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Robert Alter’s trailblazing translation and commentary on The Five Books of Moses and Amos Oz’s celebrated memoir of growing up in the fledgling state of Israel have been selected as this year’s Koret Jewish Book Award winners.

Alter, professor of Hebrew and comparative literature and director of Jewish studies at U.C. Berkeley, won a special award for translation and commentary for “The Five Books of Moses: A Translation with Commentary.”

“The translation is outstanding, and the culmination of a lifetime of the highest level of scholarly achievement,” said Steven J. Zipperstein, chairman of the book awards advisory board and director of the Taube Center for Jewish Studies at Stanford University.

Oz’s “A Tale of Love and Darkness,” translated from the Hebrew by Nicolas de Lange, won the award for biography. The memoir is a story — as seen through the eyes of a child — of Oz’s parents, of Jerusalem in the late 1940s and early ’50s, and of a young, haunted Israeli state.

For the first time in the program’s seven-year history, a prize was awarded for children’s literature. The winner, “The Cats in Krasinski Square,” by Karen Hesse, illustrated by Wendy Watson, is a poetic rendering of a young girl’s resistance to the horror of life in the Warsaw Ghetto.

In the history category, Elisheva Baumgarten’s “Mothers and Children: Jewish Family Life in Medieval Europe” won. It is an original portrait of the intimacy of Jewish family, motherhood and childhood in the context of life in medieval Christian Europe.

Tony Eprile produced the fiction-category winner with his debut novel, “The Persistence of Memory.” Set in the dizzying final days of the apartheid regime in his native South Africa, the novel, written from Eprile’s adopted home in Vermont, explores the curse of a perfect memory in a nation plagued with rose-colored recall.

The award for philosophy and thought was granted to a work of self-exploration, “Wrestling with God and Men: Homosexuality in the Jewish Tradition,” by Rabbi Steven Greenberg, an Orthodox homosexual rabbi and one of the leading educators at CLAL —The National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership. The book is a theological work that resulted from the author’s decade-long struggle to reconcile his religious beliefs and his sexual orientation, and conveys his evolution to resolution.

Tim Bradford won Koret’s Young Writer on Jewish Themes award. A Ph.D. candidate at Oklahoma State University, Bradford is currently conducting research for a novella on the history of the Vélodrome d’Hiver, the 1942 roundup of French and stateless Jews who were held in the winter cycling stadium in Paris before being shipped off to Auschwitz.

The Koret Jewish Book Awards will be presented April 11 at an invitation-only ceremony at the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco. This marks the first year that the Koret Jewish Book Awards ceremony will be held in San Francisco, home of the Koret Foundation. Previous years’ awards ceremonies have been held in New York.

With one exception, each award carries a $10,000 prize. The Young Writer (under 40) on Jewish Themes category includes a $25,000 award and the opportunity to spend a quarter in residence at Stanford University, teaching, researching, and writing.

In related events, the JCCSF will present a “Literary Arts Mosaic” April 9 and 10, with a series of free events showcasing the award winners as well as other celebrated local authors, including “Lemony Snicket” author Daniel Handler and Shalom Auslander in conversation. A detailed schedule of events is available at www.jccsf.org or by calling (415) 292-1219.