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Rav Hisda's Daughter, Book I: Apprentice: A Novel of Love, the Talmud, and Sorcery
Maggie Anton
June 23 2013: Sunday 2-3:30pm
Rav Hisda's Daughter, Book 1: Apprentice: A Novel of Love, the Talmud, and Sorcery by Maggie Anton
"This is more than a touching story of love and loss, a journey of an independent-minded woman or a tale of magic and witchcraft. Anton’s imagination takes you into the lives of our Talmudic Sages-- as young students and venerated teachers, shy fiancés and strong husbands, devoted sons and caring fathers. She also fills in the blank spaces for us – the rich and important lives of women and girls of those times. Researching her material well, Anton recreates Talmudic times, both the day to day ordinary existence and life fraught with danger and destruction, yet surviving to bring us Jewish law and wisdom unto this very day." --- Blu Greenberg, founding president of JOFA, the Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance; author of On Women and Judaism: A View from Tradition.
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Shanghai Diary: A Young Girl's Journey from Hitler's Hate to War-Torn China
Ursula Bacon
April 21, 2013: Sunday 2-3:30pm
Shanghai Diary, by Ursula Bacon
By the late 1930s, Europe sat on the brink of a world war. As the holocaust approached, many Jewish families in Germany fled to one of the only open port available to them: Shanghai. Once called "the armpit of the world," Shanghai ultimately served as the last resort for tens of thousands of Jews desperate to escape Hitler's "Final Solution." Against this backdrop, 11-year-old Ursula Bacon and her family made the difficult 8,000-mile voyage to Shanghai, with its promise of safety. But instead of a storybook China, they found overcrowded streets teeming with peddlers, beggars, opium dens, and prostitutes. Amid these abysmal conditions, Ursula learned of her own resourcefulness and found within herself the fierce determination to survive.
Elizabeth Drummond, Asst. Professor, Department of History, facilitator
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The Crisis of Zionism
Peter Beinart
December 15, 2013
The Crisis of Zionism by Peter Beinart
Facilitated by Dr. Jeff Siker, Professor of New Testament & Christian Origins
A dramatic shift is taking place in Israel and America. In Israel, the deepening occupation of the West Bank is putting Israeli democracy at risk. In the United States, the refusal of major Jewish organizations to defend democracy in the Jewish state is alienating many young liberal Jews from Zionism itself. In the next generation, the liberal Zionist dream--the dream of a state that safeguards the Jewish people and cherishes democratic ideals--may die.
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Sholem Aleichem: Laughing in the Darkness
Joseph Dorman
September 29, 2013 -FILM SCREENING -11:00am-12:45pm
Sholem Aleichem: Laughing in the Darkness, directed by Joseph Dorman
A portrait of writer Sholem Aleichem, whose stories about Tevye the milkman became the basis of the Broadway musical Fiddler on the Roof. Aleichem (1859-1916) was a rebellious wordsmith who created a new genre of literature and used his remarkable humor to encapsulate the realities of the Eastern European Jewish world in the late nineteenth century. Using a rich collection of archival footage, the film recreates a time in czarist Russia when Jews were second-class citizens and frequent scapegoats in times of social and political unrest. (2011, 93 MINS.)
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What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank: Stories
Nathan Englander
October 20, 2013
What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank: Stories by Nathan Englander
Facilitated by Dr. Audrey Thacker, Department of English, California State University, Northridge
Eight stories from the celebrated novelist and short-story writer Nathan Englander display a gifted young author grappling with the great questions of modern life, with a command of language and the imagination that place Englander at the very forefront of contemporary American fiction… ".. . If Mr. Englander is in fact the future of Jewish-American prose, then that future looks to be a far more moral and compassionate one than the writing of the recent past. . . . the humor and the brilliance, and the investigation of cultural identity, are all still there.” —The New York Observer
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The Sabbath
Abraham Joshua Heschel
March 17, 2013: Sunday 2-3:30pm
The Sabbath by Abraham Joshua Heschel
Elegant, passionate, and filled with the love of God's creation, Abraham Joshua Heschel's The Sabbath has been hailed as a classic of Jewish spirituality ever since its original publication-and has been read by thousands of people seeking meaning in modern life. In this brief yet profound meditation on the meaning of the Seventh Day, Heschel introduced the idea of an "architecture of holiness" that appears not in space but in time Judaism, he argues, is a religion of time: it finds meaning not in space and the material things that fill it but in time and the eternity that imbues it, so that "the Sabbaths are our great cathedrals." A scholarly meditation of the nature and celebration of the Sabbath.
Linda Yellin, Asst. Professor, Department of Sociology, facilitator
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Shtetl: The Life and Death of a Small Town and the World of Polish Jews
Eva Hoffman
February 10, 2013: Sunday 2-3:30pm
Shtetl: The Life and Death of a Small Town and the World of Polish Jews, by Eva Hoffman
Eva Hoffman's Shtetl examines the history of Jewish small towns, bringing to life the vibrancy and complexity of Jewish Polish life over the course of centuries from the 16th century to the Holocaust. Using the town of Braƒsk case study, Hoffman examines the institutions, culture, beliefs, social structures and tensions that characterized Jewish life in Poland as well as Polish Jews relations with their Christian neighbors. While framed through the lens of the tragedy of the Holocaust, Hoffman's history of Polish Jews and Jewish-Christian relations at the same time tries to recapture the complexity that characterized this history.
Elizabeth Drummond, Asst. Professor, Department of History, facilitator
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Wedding Song: Memoirs of an Iranian Jewish Woman
Farideh Goldin
September 9, 2012: Sunday 2-3:30pm
Wedding Song: Memoirs of an Iranian Jewish Woman by Farideh Goldin
Farideh Goldin was born to her fifteen-year-old mother in 1953 and into a Jewish community living in an increasingly hostile Islamic state--prerevolutionary Iran. This memoir is Goldin's passionate and painful account of her childhood in a poor Jewish household and her emigration to the United States in 1975.
Goldin's memoir conveys not just the personal trauma of growing up in a family fraught with discord but also the tragic human costs of religious dogmatism. In Goldin's experience, Jewish fundamentalism was intensified by an Islamic context. Although the Muslims were antagonistic to Jews, their views on women's roles and their treatment of women influenced the attitude and practices of some Iranian Jews.
In this brave and dispassionate portrayal of a little-known corner of Jewish life, Farideh Goldin confronts profound sadness yet captures the joys of a child's wonder as she savors the scenes and textures and scents of Jewish Iran. Readers share her youthful adventures and dangers, coming to understand how such experiences shape her choice.
Facilitated by Dr. Saba Soomekh, Asst. Professor of Theological Studies
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Lost In Translation
Eva Hoffman
January 22, 2012 2:00-3:30pm
Lost In Translation by Eva Hoffman
Daughter of Holocaust survivors, the author, a New York Times Book Review editor, lost her sense of place and belonging when she emigrated with her family from Poland to Vancouver in 1959 at the age of 13. Although she works within a familiar genre here, Hoffman's is a penetrating, lyrical memoir that casts a wide net as it joins vivid anecdotes and vigorous philosophical insights on Old World Cracow and Ivy League America; Polish anti-Semitism; the degradations suffered by immigrants; Hoffman's cultural nostalgia, self-analysis and intellectual passion; and the atrophy of her Polish from disuse and her own disabling inarticulateness in English as a newcomer. Linguistic dispossession, she explains, "is close to the dispossession of one's self." As Hoffman savors the cadences and nuances of her adopted language, she remains ever conscious of assimilation's perils: "But how does one bend toward another culture without falling over, how does one strike an elastic balance between rigidity and self-effacement?"
Elizabeth Drummond, Department of History, facilitator
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Bernhard
Yoel Hoffmann
February 12, 2012 2:00-3:30pm
Bernhard by Yoel Hoffmann
In Israeli avant-garde novelist Hoffmann's startling minimalist collage, 50-ish, grief-numbed widower Bernhard Stein, transplanted from Berlin to Palestine, ruminates on his wife's death, on history and on the universe against a background of Hitler's rampage across Europe. A postmodernist kaleidoscope unfolding in 172 loosely interconnected vignettes, most of them a page in length or shorter, this experimental novel echoes Hoffmann's more conventional double-novella American debut, The Book of Joseph and Katschen. Bernhard, whose feverish ruminations hop from Spinoza to El Greco to Trotsky, is a man unhinged. His best friend, a plumber named Gustav, and Elvira Neuwirth, the cultured Viennese widow with whom he flirts, seem almost as unreal as his fictive alter ego, Moscow-born dermatologist D.S. Gregory, whose father lost a leg fighting in the American Revolution. Within these flights of fancy lies a searing meditation on loss of faith, the tragedy of modern history and life's apparent meaninglessness. Hoffmann's semantic riffs, historical excursions and self-referential metaphysical noodlings can be wearying. Yet he adds ballast to this tale by loading it with dark parables and dreams; Jewish ritual and lore; German, Yiddish and Arabic phrases (translated in the margins); and snatches of songs, childhood memories and sexual fantasies. His hypnotic prose fuses everyday events and surreal imagery with the lyrical intensity of a Chagall painting.
Gil Klein, Department of Theological Studies, facilitator
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Drawing in the Dust
Zoe Klein
November 11, 2012: Sunday 2-3:30pm
Drawing in the Dust, by Rabbi Zoe Klein
Brilliant archaeologist Page Brookstone has toiled at Israel’s storied battlegrounds of Megiddo for twelve years, yet none of the ancient remnants she has unearthed deliver the life-altering message she craves. Which is why she risks her professional reputation when a young Arab couple begs her to excavate beneath their home. Ibrahim and Naima Barakat claim the spirits of two lovers overwhelm everyone who enters with love and desire. As Page digs, she makes a miraculous discovery—the bones of the deeply troubled prophet Jeremiah locked in an eternal embrace with a mysterious woman. Buried with the entwined skeletons is a collection of scrolls that challenge centuries-old interpretations of the prophet’s story and create a worldwide fervor. Caught in a forbidden romance of her own, and under siege from religious zealots and relentless critics, Page endangers her life to share the lovers’ story with the world. But in doing so, she discovers she must let go of her own painful past. Called a “zesty debut” by Kirkus Reviews, Zoë Klein’s historically rich novel is a lyrical and unexpected journey as poignant and thought-provoking as the beloved bestsellers The Red Tent and People of the Book.
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The One Facing Us
Ronit Matalon
December 2, 2012: Sunday 2-3:30pm (in Faculty Commons, not Von Der Ahe Suite)
The One Facing Us by Ronit Matalon
Matalon, through photographs and storytelling, conveys the story of a Jewish family in Africa, which has interesting roots in Egypt. Esther, seventeen years old, wild and rebellious, is sent from Israel to Cameroon to stay with her hardheaded uncle Sicourelle, who is charged with straightening her out. But Esther resists her uncle's plans for her future--which include marriage to a cousin--and in the privileged indolence of postcolonial Africa, she looks to the past instead. Using sepia portraits and scraps of letters, Esther pieces together the history of her family, a once-grand Egyptian-Jewish clan, and its displacement from Cairo in the 1950s to Israel, West Africa, and New York.
As the worn photographs yield their secrets, Esther uncovers a rich tale of wives and ex-wives; revolving mistresses and crushing marriages; intrigues and disappointments; poignant contrasts between the living past and the dead present. In sensuous, inventive prose, Matalon penetrates the mysteries of cultural exile and family life to produce a first novel that is mature, authentic, and deeply moving. Facilitated by Dr. Gil Klein, by Asst. Professor of Theological Studies
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Golems of Gotham
Thane Rosenbaum
October 7, 2012: Sunday 2-3:30pm
Golems of Gotham by Thane Rosenbaum
At the beginning of Thane Rosenbaum's imaginative comedy The Golems of Gotham, an elderly pair of Holocaust survivors, Lothar and Rose Levin, commit suicide. Their son, Oliver, a successful New York mystery writer already suffering from his wife's desertion and a crippling case of writer's block, is devastated by the news. Oliver's 14-year-old daughter, Ariel, comes to the rescue, conjuring not only her grandparents from the grave but also a remarkable group of Jewish literary golems (ghosts, in this case) who also killed themselves after a lifetime of Holocaust memories. Among the visitors here to inspire Oliver toward writing a serious second novel are Primo Levi, Jerzy Kosinski, and Paul Celan. While Oliver writes feverishly, the ghosts cleanse New York City of any reminders of oppression toward Jews: tattoos, crew cuts, overcrowded trains, striped uniforms, and smoke belching from tall stacks.
Facilitated by Dr. Holli Levitsky, Director, Jewish Studies Program and Associate Professor of English
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Displaced Persons
Ghita Schwarz
April 22, 2012 2:00-3:30pm
Displaced Persons by Ghita Schwarz
Moving from the Allied zones of postwar Germany to New York City, an astonishing novel of grief and anger, memory and survival witnessed through the experiences of "displaced persons" struggling to remake their lives in the decades after World War II.
Holli Levitsky, Director, Jewish Studies Program facilitator
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The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East
Sandy Tolan
March 18, 2012 2:00-3:30pm
The Lemon Tree : An Arab, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East by Sandy Tolan
"In the summer of 1967, not long after the Six Day War, three young Arab men ventured into the town of Ramla, in what is now Jewish Israel. They were cousins, on a pilgrimage to see their childhood homes; their families had been driven out of Palestine nearly twenty years earlier. One cousin had a door slammed in his face, and another found his old house had been converted into a school. But the third, Bashir, was met at the door by a young woman called Dalia, who invited him in." "This poignant encounter is the starting point for a true story of two families, one Arab, one Jewish, amid the fraught modern history of the region. In Bashir's childhood home, in the lemon tree his father planted in the backyard, he sees dispossession and occupation; Dalia, who arrived as an infant in 1948 with her family from Bulgaria, sees hope for a people devastated by the Holocaust. Both are swept up in the fates of their people, and their lives form a personal microcosm of more than half a century of Israeli-Palestinian history."
Saba Soomekh, Department of Theological Studies, facilitator
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Behind Enemy Lines
Marthe Cohn
Sun., March 27, 2011, 2:00PM - 3:30PM
Behind Enemy Lines by Marthe Cohn
The courageous Marthe Hoffnung was born in 1920 in the city of Metz, 33 miles from the Franco-German border. Born into a close-knit Jewish family, Marthe and her six brothers and sisters basked in the glow of love, education, and freedom of expression, but darker times altered their lives forever when Hitler's machinations reached the perimeters of France to shatter their lives. Marthe's family played an active role in the Resistance movement, often hiding fellow Jews in their home or ensuring their passage to an escape route. This selflessness would manifest itself further when Marthe joined the French army and, with her perfect German accent and blond hair, made several trips into occupied Germany posing as a German nurse looking for her fiance in order to obtain critical intelligence information. In 1990, at the age of 80, Marthe was awarded the Medaille Militaire, France's highest honor. Despite having played a tremendous role in securing vital strategic information crucial to ending World War II, Cohn relays her amazing story of unprecedented bravery with simplicity and modesty.
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The Book of Genesis Illustrated
R. Crumb
Sunday, November 13, 2011 (2:00-3:30PM)
The Book of Genesis Illustrated, by R. Crumb
Discussion led by Prof. Michael Brodsky, Art Dept.
Far removed from the satirical reimagining some might expect from the father of underground comix, Crumb's long-awaited take on the first book of the Bible presents the artist's own sensitive, visually intense reflections. Where most visual adaptations edit down their prose sources, Crumb has, strikingly, included every word of the Book of Genesis within his first major book-length work. His humanistic visual response to this religious text imbues even briefly mentioned biblical characters with unique faces and attitudes, and his renderings of the book's more storied personalities draw out momentous emotions inspired by the book's inherent drama. Throughout, Genesis is a virtual portfolio of Crumb's career-long effort to instill fluid cartoon drawing with carefully rendered lifelike detail. Some might miss Crumb's full stylistic and tonal range, but the source's narrative sweep includes moments of sex and scandal that recall the artist's more notorious comics. Indeed, this monumental visual adaptation's basic strategy may subvert simply by demanding a reconsideration of its source, one that continues to motivate the complex cultural struggles that have, for decades, preoccupied this master cartoonist's landmark work.
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The Preservationist
David Maine
Sunday, September 18, 2011 (2:00-3:30PM)
The Preservationist by David Maine
Discussion led by Dr. Elaine Goodfriend, Jewish Studies Dept.
Visitations from God are a mixed blessing for Noah and his family in Maine's spirited, imaginative debut. Noah (aka "Noe") may have pissed himself upon hearing God's instructions to build an arc, but he sets to the task without delay. He crosses the desert to buy lumber from giants; his eldest, Sem, fetches Cham, the son with shipbuilding skills; Sem's wife, Bera, and Cham's wife, Ilya, gather the animals; and Japheth, Noe's youngest, helps, too, in between goofing off and "rutting" with wife Mirn. And, of course, there's "the wife," 600-year-old Noe's once-teenage bride, who takes everything "Himself" (that's Noe, not God) dishes out with time-tested practicality. Wildly different in temperament, age and provenance, these characters, each telling part of the story, help create a brilliant kaleidoscopic analysis of the situation: the neighbors who ridicule Noe and clan; the inner doubts and shifting alliances; the varying feelings toward God, whose presence is always felt and sometimes resented. The flood comes as a relief from the wondering ("who is crazier: the crazy man or the people who put their faith in him?"), but hardship soon follows. Though the ending is already written, Maine enlivens every step toward it with small surprises.
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Focus
Arthur Miller
Sun., May 1, 2011, 2:00PM-3:30PM
Focus by Arthur Miller
Facilitated by Karen Feiner
Written in 1945, Focus was Arthur Miller's first novel and one of the first books to directly confront American anti-Semitism. It remains as chilling and incisive today as it was at the time of its controversial debut. As World War II draws to a close, anti-Semitism is alive and well in Brooklyn, New York. Here, Newman, an American of English descent, floats through a world of multiethnic neighborhoods indifferent to the racism around him. That is, until he begins wearing glasses that render him "Jewish" in the eyes of others, making him the target of anti-Semitic persecution. As he and his wife find friendship and support from a Jewish immigrant, Newman slowly begins to understand the racial hatreds that surround him.
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Water from the well: Sarah, Rebekah, Rachel and Leah
Anne Richardson Roiphe
Sun, Jan. 23, 2011, 2:00PM-3:30PM
Water from the well: Sarah, Rebekah, Rachel and Leah by Anne Richardson Roiphe
Facilitated by Dr. Elaine Goodfriend In this lovely meditation on the innate power of women, critically acclaimed author Roiphe focuses on four biblical figures--Sarah, Rebekah, Rachel, and Leah--who to Roiphe constitute the backbone of humanity. "We can't forget these women because they belong to us, come with us, across seas in exile." Millions of words have been written about their stories, which Roiphe maintains are foundational for Jewish, Christian, and Muslim history, yet she manages fresh interpretations. The biblical world she re-creates is a lived-in, gritty place, where the women ride camels, feed donkeys, grind barley, weave wool--in short, are flesh and blood, with all the foibles and imperfections that implies. Drawing on a variety of prayer books, religious texts from all major religious groups, and folklore and legends, Roiphe brings these characters to full-blown, messy life and confirms that their stories of love, faith, death, deception, and betrayal are indeed timeless. Moreover, Roiphe brings all her literary art to bear on retelling this seminal lore with effortless grace.
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The Prophet's Wife
Milton Steinberg
Sunday, October 16, 2011 (2:00-3:30PM)
The Prophet's Wife by Milton Steinberg
Discussion led by Dr. Monica Osborne, English Dept.
The Lord said unto Hosea: Go, take unto thee a wife of harlotry and children of harlotry; for the land doth commit great harlotry, departing from the Lord.
HOSEA 1:2
From the moment young Hosea saw the maiden Gomer dancing at the Festival of Booths, he loved her. It was the most beautiful vision he had ever seen, and he would never forget it, despite the scornful laughter of his older brother Iddo, despite the lack of piety of Gomer s household, and despite her admission that she did not love him.
And so Hosea marries Gomer, in a troubled land where idol-worshiping neighbors offer up their daughters purity in the sacred groves, where arrogant high priests will stop at nothing to silence troublesome prophets, and where the blood of brothers can be the strongest bond, or the most destructive.
When Milton Steinberg died in 1950, he left one manuscript tantalizingly unfinished. Like As a Driven Leaf, it is grand in scope, while told as a compelling personal tale. Set against a backdrop of unrest in ancient Israel, The Prophet s Wife is a stirring portrait of the biblical prophet Hosea, his passionate and free-spirited wife Gomer, and a people seduced by the lures of power and idolatry to betray their faith. -
The Day of the Locust
Nathanael West
Sunday, December 4, 2011 (2:00-3:30PM)
The Day of the Locust, by Nathanael West
Discussion led by Dr. Nick Rosenthal, History Dept.
During his years in Hollywood West wrote The Day of the Locust, a study of the fragility of illusion. Many critics consider it with F. Scott Fitzgerald's unfinished masterpiece The Last Tycoon (1941) among the best novels written about Hollywood. Set in Hollywood during the Depression, the narrator, Tod Hackett, comes to California in the hope of a career as a painter for movie backdrops but soon joins the disenchanted second-rate actors, technicians, laborers and other characters living on the fringes of the movie industry. Tod tries to seduce Faye Greener; she is seventeen. Her protector is an old man named Homer Simpson. Tod finds work on a film called prophetically “The Burning of Los Angeles,” and the dark comic tale ends in an apocalyptic mob riot outside a Hollywood premiere, as the system runs out of control.
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The Trial of God
Elie Wiesel
Sun., Feb. 20, 2011: 2:00PM - 3:30PM
The Trial of God by Elie Wiesel
Facilitated by Dr. Kevin Wetmore
Set in a medieval European village where three itinerant Jewish actors put God on trial to answer for His silence during a pogrom, a powerful drama considers historical and especially post-Holocaust issues surrounding faith.
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Wandering Stars
Sholem Aleichem
Sun, Mar. 21, 2010, 2:00pm - 3:30pm
Wandering Stars by Sholem Aleichem
Facilitated by Kevin Wetmore
Aleichem, the great Yiddish humorist whose Tevye and His Daughters became Fiddler on the Roof, is honored on the 150th anniversary of his birth with a complete translation of this sprawling novel, a panoramic view of the Yiddish theater in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Masterfully translated by Shevrin and including a foreword by Tony Kushner, the novel follows an antic troupe of Yiddish actors traveling from a small town in Bessarabia (present-day Moldova) across Europe to London and finally New York. As the novel opens, Leibel Rafalovitch, the rich man's son, and Reizel Spivak, the poor cantor's daughter, are entranced by a troupe performing in their small town. Enticed away by the promise of stage careers, they are soon separated, with Reizel becoming the concert star Rosa Spivak and Leibel, Leo Rafalesko, a serious stage actor. The colorful lives of the theater performers and the difficulties they face—including anti-Semitism, a lack of money, and matters of love—are even more captivating than what happens on the stage itself. As Leibel says to Reizel while they gaze at the sky above their village, stars don't fall but wander, as do these stalwart theater people.
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Rashi's Daughters, Book I: Joheved: A Novel of Love and the Talmud in Medieval France
Maggie Anton
Sun, Apr. 18, 2010, 2:00pm - 3:30pm
Rashi's Daughters: Book One- Joheved by Maggie Anton
Author, Maggie Anton spoke about her research that went into writing her wonderful triology, "Rashi's Daughters". Ms. Anton also sold and signed her books.
In 1068, the scholar Salomon ben Isaac returns home to take over the family winemaking business and embark on a path that will indelibly influence the Jewish world—writing the first Talmud commentary, and teaching it to his daughters. Joheved, her mind and spirit awakened, knows the risk and keeps her learning hidden. When she weds, must she choose between marital happiness and her love of Talmud?
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