UPCOMING SELECTIONS
Wednesday, May 8, 2013 • 8:30 AM
“THIS 1935 NOVEL is considered among [Elizabeth] Bowen’s best. Eleven-year-old Henrietta is visting the Fisher family in Paris. The character of the city, however, has nothing on the characters inside the residence, including Leopold, a child; his unusual mother; a dead father who has as much presence as any of the living; and an old man dying in bed. There’s something dark about the goings-on here, which Henrietta learns firsthand.”
— Library Journal
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PAST SELECTIONS
“POWERFUL…A HIGHLY READABLE, EVEN GRIPPING ACCOUNT OF THE 1967 CONFLICT … [Oren] has woven a seamless narrative out of a staggering variety of diplomatic and military strands.”
— The New York Times
“WITH A REMARKABLY ASSURED STYLE, OREN ELUCIDATES NEARLY EVERY ASPECT OF THE CONFLICT… Oren’s [book] will remain the authoritative chronicle of the war. His achievement as a writer and a historian is awesome.”
— The Atlantic Monthly
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Sayed Kashua has been widely praised for his literary eye and deadpan wit. Winner of the prestigious Bernstein Award, Second Person Singular centers on an ambitious lawyer who is considered one of the best Arab criminal attorneys in Jerusalem. With enormous emotional power, and a keen sense of the absurd, Kashua spins a tale of love and betrayal, honesty and artifice, and questions whether it is possible to truly reinvent ourselves.
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Equally adept at fiction (a winner of the National Jewish Book Award) and philosophy (a recipient of the MacArthur Foundation “genius” prize), Rebecca Newberger Goldstein now gives us a novel that transforms the great debate between faith and reason into an exhilarating romance of both heart and mind. In 36 Arguments for the Existence of God, she explores the rapture and torments of religious experience in all its variety. Hilarious, heartbreaking and intellectually captivating, it is a luminous and intoxicating novel.
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“Chad Harbach writes with the self-assurance of a seasoned novelist and exercises a masterful precision over the language and pacing of his narrative in this first novel. The title is a reference to baseball, but Harbach’s concern with sports is more than just a cheap metaphor. The Art of Fielding explores relationships — between friends, family and lovers — and the unpredictable forces that complicate them.”
— Kevin Nguyen (Amazon Best Book of the Month,
September 2011)
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“This provocative new book is exactly what it sounds like: an account of how Gen. Ulysses S. Grant issued an order to expel Jews from their homes in the midst of the Civil War. Anyone seeking to rock the Passover Seder with political debate will find the perfect conversation piece in Sarna’s account of this startling American story…. His book is part of the prestigious [Jewish Encounters] series, matching prominent Jewish writers with intriguingly fine-tuned topics.”
— Janet Maslin, The New York Times
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“[A] comprehensive study, richly documented… The way [Schneer] reveals the characters behind the diplomatic papers, bringing them to life, makes his book particularly enjoyable.”
— The New York Times Book Review
“Interesting, very readable, and an enormous education.”
— Jewish Chronicle
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“Nicole Krauss’ third novel is such an ambitious, disturbing, brave, provocative work, one fears unfairly reducing it in a brief review… Every page vibrates with the tension of something unsolvable insisting on being solved… Krauss’ sentences are so beautiful, rendered in such simple, clear language, I had to stop to reread many. Though they often describe inchoate anguish, their clarity and precision exhilarate.”
— Joan Frank, The San Francisco Chronicle
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“This engaging biography gives nuance and meaning to one of the most enigmatic men of the Victorian era.”
— Amanda Formean, author of
Georgiana: Duchess of Devonshire
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In this family history, [author Edmund] de Waal, a potter and curator of ceramics at the Victoria and Albert Museum, describes the experiences of his family, the Ephrussis, during the turmoil of the 20th century. Grain merchants in Odessa, various family members migrated to Vienna and Paris, becoming successful bankers. Secular Jews, they sought assimilation in a period of virulent anti-Semitism.
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Award-winning historian Deborah E. Lipstadt gives us an overview of the trial of SS Lieutenant Colonel Adolf Eichmann and analyzes the dramatic effect that the survivors’ courtroom testimony — which was itself not without controversy — had on a world that had until then regularly commemorated the Holocaust but never fully understood what the millions who died and the hundreds of thousands who managed to survive had actually experienced.
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“Intelligent, humane, highly civilized...the voice we hear not only holds our attention but also wins our affection and respect.”
— Los Angeles Times
“Incisive.... Mr. Gross’s voice — demure, measured, if at times overly cautious — is strikingly unique and unusually trustworthy.”
— Wall Street Journal
“A delightful memoir of life to the age of 18 in London before, during, and after World War II.” — New York Times
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“In this mesmerizing portrait of the Nazi capital, Larson plumbs a far more diabolical urban cauldron than in his bestselling The Devil in the White City…a vivid, atmospheric panorama of the Third Reich and its leaders…” — Publishers Weekly (starred, boxed review)
“Excellent….suspenseful, [has] the feel of a John le Carré novel.” — Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“A brilliant and often infuriating account of the experiences and evolving attitudes of the Dodd family during Hitler’s critical first year in power. With the benefit of hindsight, of course, the Dodds seem almost criminally ignorant, but Larson treats them with a degree of compassion that elevates them to tragic status.” — Booklist (starred, boxed review)
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A tiny, ebullient Jew who started as America’s leading liberal and ended as its most famous judicial conservative. A Klansman who became an absolutist advocate of free speech and civil rights. A backcountry lawyer who started off trying cases about cows and went on to conduct the most important international trial ever. A self-invented, tall-tale Westerner who narrowly missed the presidency but expanded individual freedom beyond what anyone before had dreamed.
Four more different men could hardly be imagined. Yet they had certain things in common. Each was a self-made man who came from humble beginnings on the edge of poverty. Each had driving ambition and a will to succeed. Each was, in his own way, a genius.
They began as close allies and friends of FDR, but the quest to shape a new Constitution led them to competition and sometimes outright warfare. SCORPIONS tells the story of these four great justices: their relationship with Roosevelt, with each other, and with the turbulent world of the Great Depression, World War II, and the Cold War. It also serves as a history of the modern Constitution itself. (Source: Publisher’s website)
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“This is a book of overwhelming power and intensity, David Grossman’s masterpiece. Flaubert created his Emma, Tolstoy made his Anna, and now we have Grossman’s Ora—as fully alive, as fully embodied, as any character in recent fiction. I devoured this long novel in a feverish trance. Wrenching, beautiful, unforgettable.” — Paul Auster
“Very rarely, a few times in a lifetime, you open a book and when you close it again nothing can ever be the same. Walls have been pulled down, barriers broken, a dimension of feeling, of existence itself, has opened in you that was not there before. To the End of the Land is a book of this magnitude. David Grossman may be the most gifted writer I’ve ever read; gifted not just because of his imagination, his energy, his originality, but because he has access to the unutterable, because he can look inside a person and discover the unique essence of her humanity. For 26 years he has been writing novels about what it means to defend this essence, this unique light, against a world designed to extinguish it. To the End of the Land is his most powerful, shattering, and unflinching story of this defense. To read it is to have yourself taken apart, undone, touched at the place of your own essence; it is to be turned back, as if after a long absence, into a human being.” — Nicole Krauss
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From the internationally acclaimed Israeli writer Meir Shalev comes a mesmerizing novel of two love stories, separated by half a century but connected by one enchanting act of devotion. During the 1948 War of Independence — a time when pigeons still are used to deliver battlefield messages — a gifted young pigeon handler is mortally wounded. In the moments before his death, he dispatches one last pigeon. The bird is carrying his extraordinary gift to the girl he has loved since adolescence. (Source: Publisher’s website) Read more»
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 Nathan the Wise is a fervent plea for religious tolerance. Its performance was forbidden by the church during Lessing’s lifetime and along with another of his works, The Jews, it was also banned by the Nazis. Set in Jerusalem during the Third Crusade, it describes how the wise Jewish merchant Nathan, the enlightened sultan Saladin and the (initially anonymous) Templar bridge their gaps between Judaism, Islam and Christianity. Its major themes are friendship, tolerance, relativism of God, a rejection of miracles and a need for communication. Read more»
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Alice Tatnall Ziplinsky’s greatest ambition is to belong, to feel truly entitled to the heritage she has tried so hard to earn. Which is why Zip’s Candies, her husband’s family’s company, is so much more to her than just a business. In True Confections, Alice looks back on the family owned and operated candy company, now in a crisis of intergenerational struggle over succession. Read more»
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Disillusioned with Ivy League post-graduate life, 24-year-old Joel Chasnoff makes real on his dream of giving back to Israel (and of being a “badass gun-toting soldier”) and voluntarily enlists in the Israeli Army. What follows is a hilarious coming-of-age tale in which Chasnoff takes readers into the barracks, over, under and through political fences, and face-to-face with the absurd reality of life in the Israeli Army. Read more»
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[Gary] Shteyngart ( Absurdistan) presents another profane and dizzying satire, a dystopic vision of the future… It’s also a pointedly old-fashioned May-December love story, complete with references to Chekhov and Tolstoy. … Shteyngart’s earnestly struggling characters — along with a flurry of running gags — keep the nightmare tour of tomorrow grounded. A rich commentary on the obsessions and catastrophes of the information age and a heartbreaker worthy of its title, this is Shteyngart’s best yet. (Source: Publishers Weekly) Read more»
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In 1930s fascist Rome, Dino Carpi encounters Sonia Gentile when she breaks her leg at his parents’ hotel on New Year’s Eve, and as the Italians say, it’s amore a prima vista. But their burgeoning relationship appears mortally wounded when Sonia discovers that Dino is Jewish. Sonia’s father is a devout Catholic and well-connected supporter of Il Duce. Faced with the possibility of losing the object of his ardor, Dino enters into a compromise with Sonia’s father in which he effectively denies his heritage in order to secure her hand. (Source: Publishers Weekly) Read more»
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 In 1960, The New Yorker magazine sent Hannah Arendt to cover the trial of Adolf Eichmann for crimes against humanity. While covering the technical aspects of the trial, she also explored wider themes, such as the nature of justice, the behavior of the Jewish leadership during the Nazi regime and the nature of evil itself. (Source: The New York Times Book Review) Read more»
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 A novel that stirs us to examine the nature of loyalty, identity and history itself, The Liberated Bride presents a multitude of sectors in Israeli life, as seen through the eyes of an endearing professor named Yochanan Rivlin. (Source: Reading Group Guides) Read more»
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 Historian Zuccotti’s excellently researched and vividly written study is loaded with poignant or inspiring accounts derived from interviews with Jewish-Italian survivors of the Holocaust in Italy and from unpublished sources. The book, her first, takes its place among other authentic Holocaust histories and will be praised for its evenhanded and wide-ranging analysis of Italian history and culture. An estimated 85 percent of Jewish Italians survived the Holocaust; 6,000-plus perished. (Source: Publishers Weekly) Read more»
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 This 1949 novella about the violent expulsion of Palestinian villagers by the Israeli army has long been considered a modern Hebrew masterpiece. It also has given rise to fierce controversy over the years. The various debates it has prompted would themselves make Khirbet Khizeh worth reading, but the novella is much more than a vital historical document: It is also a great work of art. Read more»
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 Almost before he knows it, Herman Broder, refugee and survivor of World War II, has three wives: Yadwiga, the Polish peasant who hid him from the Nazis; Masha, his beautiful and neurotic true love; and Tamara, his first wife, miraculously returned from the dead. Astonished by each new complication, and yet resigned to a life of evasion, Herman navigates a crowded, Yiddish New York with a sense of perpetually impending doom. Read more»
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 Norman Podhoretz, bestselling author of World War IV, returns with a brilliant, provocative examination of a central question in American politics and culture: Why are Jews overwhelmingly liberal?
Podhoretz, one of the founders of the neoconservative movement, is editor-at-large for Commentary magazine, of which he was editor-in-chief for 35 years. He is also an adjunct fellow of the Hudson Institute and the author of numerous bestselling books, including Making It, Breaking Ranks, Ex-Friends, My Love Affair With America and The Prophets. Read more»
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 Award-winning novelist A.B. Yehoshua takes us to the heart of remembrance and identity in this tale of a woman whose death brings gentle transformations to the strangers entrusted with her burial. The victim of a suicide bombing at a Jerusalem market, she is identified by a pay stub from the bakery where she worked as a cleaning woman. Despite a clerical error that kept her on the payroll when she was no longer employed, a Jerusalem newspaper reporter accuses the bakery of “gross negligence and inhumanity toward an employee” for failing to provide appropriate funeral arrangements. Soon the bakery’s human-resources manager is charged with the task of locating her relatives, leading him to make surprising discoveries and take an unforgettable journey to her homeland in the former Soviet Union. Read more»
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 Josephus’ account is a detailed and evocative record of the Jewish rebellion against Rome between AD 66 and 70. Originally a rebel leader, Josephus changed sides after he was captured, to become a Rome-appointed negotiator, and so was uniquely placed to observe these turbulent events, from the siege of Jerusalem to the final heroic resistance and mass suicides at Masada. His account provides much of what we know about the history of the Jews under Roman rule, with vivid portraits of such key figures as the Emperor Vespasian and Herod the Great. Read more»
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 This year’s Emanu-El Reads selection is Good Book: The Bizarre, Hilarious, Disturbing, Marvelous, and Inspiring Things I Learned When I Read Every Single Word of the Bible by David Plotz. Plotz’ book is based on a blog in which he recorded his reaction to reading the Hebrew Bible from cover to cover. Read more»
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 An ancient land. A lost language. And a wayward son who never knew what he and his father shared. Until they embarked on an epic journey into their family’s extraordinary past. Read more»
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 A caravan of Jews wanders through pre-World War II Eastern Europe on a heartbreaking quest. Among them is Laish, a 15-year-old orphan, who narrates the story of this against-all-odds journey. Read more»
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Missteps and missed opportunities proliferate in this gripping insider history of Middle Eastern diplomacy during the Clinton administration. Indyk, former ambassador to Israel, examines the contradictions inherent in Clinton’s Iraq policy with a remarkable level of self-criticism and brings a nuanced perspective to his analysis of Iraq’s alleged WMD programs and the reasons for and against war. The book emphasizes Clinton’s initial strategic focus on Syrian-Israeli relations, and the author’s discussion of Syria runs parallel to his central narrative about the Israel-Palestine conflict, which traces the tumultuous eight years from the hopeful handshake between Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat in 1993 through the beginning of the second intifada. The author achieves an impressive balance of scale, packing a tremendous amount of anecdotal information throughout, creating a portrait of diplomacy that reveals the influence of countless small details, from ceremonial gifts to friendly kisses, on world affairs. At the same time, the book surveys the enduring challenges that plagued the Clinton team’s efforts to bring peace to the region, making insightful connections between the history in which the author participated and the present state of the region. (Publisher’s Weekly) Read more»
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Published in 1876, Daniel Deronda is the last novel completed by George Eliot and the only one set in the contemporary Victorian society of her day. Its mixture of social satire and moral searching, along with a sympathetic rendering of Jewish proto-Zionist and kabbalistic ideas, has made it a controversial final statement of one of the greatest of Victorian novelists. Written during a time when Christian Zionism had a strong following, Eliot’s novel had a positive influence on later Jewish Zionism. It has been cited by Henrietta Szold, Eliezer Ben-Yehuda and Emma Lazarus as having been highly influential in their decision to become Zionists. Read more»
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The Counterlife is a complex story of Nathan Zuckerman’s search for who he is as a Jew, a man and a human being. The style is sometimes complex and confusing, with a fluid line between fantasy and reality. Roth asks challenging questions and presents them in a challenging way. Yet the reader is rewarded with insights that are profound, provoking and compelling. The Counterlife is not for everyone. Because of its strong sexual content and controversial ethnic and religious discussions, the reader is cautioned to read at his or her own risk. (From the URJ) Read more»
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Winner of the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature and hailed by The New York Times Book Review as a “brilliant, crushing book” and The New Yorker as a memoir of ruin “told without melodrama by its youngest survivor,” The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit recounts the exile of the author’s Jewish Egyptian family from Cairo in 1963 and her father’s heroic and tragic struggle to survive his “riches to rags” trajectory. Read more»
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In Jacob’s Gift: A Journey Into the Heart of Belonging, author Jonathan Freedland looks on as his 8-day-old son is about to be circumcised and admitted into the “Covenant of Abraham.” So begins a search for the meaning of his son’s inheritance and an epic journey into the nature of this, the world’s oldest civilization. Read more»
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Taking in everything from the Kingdom of David to the Oslo Accords, Ruth Wisse offers a radical new way to think about the Jewish relationship to power. Traditional Jews believed that upholding the covenant with God constituted a treaty with the most powerful force in the universe; this later transformed itself into a belief that, unburdened by a military, Jews could pursue their religious mission on a purely moral plain. Wisse, an eminent professor of comparative literature at Harvard, demonstrates how Jewish political weakness both increased Jewish vulnerability to scapegoating and violence, and unwittingly goaded power-seeking nations to cast Jews as perpetual targets. Read more»
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Matt Rees, an award-winning Jerusalem bureau chief for Time magazine, shares insight into the violent relationship between Israel and Palestine, discussing the internal rifts and self-defeating strategies that contribute to daily conflicts and focusing on specific individuals, from Palestinian car thieves to Israeli settlers, whose personal lives affect or reflect regional circumstances. Read more»
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This history of the foundational war in the Arab-Israeli conflict is groundbreaking, objective and deeply revisionist. A riveting account of the military engagements, it also focuses on the war’s political dimensions. Author Benny Morris probes the motives and aims of the protagonists on the basis of newly opened Israeli and Western documentation. The Arab side — where the archives are still closed — is illuminated with the help of intelligence and diplomatic materials. Read more»
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Focusing on a subject that has been covered by various national media, Standing With Israel goes beyond politics to profile leading Christian Zionists and detail the views and motives that drive their politics; spotlight Jews who have been at the forefront of forming a budding alliance with Israel’s Christian allies; and explain why so many American Jews are deeply uncomfortable with this outpouring of Christian support. Unlike other books on the subject, Standing With Israel has broad appeal and will help bring Jews and Christians together. Read more»
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Based on exclusive interviews with justices themselves, The Nine by Jeffrey Toobin tells the story of the Court through personalities — from Anthony Kennedy’s overwhelming sense of self-importance to Clarence Thomas’ well-tended grievances against his critics to David Souter’s odd 19th century lifestyle. There is also, for the first time, the full behind-the- scenes story of Bush v. Gore — and Sandra Day O'Connor’s fateful breach with George W. Bush, the president she helped place in office. Read more»
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The Lost begins as the story of a boy who grew up in a family haunted by the disappearance of six relatives during the Holocaust — an unmentionable subject that gripped his imagination from earliest childhood. Decades later, spurred by the discovery of a cache of desperate letters written to his grandfather in 1939 and tantalized by fragmentary tales of a terrible betrayal, author Daniel Mendelsohn sets out to find the remaining eyewitnesses to his relatives’ fates. Read more»
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Journalist Douglas Century offers this biography of Barney Ross, the Jewish champion boxer and World War II hero. Born Dov Ber Rasofsky, Barney Ross grew up in a tough Chicago neighborhood. To survive, he became a petty thief, gambler and errand boy for Al Capone. At 19, he became a professional boxer, joining a generation of Jewish boxers in the 1920s and 30s. When World War II began, Ross enlisted in the marines, becoming a hero of the battle of Guadalcanal. Read more»
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Written by Mr. Bernstein at age 93, The Invisible Wall is a memoir of his childhood in an English mill town prior to World War I and the effects of a love affair that is discovered between Mr. Bernstein’s sister, Lily, and Arthur, a Christian boy who lives across the street. Read more»
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 Download a cumulative list of selections read by the
Men’s Club Book Group from 1992 to 2011.
Back to Men’s Club
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ll Temple members are invited to join in this monthly discussion group organized by the Men’s Club of Congregation Emanu-El. Sessions meet at the Marvin and Elisabeth Cassell Community House. Click on the links below for book descriptions. For more information, contact the Men’s Club.