Daniel Torday

One morning in early March, I got into my car and drove to see the Mount Carmel Jewish Cemetery in Northeast Philadelphia. The graveyard is 20 minutes from my house. It's filled with the remains of Jewish Philadelphians, the majority of them from the 19th century.

In Daniel Torday's The Last Flight of Poxl West, a Jewish refugee tells his heroic World War II story in a best-selling — and partly fabricated — memoir.