Temple Beth Torah’s Book Club began in 2008 when The Adult Education Committee sponsored a one session class on the fascinating book, Born To Kvetch, by Michael Wex, about the history and usage of Yiddish. Our guest teacher was an expert in this subject, and the discussion was rich and enjoyable. So much so, that the idea was born to start a book club to meet on a regular basis.
The book selection criteria are that the book has a connection to Judaism – whether the author is Jewish or Israeli, the subject matter is related to Jewish themes, history or culture. While the group agrees on the upcoming books, the TBT book club is different from many other groups in that the request is that no one has read the book prior to the selection!
A book is discussed for one meeting only. Anyone is welcome to come to a meeting at any time, if the book is of interest – there’s no requirement to attend each meeting.
Meetings are on Sundays from 11:30 to 1:00 in the Teen Lounge and are bi-monthly. Please see the calendar for our next discussion date. Contact Julie Buffington Rizner (845) 353-0548 for more information.
Below is a comprehensive list of the books already read, digested and discussed.
Day After Night– Anita Diamant (2009) - This novel is based on a dramatic true story: In October 1945, more than 200 "illegal immigrant" prisoners at the Atlit internment camp in Palestine were freed. The story of this rescue, the friendships it forged, and its aftermath is told through the words of four young women who at first seem to share little except their incarceration. This is fiction that makes history real.
The Hare With Amber Eyes: A Family’s Century of Art and Loss – Edmund de Waal- In the 1870’s, Charles Ephrussi assembled a collection of 360 Japanese ivory carvings known as “netsuke.” In this grand story, a renowned ceramicist and the fifth generation to inherit the collection traces the story of a remarkable family and a tumultuous century. The book succeeds in several genres: family memoir, travel literature, essays on migration and exile, on cultural misperceptions, and the author’s relationship to his art.
Friendly Fire - A B Yehoshua, Israel’s most distinguished living novelist - Two warring visions of Israel, the author’s country. The war, fought against the Palestinians, mortally injures the nation that fights it.
Wandering Stars -- Sholom Aleichem(Originally published in 1909, translated in full for the first time in 2009 with a foreword by Tony Kushner.) Spanning ten years and two continents, and set in the colorful world of the Yiddish theatre, this is an epic love story by the great Yiddish humorist Sholom Aleichem, creator of Teveye of Fiddler on the Roof fame. Wandering Stars is an engrossing romance, an account of the Jewish theatre of the Diaspora, and a great New York story.
The Russian Debutantes Handbook - Gary Shteyngart- A late 20th century coming of age tale of a Russian Jewish immigrant, Vladimir Girshkin, “dragging a passionate Slavic soul and an Ashkenazic sense of the absurd through the bright new American world…” about his attempts to assimilate.
The Man in the Sharkskin Suit – Lucette Lagnado(2007) - recounts the exile of the author’s Jewish Egyptian family from Cairo (in 1963 after the fall of King Farouk and the rise of the Nasser dictatorship) and their flight to America. She tells of her father’s heroic and tragic struggle to survive his “riches to rags” trajectory. This memoir is set against the backdrops of Cairo, Paris and New York.
Ten Thousand Lovers- Edeet Ravel- This novel takes place in Israel during the 1970’s and is about a love affair between a young emigrant student and a handsome intelligent actor who is also an army interrogator. As their unexpected passion grows, so too does the shadow that hangs over them.
All Other Nights - Dara Horn- A Civil War spy page turner that deals with race and religion in 19th century America. Are you curious about the Jewish experience in the south during the Civil War? This novel reflects a period of Jewish American history that many of us are unaware.
A Pigeon and A Boy -- Meir Shalev(2007) - One of Israel’s most celebrated writers, Shalev unravels a wondrous story of love that evolves between two handlers of homing pigeons that begins in the early 40’s and lasts until Israel’s War of Independence.
The World To Come– Dara Horn(2006) Inspired by a real-life art theft in Manhattan, the story encompasses early Soviet Russia, the Vietnam War and late 20th century New Jersey as it explores the nature of true art and the value of forgery, the trials of adolescence and the betrayals of adulthood. Rich, complex and haunting.
People of the Book- Geraldine Brooks(2008) - A fictional history of the Sarajevo Haggadah – an important Jewish manuscript that originated in 15th century Spain. This novel is a set of stories telling the book’s survival, woven together through the story of a conservationist who is trying to unlock the mysteries during the 1990’s.
The Other Schulman -- Alan Zweibel(2005) - An original Saturday Night Live writer, Alan Zweibel mixes wise-guy humor with a little Jewish magic realism. A sweet and hilarious look at middle age.
Dreams from My Father – A Story of Race and Inheritance, Barack Obama(1995, 2004) - “In this lyrical, unsentimental, and compelling memoir, the son of a black African father and a white American mother searches for a workable meaning to his life as a black American.” The N. Y. Times called the book “provocative… Persuasively describes the phenomenon of belonging to two different worlds, and thus belonging to neither.”
The Book Thief - Marcus Zusak (2006) - Drawn into a tense and dangerous historical era, readers discover how Liesel Meminger first learns to read and is transformed into the “book thief,” stealing books before they can be burned by the Nazi’s or confiscated from personal libraries. When her family decides to hide a Jew in the basement, Liesel holds out hope to him in the form of her two most precious commodities: words and stories.
The Plot Against America: A Novel- Philip Roth(2004) - Roth imagines an alternative version of American history. In 1940 Charles Lindbergh, heroic aviator and rabid isolationist, is elected President. Shortly thereafter, he negotiates a cordial “understanding” with Adolph Hitler, while the new government embarks on a program of folksy anti-Semitism. A NY Times Book Review Best Book of the Year.
The Ministry of Special Cases -- Nathan Englander(2007) - The story of a unique Jewish family, set in Argentina in 1976 during that country’s devastating Dirty War in which thousands of students, union members, and other “subversives” were kidnapped, tortured, killed, and thus made to disappear by the military junta. Haunting and beautifully written.
Everything Is Illuminated- Jonathan Safran Foer(2002)
In his remarkable first novel, the author, age 25, spins a tale out of shtetl life using every literary trick. In hilariously mangled English, a Ukrainian boy describes his efforts to help a young American Jew find the village his grandfather fled in WW II. Variously reviewed as “brilliant”, “too arty for its own good”, and “sometimes a challenge”.
The Septembers of Shiraz- Dalia Sofer(2007) - The story follows the Amin family, a Jewish family in post-revolutionary Iran, as they cope with the father’s false imprisonment for being a spy, watch their formerly peaceful world collapse, and flee their homeland.
The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Mohsin Hamid(2007) – This is a psychological thriller about a Princeton educated Pakistani and immigrant living the American dream – well educated, successful career, and how his view of himself changes in the wake of Sept 11th.
Suite Francaise- Irene Nemirovsky (2007)- Holocaust victim Irene Nemirovsky wrote these two novellas about life in Nazi-occupied France before being deported to Auschwitz in 1942. Preserved by her daughters, they were just brought to light. Best seller in France. NYTimes 100 best books.
The Yiddish Policemen’s Union– Michael Chabon(2007) -prize winning author of Kavalier & Clay. On the eve of WWII, FDR suggests that European Jewish refugees be resettled in the Alaskan territory. (“The Frozen Chosen.”)
Away- Amy Bloom(2007) - A vivid immigrant tale about a young woman from Russia who makes her way from Ellis Island to Manhattan. In the second half, seeking her daughter, she embarks on an odyssey that takes her from the world of the Yiddish theatre on NY’s lower east side into Seattle’s African- American underworld and across the Alaskan wilderness. A brilliant novel, epic and intimate.
Disobedience- Naomi Alderman(2007) - Set in London, a woman finds herself caught between the Orthodox Jewish community that raised her and the secular world that changed her.
Heir To the Glimmering World- Cynthia Ozick- In 1933 a family of German Jews arrive in N Y after a narrow and eccentric escape from Berlin. An 18 yr old orphan, Rose, comes to work for them and narrates this story. Ozick portrays this ramshackle household to dazzling effect, as it adjusts to its many states of exile – from a sense of security, from cherished ideas, and from the consolations of each other.
A Woman In Jerusalem- A. B. Yehoshua(2006) - At once profoundly serious and highly entertaining A. B. Yehoshua
Delights us with his masterly, often unexpected turns in the story, and above all with his ability to get under the skin and into the soul of Israel today.
A Tale of Love and Darkness -- Amos Oz(2002) Set mostly during the author’s childhood in Jerusalem of the 1940’s and 50’s, his memoir is epic in scope, following his ancestors back to Odessa and describing the anti-Semitism and Zionist passions that drove them to Palestine in the early 1930’s. His personal history is set against the background of the early history of Israel.
Born To Kvetch- Yiddish Language and Culture in All Its Moods Michael Wex (2005) Cultural and religious influences in Yiddish language and how the Jewish worldview is reflected in Yiddish. “Wise, witty and wonderful”, said the NY Times.
