Meetings on Sundays at 9:30am * Live at Temple Shalom and on Zoom * Contact us at ten.molahselpmet@bulckooB
Temple Shalom Book Club 2023-2024
October 1, 2023
Jerusalem Beach: Stories by Iddo Geffen
*WINNER OF THE 2023 SAMI ROHR PRIZE FOR JEWISH LITERATURE, FICTION*
At once compassionate and humorous, Jerusalem Beach is a foray into the human condition. Through a series of snapshots of contemporary life in Israel, Gefen reveals a world that’s a step from the familiar.
A man’s grandfather joins an army platoon of geriatrics looking for purpose in old age. A scheming tech start-up exposes the dire consequences of ambition. An elderly couple searches for a beach that doesn’t exist. And, a boy mourns his brother’s death in an attempt to catch time like flies in his fist.
November 19, 2023
One Hundred Saturdays by Michael Frank
One of Wall Street Journal’s Ten Best Books of the Year * Winner of the National Jewish Book Award for Holocaust Memoir and Sephardic Culture *
The remarkable story of ninety-nine-year-old Stella Levi whose conversations with the author over the course of six years bring to life the vibrant world of Jewish life on the Greek island of Rhodes, the deportation to Auschwitz that extinguished ninety percent of her community, and the resilience and wisdom of the woman who lived to tell the tale
January 7, 2024
The Woman's Hour: The Great Fight to Win the Vote by Elaine Weiss
"Both a page-turning drama and an inspiration for every reader"--Hillary Rodham Clinton
"Weiss is a clear and genial guide with an ear for telling language ... She also shows a superb sense of detail, and it's the deliciousness of her details that suggests certain individuals warrant entire novels of their own... Weiss's thoroughness is one of the book's great strengths. So vividly had she depicted events that by the climactic vote, I got goose bumps."--Curtis Sittenfeld, The New York Times Book Review
February 11, 2023
The Netanyahus by Joshua Cohen
2022 PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION, 2021 NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARD, NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2021, WALL STREET JOURNAL BEST BOOK OF 2021
Corbin College, not quite upstate New York, winter 1959–1960: Ruben Blum, a Jewish historian, is co-opted onto a hiring committee to review the application of an exiled Israeli scholar specializing in the Spanish Inquisition. When Benzion Netanyahu shows up for an interview, family unexpectedly in tow, Blum plays the reluctant host to guests who proceed to lay waste to his American complacencies. Mixes fiction with nonfiction
March 24, 2024
A River Could Be a Tree: A Memoir by Angela Himsel
How does a woman who grew up in rural Indiana as a fundamentalist Christian end up a practicing Jew in New York?
Angela Himsel was raised in a German-American family, one of eleven children who shared a single bathroom in their rented ramshackle farmhouse in Indiana.
Himsel's seemingly impossible road from childhood cult to a committed Jewish life is traced in and around the major events of the 1970s and 80s with warmth, humor, and a multitude of religious and philosophical insights. A River Could Be a Tree: A Memoir is a fascinating story of struggle, doubt, and finally, personal fulfillment.
May 5, 2024
Kantika: A Novel by Elizabeth Graver
A dazzling Sephardic multi-generational saga that moves from Istanbul to Barcelona, Havana, and New York, exploring displacement, endurance, and family as home.
A portrait of one family’s displacement across four countries, Kantika follows Rebecca Cohen, feisty daughter of the Sephardic elite of early 20th-century Istanbul. When the Cohens lose their wealth and are forced to move to Barcelona and start anew, Rebecca fashions a life from a failed marriage, the need to earn a living, but also passion, pleasure and motherhood. Moving from Spain to Cuba to New York for an arranged second marriage, she faces her greatest challenge―her disabled stepdaughter, Luna.