intellectual in search of a moral way.