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What We Choose To Keep, Stories of devotion, survival, love and memory
Paperback
Publisher: Joseph Portnoj Gaj
Published: Jan 26 2026
Pages: 58
Weight: 0.20
Height: 0.14 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Some stories are born from imagination.
Others are carved out of lived truth.
What We Chose to Keep is a powerful collection of short stories and short novellas about devotion, survival, and the quiet kind of love that holds when everything else collapses.
Across war-torn streets, fractured families, fleeting encounters, and lifelong vows, Joseph Portnoj Gaj writes with a voice that is both intimate and unflinching-where tenderness and pain share the same page, and every ending leaves a mark.
Inside these pages you will find:
A soldier returning home to an imperfect soup that tastes like protection.
A child selling chewing gum with dignity sharper than poverty.
A man trapped in a world that erased his own name.
Ten minutes inside a city where survival depends on discipline and nerve.
A love found in the middle of grief.
Two engagement rings that become an oath.
And an epilogue that asks the only question that matters:
When everything is taken... what remains?
These are not just stories about hardship.
They are stories about what people refuse to lose:
memory, loyalty, faith, and love-
not as a feeling, but as a decision.
If you find tenderness here, keep it.
If you find pain, know you're not alone.
And if you find hope, let it stay with you.
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