The Girl Who Rode the White Lion

A hidden truth, a relentless pursuit, and a story history could not silence

Germany, 1938. On the eve of war, as Nazi violence engulfs Jewish homes and businesses, young Sarah Frank escapes an SS officer whose obsession with her family turns deadly. Forced into a world suddenly stripped of safety and certainty, she finds refuge in a traveling circus-an unlikely sanctuary of lion trainers, acrobats, elephants, and outsiders who become her family. Under their protection, Sarah discovers a courage she never knew she possessed, even as the Nazi grip tightens and the man she fled closes in.

New York City, 1957. A routine autopsy at the city zoo uncovers a chilling object inside an elderly lion: a silver SS ring engraved with a skull. For chief veterinarian Mark Spencer, the discovery ignites a transatlantic search that leads through postwar Paris, Tel Aviv, and the shadowed corners of New York-toward the buried story of a girl who dared to challenge an unfathomable evil.

Yishay Ishi Ron is an Israeli author and the son of a Holocaust survivor. His acclaimed novel Dog was longlisted for the Sapir Prize and is currently being adapted into a feature film. Dog won the 2025 National Jewish Book Award by the Jewish Book Council for Book Club and Hebrew Fiction in Translation. The Girl Who Rode the White Lion is his second novel published in English.

Yardenne Greenspan is a writer and Hebrew translator born in Tel Aviv. Her work has been featured in Tablet, the Jewish Book Council, Literary Hub, Haaretz, Words Without Borders, and as a regular column in Ploughshares. Her translations have been published by Restless Books, St. Martin's Press, Akashic, New Vessel Press, Amazon Crossing, and Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Her translation of e Memory Monster by Yishai Sarid was a 2020 New York Times Notable Book, and her translations have repeatedly been included in World Literature Today's Notable Translations lists. Greenspan has taught creative writing and translation workshops at Columbia University and at a VA hospital. She holds an MFA from Columbia University and lives in New York City.