Jewish Studies Sunday Book & Discussion Group 2015

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  The Paris Architect: A Novel

  Charles Belfoure

  Sunday, November 15, 2015, 2:00-3:30pm

  The Paris Architect: A Novel, by Charles Belfoure

  Facilitated by Dr. Veronique Flambard-Weisbart, Professor, Department of Modern Languages & Literatures

  How far would you go to help a stranger? What would you risk? Would you trade your life for another's in the name of what is right? Belfoure explores these questions and others in this debut novel set in Paris during the Nazi occupation. Lucien Bernard—who, like the book's author, is an architect—is offered a large sum of money to outsmart the Gestapo by devising unique hiding places for Jews, though he knows that anyone caught helping them will be tortured and killed by the Germans. Danger is everywhere: Lucien's mistress, Adele, a successful fashion designer, has an affair with a Gestapo colonel. Lucien's new assistant will betray him in a heartbeat. Offered a juicy German factory commission that involves working with a Nazi officer who admires architecture and art, Lucien's web weaves more complexly. And when he falls in love with Adele's assistant, rescues a child, and contacts some of the individuals he's saved, the stakes grow higher and Lucien's thoughts turn from money to vengeance. Seamlessly integrated architectural details add to the excitement. Belfoure's characters are well-rounded and intricate. Heart, reluctant heroism, and art blend together in this spine-chilling page-turner.

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  No. 4 Street of our Lady

  Barbara Bird, Judy Maltz, and Richie Sherman

  Sunday, September 20, 2015, 2:00-3:30pm

  FILM SHOWING: No. 4 Street of our Lady

  A film by Barbara Bird, Judy Maltz, Richie Sherman (90 min)

  Tells the story of Francisca Halamajowa, a Polish Catholic woman who hid 15 of her Jewish neighbors during the Holocaust. The film draws on excerpts from a diary kept by one of the survivors, Moshe Maltz. It also incorporates testimonies from other Jews saved by Halamajowa, her descendants and former neighbors as they reconnect on a trip back to Sokal.

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  A Replacement Life

  Boris Fishman

  Wednesday, February 11, 2015, 3-4:30pm

  A Replacement Life, by Boris Fishman

  Author, Boris Fishman will be here in person to discuss, sell and sign his book

  A singularly talented writer makes his literary debut with this provocative, soulful, and sometimes hilarious story of a failed journalist asked to do the unthinkable: forge Holocaust-restitution claims for old Russian Jews in Brooklyn, New York.

  Yevgeny Gelman, grandfather of Slava Gelman, “didn’t suffer in the exact way” he needs to have suffered to qualify for the restitution the German government has been paying out to Holocaust survivors. But suffer he has – as a Jew in the war; as a second-class citizen in the USSR; as an immigrant to America. So? Isn’t his grandson a “writer”?

  High-minded Slava wants to put all this immigrant scraping behind him. Only the American Dream is not panning out for him – Century, the legendary magazine where he works as a researcher, wants nothing greater from him. Slava wants to be a correct, blameless American – but he wants to be a lionized writer even more.

  Slava’s turn as the Forger of South Brooklyn teaches him that not every fact is the truth, and not every lie a falsehood. It takes more than law-abiding to become an American; it takes the same self-reinvention in which his people excel. Intoxicated and unmoored by his inventions, Slava risks exposure. Cornered, he commits an irrevocable act that finally grants him a sense of home in America, but not before collecting a lasting price from his family.

  A Replacement Life is a dark, moving, and beautifully written novel about family, honor, and justice.

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  The World to Come

  Dara Horn

  Sunday, October 18, 2015, 2:00-3:30pm

  The World to Come, by Dara Horn

  Facilitated by Dr. Holli Levitsky, Professor, English Dept. & Director of Jewish Studies

  Following in the footsteps of her breakout debut In the Image, Dara Horn's second novel, The World to Come, is an intoxicating combination of mystery, spirituality, redemption, piety, and passion. Using a real-life art heist as her starting point, Horn traces the life and times of several characters, including Russian-born artist Marc Chagall, the New Jersey-based Ziskind family, and the "already-weres" and "not-yets" who roam an eternal world that exists outside the boundaries of life on earth. At the center of the story is Benjamin Ziskind, a former child prodigy who now spends his days writing questions for a television trivia show. After Ben's twin sister Sara forces him to attend a singles cocktail party at a Jewish museum, Ben spots Over Vitebsk, a Chagall sketch that once hung in the twins' childhood home. Convinced the painting was wrongfully taken from his family, Ben steals the work of art and enlists his twin to create a forgery to replace the stolen Chagall. What follows is a series of interwoven stories that trace the life and times of the famous painting, and the fate of those who come into contact with it. From a Jewish orphanage in 1920s Soviet Russia to a junior high school in Newark, New Jersey, with a stop in the jungles of Da Nang, Vietnam, Horn takes readers on an amazing journey through the sacred and the profane elements of the human condition. It is this expertly rendered juxtaposition of the spiritual with the secular that makes The World to Come so profound, and so compelling to readers. As we learn near the end of the beautiful tale, "The real world to come is down below--the world, in the future, as you create it."

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  The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara

  David Kertez

  Sunday, August 23, 2015, 2:00-3:30pm

  The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara by David Kertez

  Facilitated by Dr. Margarete Feinstein, Assoc. Professor, Department of Jewish Studies

  Bologna, 1858: A police squad, acting on the orders of the Inquisitor, invades the home of a Jewish merchant, Momolo Mortara, wrenches his crying six-year-old son from his arms, and rushes him off in a carriage bound for Rome. His mother is so distraught that she collapses and has to be taken to a neighbor's house, but her weeping can be heard across the city. With this terrifying scene--one that would haunt this family forever--David I. Kertzer begins his fascinating investigation of the dramatic kidnapping, and shows how this now obscure saga would eventually contribute to the collapse of the Church's temporal power in Italy. As Edgardo's parents desperately search for a way to get their son back, they learn why he--out of all their eight children--was taken. Years earlier, the family's Catholic serving girl, fearful that the infant might die of an illness, had secretly baptized him (or so she claimed). Edgardo recovered, but when the story reached the Bologna Inquisitor, the result was his order for Edgardo to be seized and sent to a special monastery where Jews were converted into good Catholics. The Inquisitor's justification for taking the child was based in Church teachings: No Christian child could be raised by Jewish parents. The case of Edgardo Mortara became an international cause célèbre. Although such kidnappings were not uncommon in Jewish communities across Europe, this time the political climate had changed. As news of the family's plight spread to Britain, where the Rothschilds got involved, to France, where it mobilized Napoleon III, and even to America, public opinion turned against the Vatican. Refusing to return the child to his family, Pope Pius IX began to regard the boy as his own child. The fate of this one boy came to symbolize the entire revolutionary campaign of Mazzini and Garibaldi to end the dominance of the Catholic Church and establish a modern, secular Italian state. The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara was a finalist for the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 1997, and has been made into a play by Pulitzer and Oscar winning playwright, Alfred Uhry. Early versions of the play were performed at Hartford Stage in 2002 and the Guthrie Theater in 2006.

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  The Short, Strange Life of Hershel Grynszpan: a Boy Avenger, A Nazi Diplomat and a Murder in Paris

  Jonathan Kirsch

  Sunday, April 19, 2015, 2:00-3:30pm

  The Short, Strange Life of Hershel Grynszpan: a Boy Avenger, A Nazi Diplomat and a Murder in Paris, by Jonathan Kirsch

  Author, Jonathan Kirsch was on campus to discuss, sell and sign his book.

  On the morning of November 7, 1938, a seventeen-year-old Jewish refugee, Herschel Grynszpan, walked into the German embassy in Paris and in an act of desperation assassinated Ernst vom Rath, a low-level Nazi diplomat. He did it, he said, out "of love for my parents and for my people." Two days later, vom Rath lay dead, and the Third Reich exploited his murder to inaugurate its long-planned campaign of terror against Germany's Jewish citizens, in the mass pogrom that became known as Kristallnacht. In a bizarre concatenation of events that would rapidly involve Ribbentrop, Goebbels, and Hitler himself, Grynszpan would become the centerpiece of a Nazi propaganda campaign that would later describe his actions as "the first shot of the Jewish War."

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  The Plot Against America

  Philip Roth

  Sunday, March 15, 2015, 2:00-3:30pm

  The Plot Against America, by Philip Roth

  Facilitated by Dr. Stella Setka, University Advisor & Fellowship Coordinator
  

  In an astonishing feat of empathy and narrative invention, novelist Philip Roth imagines an alternate version of American history.
  In 1940 Charles A. Lindbergh, heroic aviator and rabid isolationist, is elected President. Shortly thereafter, he negotiates a cordial “understanding” with Adolf Hitler, while the new government embarks on a program of folksy anti-Semitism.

  For one boy growing up in Newark, Lindbergh’s election is the first in a series of ruptures that threaten to destroy his small, safe corner of America–and with it, his mother, his father, and his older brother.

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  Mendoza the Jew: Boxing, Manliness, and Nationalism: A Graphic History

  Ronald Schecter

  Sunday, January 25, 2015, 2:00-3:30pm

  Mendoza the Jew: Boxing, Manliness, and Nationalism: A Graphic History by Ronald Schecter

  Facilitated by Dr. Elizabeth Drummond, Department of History

  Mendoza the Jew combines a graphic history with primary documentation and contextual information to explore issues of nationalism, identity, culture, and historical methodology through the life story of Daniel Mendoza. Mendoza was a poor Sephardic Jew from East London who became the boxing champion of Britain in 1789. As a Jew with limited means and a foreign-sounding name, Mendoza was an unlikely symbol of what many Britons considered to be their very own "national" sport. Whereas their adversaries across the Channel reputedly settled private quarrels by dueling with swords or pistols - leaving widows and orphans in their wake - the British (according to supporters of boxing) tended to settle their disputes with their fists. Mendoza the Jew provides an exciting and lively alternative to conventional lessons on nationalism. Rather than studying learned treatises and political speeches, students can read a graphic history about an eighteenth-century British boxer that demonstrates how ideas and emotions regarding the "nation" permeated the practices of everyday life. Mendoza's story reveals the ambivalent attitudes of British society toward its minorities, who were allowed (sometimes grudgingly) to participate in national life by braving pain and injury in athletic contests, but whose social mobility was limited and precarious.