Jewish Studies Sunday Book & Discussion Group

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  The Five: A Novel of Jewish Life in Turn of the Century Odessa

  Vladimir Jabotinsky

  The Five: A Novel of Jewish Life in Turn of the Century Odessa by Vladimir Jabotinsky

  "The beginning of this tale of bygone days in Odessa dates to the dawn of the twentieth century. At that time we used to refer to the first years of this period as the ‘springtime,’ meaning a social and political awakening. For my generation, these years also coincided with our own personal springtime, in the sense that we were all in our youthful twenties. And both of these springtimes, as well as the image of our carefree Black Sea capital with acacias growing along its steep banks, are interwoven in my memory with the story of one family in which there were five children: Marusya, Marko, Lika, Serezha, and Torik."—from The Five

  The Five is an captivating novel of the decadent fin-de-siècle written by Vladimir Jabotinsky (1880–1940), a controversial leader in the Zionist movement whose literary talents, until now, have largely gone unrecognized by Western readers. The author deftly paints a picture of Russia’s decay and decline—a world permeated with sexuality, mystery, and intrigue. Michael R. Katz has crafted the first English-language translation of this important novel, which was written in Russian in 1935 and published a year later in Paris under the title Pyatero.

  The book is Jabotinsky’s elegaic paean to the Odessa of his youth, a place that no longer exists. It tells the story of an upper-middle-class Jewish family, the Milgroms, at the turn of the century. It follows five siblings as they change, mature, and come to accept their places in a rapidly evolving world. With flashes of humor, Jabotinsky captures the ferment of the time as reflected in political, social, artistic, and spiritual developments. He depicts with nostalgia the excitement of life in old Odessa and comments poignantly on the failure of the dream of Jewish assimilation within the Russian empire.

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  Suite Francaise

  Irene Nemirovsky

  Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky

  "By the early 1940s, when Ukrainian-born Irene Nemirovsky began working on what would become Suite Francaise - the first two parts of a planned five-part novel - she was already a highly successful writer living in Paris. But she was also a Jew, and in 1942 she was arrested and deported to Auschwitz: a month later she was dead at the age of thirty-nine. Two years earlier, living in a small village in central France - where she, her husband, and their two small daughters had fled in a vain attempt to elude the Nazis - she'd begun her novel, a luminous portrayal of a human drama in which she herself would become a victim. When she was arrested, she had completed two parts of the epic; her daughters took the manuscript with them into hiding. Sixty-four years later, at long last, we can read Nemirovsky's literary masterpiece" "The first part, "A Storm in June," opens in the chaos of the massive 1940 exodus from Paris on the eve of the Nazi invasion, during which several families and individuals are thrown together under circumstances beyond their control. In the second part, "Dolce," we enter the increasingly complex life of a German-occupied provincial village. Coexisting uneasily with the soldiers billeted among them, the villagers - from aristocrats to shopkeepers to peasants - cope as best they can."

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  Panther in the Basement

  Amos Oz

  Panther in the Basement by Amos Oz

  From “a great and true voice of our time” (Washington Post Book World), comes this story of Proffy, a twelve-year-old living in Palestine in 1947. When Proffy befriends a member of the occupying British forces who shares his love of language and the Bible, he is accused of treason by his friends and learns the true nature of loyalty and betrayal. Translated by Nicholas de Lange.

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  The Centaur in the Garden

  Maocyr Scliar

  Sun, Jan. 31 2010 2:00pm - 3:30pm

  The Centaur in the Garden by Moacyr Scliar

  Facilitated by Lauren Gerstmann

  "Scliar is a world-class fabulist with a solid and distinguished oeuvre awaiting discovery by a larger audience. I’ve seen The Centaur in the Garden compared to works by Franz Kafka, Nikolai Gogol, Philip Roth, Mordecai Richler, and even John Updike. At its center is Guedali Tartakowsky, a Jewish centaur born into a family of Russian immigrants in Rio Grande do Sul. Scliar pushes the tragic destiny of Tartakowsky through an infusion of comedy. Its style is vintage Scliar: crisp, speedy, cinematic, succinct."

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  The Emigrants

  W. G. Sebald

  Sun, Feb. 28, 2010: 2:00pm - 3:30pm

  The Emigrants by W.G. Sebald

  Facilitated by Elizabeth Drummond

  "The four long narratives in W.G. Sebald's The Emigrants at first appear to be the straightforward biographies of four people in exile: a painter, an elderly Russian, the author's schoolteacher as well as his eccentric great-uncle Ambrose. Following (literally) in their footsteps, the narrator retraces routes which lead from Lithuania to London, from Munich to Manchester, from the South German provinces to Switzerland, France, New York, Constantinople, and Jerusalem. Along with memories of the Holocaust, he collects documents, diaries, pictures. Each story is illustrated with enigmatic photographs, making The Emigrants seem at times almost like a family album - but of families destroyed." "Sebald weaves together variant forms (travelog, biography, autobiography, and historical monograph), combining precise documentary with fictional motifs. As he puts the question to "realism," the four stories merge gradually into one requiem, overwhelming and indelible."

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  The Sunflower

  Simon Wiesenthal

  The Sunflower by Simon Wiesenthal

  A Holocaust survivor's surprising and thought-provoking study of forgiveness, justice, compassion, and human responsibility, featuring contributions from the Dalai Lama, Harry Wu, Cynthia Ozick, Primo Levi, and more.
  
  While imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp, Simon Wiesenthal was taken one day from his work detail to the bedside of a dying member of the SS. Haunted by the crimes in which he had participated, the soldier wanted to confess to--and obtain absolution from--a Jew. Faced with the choice between compassion and justice, silence and truth, Wiesenthal said nothing. But even years after the way had ended, he wondered: Had he done the right thing? What would you have done in his place?
  
  In this important book, fifty-three distinguished men and women respond to Wiesenthal's questions. They are theologians, political leaders, writers, jurists, psychiatrists, human rights activists, Holocaust survivors, and victims of attempted genocides in Bosnia, Cambodia, China and Tibet. Their responses, as varied as their experiences of the world, remind us that Wiesenthal's questions are not limited to events of the past.

  Originally published: 1976

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  Tevye the Dairyman and The Railroad Stories

  Sholem Aleichem

  2:00--3:30pm Sun., Feb. 15

  Tevye the Dairyman and The Railroad Stories by Sholem Aleichem

  Discussion leader, Amy Shevitz, Lecturer, History Department

  With his supple, intelligent translation, Halkin makes accessible the poignant short stories by the legendary Yiddish humorist Sholem Rabinovich (1859-1916), who wrote under the nom de plume "Sholem Aleichem," a Yiddish salutation. As Halkin elucidates in his introduction, Tevye's self-mocking but deeply affecting monologues (which inspired the play and film Fiddler on the Roof) satisfy on several levels: as a psychological analysis of a father's love for his daughters, despite the disappointments they bring him; as a paradigm of the tribulations and resilience of Russian Jewry and the disintegration of shtetl life at the twilight of the Czarist Empire; and as a Job-like theological debate with God. The 20 Railroad Stories the monologues of a traveling salesman and his fellow Jewish travelers depict Jewish thieves and arsonists, feuding spouses, draft evaders, grieving parents and assimilationists. Like the eight Tevye tales, these unprettified stories of simple people and their harsh realities summon a bygone era, but their appeal and application are timeless. Bringing both groups of tales together for the first time in English, this first volume in Schocken's Library of Yiddish Classics series is an auspicious event.

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  People of the Book: A Novel

  Geraldine Brooks

  People of the Book: A Novel by Geraldine Brooks

  People of the Book crosses continents and centuries to bring stories of hope amidst darkness, compassion amidst cruelty, all bound together by the discoveries made by a young Australian woman restoring an ancient Hebrew book. When Hanna Heath gets a call in the middle of the night in her Sydney home about a precious medieval manuscript that has been recovered from the smouldering ruins of war-torn Sarajevo, she knows she is on the brink of the experience of a lifetime. A renowned book conservator, she must now make her way to Bosnia to start work on restoring the Sarajevo Haggadah - a Jewish prayer book - to discover its secrets and piece together the story of its miraculous survival.

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  In an Antique Land: History in the Guise of a Traveler's Tale

  Amitav Ghosh

  In an Antique Land: History in the Guise of a Traveler's Tale by Amitav Ghosh

  In a leisurely blend of travelogue, history and cross-cultural analysis, Indian writer Ghosh reconstructs a 12th-century master-slave relationship that confounds modern concepts of slavery. In an Antique Land is a subversive history in the guise of a traveller's tale. Bursting with anecdote and exuberant detail, it offers a magical, intimate biography of the private life of a country, Egypt, from the Crusades to Operation Desert Storm.

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  The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit: A Jewish Family's Exodus from Old Cairo to the New World

  Lucette Lagnado

  The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit: A Jewish Family's Exodus from Old Cairo to the New World by Lucette Lagnado

  This memoir of an Egyptian Jewish family’s gradual ruin is told without melodrama by its youngest survivor, now a reporter at the Wall Street Journal. Lagnado’s story hinges on her father, "the Captain," who cut a dashing figure in mid-century Cairo, consorting with British officers and Egyptian royalty at French cafés while his family, neglected, stayed home. At first refusing to join the tide of Jews fleeing Egypt under the Nasser regime, the Captain finally yields, in 1963, when the family escapes to Paris and then Brooklyn. Deprived of wealth, status, and any means of coping, Lagnado’s father fades, but he never loses his air of chivalry, manifested in a regular outflow of tiny checks to charitable causes—orphanages, vocational schools, and dowry funds for poor girls—overseas. "As if the Captain were capable of rescuing anyone," his daughter writes.

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  Noah the Water Carrier and Other Stories

  Joe Lumer

  2:00--3:30pm Sun., Mar. 22

  Noah the Water Carrier and Other Stories by Joe Lumer

  Discussion led by Holli Levitsky, Associate Professor of English and Director of the Jewish Studies Program and by Joe Lumer, author of "Noah the Water Carrier and Other Stories"

  Noah the Water Carrier is a collection of short stories whose setting is “T”, a small city in Poland in the 1930’s. The stories reflect the lives of Jews and Gentiles living together in a time and place that have disappeared forever. It was a time of change and even of optimism, before the Holocaust cast its vast net over an unprepared and unwitting people.

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  Caspian Rain: A Novel

  Gina B. Nahai

  Caspian Rain: A Novel by Gina B. Nahai

  In the decade before the Islamic Revolution, Iran is a country on the brink of explosion. Twelve-year-old Yaas is born into an already divided family: her father is the son of wealthy Iranian Jews who are integrated into the country's mostly Muslim, upper-class elite while her mother grew up in the slums of South Tehran, one street away from the old Jewish ghetto. Yaas spends her childhood navigating the many layers of Iranian society. When her parents' marriage begins to crumble and the country moves ever closer toward revolution, Yaas is plagued by a mysterious, terrifying illness. But despite her ailment, Yaas becomes determined to save herself and her family.

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  The Memoirs of Glückel of Hameln

  Glueckel of Hameln

  2:00--3:30pm Sun., Jan. 25

  The Memoirs of Glückel of Hameln by Glueckel of Hameln

  Discussion leader, Elizabeth Drummond, Assistant Professor of History

  Begun in 1690, this diary of a forty-four-year-old German Jewish widow, mother of fourteen children, tells how she guided the financial and personal destinies of her children, how she engaged in trade, ran her own factory, and promoted the welfare of her large family. Her memoir, a rare account of an ordinary woman, enlightens not just her children, for whom she wrote it, but all posterity about her life and community. Gluckel speaks to us with determination and humor from the seventeenth century. She tells of war, plague, pirates, soldiers, the hysteria of the false messiah Sabbtai Zevi, murder, bankruptcy, wedding feasts, births, deaths, in fact, of all the human events that befell her during her lifetime. She writes in a matter of fact way of the frightening and precarious situation under which the Jews of northern Germany lived. Accepting this situation as given, she boldly and fearlessly promotes her business, her family and her faith. This memoir is a document in the history of women and of life in the seventeenth century.

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  Enemies, A Love Story

  Isaac Bashevis Singer

  2:00--3:30pm Sun., April 26

  Enemies, A Love Story by Isaac Bashevis Singer

  Discussion led by Holli Levitsky, Associate Professor of English and Director of the Jewish Studies Program

  Herman Broder is a Holocaust survivor in postwar New York, wed out of gratitude to the peasant woman who hid him from the Nazis. He carries on a mad affair with a concentration camp survivor, only to find out that the snappish wife he thought had died in the war is miraculously alive.

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  Red Cavalry (in The Complete works of Isaac Babel)

  Isaac Babel

  2:00--3:15pm Sun., Oct. 5

  Red Cavalry (in The Complete works of Isaac Babel) by Isaac Babel

  In 1920, Isaac Babel rode with the Red Cavalry into Eastern Poland as part of Russia's first attempt to spread the glory of Communism throughout Europe. These brief, trenchant short stories, drawn from Babel's observations of that disastrous campaign, are marked by a cool detachment and gift for the arresting phrase: "The orange sun is rolling across the sky like a severed head."

  In Babel's wartime world, life continues, uneasily but inexorably: whether it's Lyutov, the young Jewish journalist who cloaks his identity to blend in with the Cossacks, or the pregnant Jewish woman who keeps her father's mangled corpse in her sleeping quarters, hidden under a blanket. ("I want you to tell me where one could find another father like my father in all the world!" she says.) Babel's unsentimental stories remain haunting and strikingly relevant, nearly ninety years after their creation.

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  Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland

  Jan T. Gross

  2:00--3:15pm Sun., Oct. 26

  Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland by Jan T. Gross

  "Until the outbreak of the war," writes Jan Gross, "Jedwabne was a quiet town, and Jewish lives there differed little from those of their fellows elsewhere in Poland." Then, on a summer evening in 1941, just weeks after Germany invaded the Soviet Union, Polish residents took up axes, clubs, and torches and massacred all but seven of the town's 1,600 Jews. The perpetrators, who were brought to trial in 1949, never received official blame for the massacre, which instead went to the Nazis. Piecing together eyewitness testimony and trial records with a deft historical imagination, Gross details the "potent, devilish mixture" that led Poles to turn on their Jewish neighbors. Originally published in Poland in 2000, the book sparked a national controversy and led to a public reconsideration of the Polish role in the Holocaust.

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  Mona in the Promised Land

  Gish Jen

  2:00--3:15pm Sun., Dec. 7

  Mona in the Promised Land by Gish Jen

  In this rollicking coming-of-age tale, Mona Chang's Chinese immigrant parents move their family to Westchester for its superior schools and majestic landscaping, only to find that their daughter develops a worrisome interest in the religion of her new friends. "Pretty soon Mona's tagged along to so many temple car washes and food drives...that she's been named official mascot of the Temple Youth Group."

  Jen's fast-paced novel tracks Mona as she discovers herself and her place in the world: She decides to convert, crosses racial lines by becoming friends with the workers in her parent's pancake house, and falls in love with a boy from the local synagogue who lives in a tepee in his parent's backyard. With a sly eye, Jen mines the battlefields of adolescence and assimilation to produce a novel that is as charming as it is relevant.

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  The Assistant

  Bernard Malamud

  2:00--3:15pm Sun., Nov. 16

  The Assistant by Bernard Malamud

  Set in a failing Brooklyn grocery, Malamud's 1957 novel follows shop owner Morris Bober as his lightless existence is touched and confused by hardworking Frank Alpine, an "Italyener" he doesn't so much hire as inherit. Over the course of Alpine's short tenure, he steals from Bober, falls in love with his charmless daughter, and converts to Judaism. Malamud negotiates his bleak subject without sentimentality. Like many of Malamud's stories, The Assistant poignantly (and perfectly) captures the specific struggles of immigrants in language both plain and poetic.

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  A Journey to the End of the Millennium - A Novel of the Middle Ages

  Abraham B. Yehoshua

  2:00--3:15pm Sun., Sept. 14

  A Journey to the End of the Millennium - A Novel of the Middle Ages by Abraham B. Yehoshua

  In the waning months of the year 999, Ben Attar, a wealthy Jew from Tangiers, sets sails for Paris. Armed with his two wives, his Muslim trading partner, and an Andalusian Rabbi, Ben Attar undertakes the expedition to salvage his relationship with his beloved nephew Abulafia. The estranged young man has settled in Paris with his bride, a cunning woman from a family of renowned Jewish scholars in Ashkenaz. Her moral repulsion for Ben Attar's bigamy—common in his world, unheard of in hers—has alienated Abulafia from Ben Attar.

  In a compelling narrative rich with the sights and smells of the Mediterranean and Medieval Europe, Yehoshua powerfully dramatizes this intellectual and religious showdown between northern and southern Jews, one full of moral decrees, human desire, and heartbreak.