There’s something so special about a true story. The best true stories touch us and teach us; the very best will change the way we look at the world.
Two new books from ArtScroll are very different from each other, but they share one very important quality: as we read them we are entertained, we are inspired and, yes, we are changed.
It Could Have Been You, by master storyteller Nachman Seltzer, takes us on a breathtaking journey to many different worlds. These never before published true stories are set in places as varied as Holocaust-era France and modern-day Jerusalem. They take place in a luxurious Swiss villa, an abandoned Ukrainian factory, a department store in Long Island. Wherever they are, they are unforgettable.
“When I started writing, I wrote the kind of stories that I felt I’d like to read,” Rabbi Seltzer says. “I saw that people really connected with them so I looked for more, and before I knew it there was a genre called ‘the Nachman Seltzer story’.”
So what makes a “Nachman Seltzer story” so good, so unusual, so memorable — and so beloved by thousands of readers? It’s a mixture of Rabbi Seltzer’s fresh, vibrant writing – and stories with endings that surprise and astonish us. “Every single person has at least one amazing story that happened to them,” Rabbi Seltzer says. “The trick is being able to listen.”
Hidden Gems: Our Special Children by Ruchi Eisenbach is a collection of true stories about raising special children. We hear the voices of parents,
siblings, grandparents, and teachers, sharing the triumphs and the disappointments, the day-to-day challenges and the lifelong lessons. The word “inspiration” has become a cliché, but in this book the inspiration is truly there: in the story of the family that adopted five (!) children with Down’s syndrome; in the honest words of the mother who speaks about the difficult choice of putting her daughter into an institution. A blind woman tells how one woman’s kindness changed her life, and a disabled student walks a few steps and teaches his class an unforgettable lesson.
The author, herself the mother of a special needs child, remembers: “I started writing about three years ago. B’chasdei Hashem I found that when I wrote from my heart, the words just came. I thought it would strengthen others… but it truly strengthened me.”
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