Book Club
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In March Selection, Book Circle Follows The Displacement Of A Family
At its next meeting, to be held on Thursday, April 4 at 3 p.m., on Zoom, the Book Circle will consider a novel by Elizabeth Graver titled Kantika, a word translated from Ladino as “song.”
In this work, readers will meet Rebecca Cohen and her family as they traverse four countries that test their endurance to maintain the family dynamic.
The book group meets monthly to explore the writing of Jewish authors and/or Jewish themes. For more information, email ctigreenport@gmail.com with a message for Susan Rosenstreich, coordinator of the group.
The Book Circle Group Considers What Happened On Chicken Hill
Coming up at the Thursday, Feb. 22 meeting of the Book Circle, at 3 p.m. on Zoom, is a discussion about what happened on Chicken Hill, as related by James McBride in his bestselling National Book Award-winning novel The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store.
In 1972, when workers in Pottstown, PA, were digging the foundations for a new development, they found a skeleton at the bottom of a well. Who the skeleton was and how it got there are two of the long-held secrets kept by the residents of Chicken Hill, the dilapidated neighborhood where immigrant Jews and African Americans live side by side and share ambitions and sorrows.
When the truth is finally revealed, we see that love and community — heaven and earth — sustain us.
The Forward’s Best Jewish Books of 2023: How Many Have You Read?
- We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I: A Palestinian Memoir, Raja Shehadeh Father and son lawyers share goals, but are unable to appreciate each other’s politics.
- A Day In The Life of Abed Salama, Nathan Thrall. An account of daily life in the occupied West Bank.
- Enter Ghost, Isabella Hammad. A West Bank production of Hamlet explores the challenge of theater-making under occupation.
- Land of Hope and Fear, Isabel Kershner. A mosaic portrait of Israeli society at the height of Israel’s protests against the judicial overhaul.
- The Heaven And Earth Grocery Store, James McBride. A saga about intertwined Black and Jewish communities banding together in rural Pennsylvania.
- Hope, Andrew Ridker. A send-up of a seemingly perfect Boston Jewish family as it unravels over the course of a year.
- The Postcard, Anne Berest. Part fiction, part memoir, a mystery of four ancestors murdered at Auschwitz.
- The Best of Everything, Rona Jaffe. A reissue of the 1958 cult classic: Five young secretaries trying to make it in New York City.
- Lies and Sorcery, Elsa Morante. Available in English this year, these stories explore women’s inner lives.
- The World And All That It Holds, Aleksandar Hemon. The life of a Sephardic Jew upended by the start of WWI.
- I Must Be Dreaming, Roz Chast. The New Yorker cartoonist produces an illustrated catalogue of her dreams.
- The Cost Of Free Land, Rebecca Clarren. Journalist explores how her Jewish ancestors displaced the Lakota for settlers like her family.
- Fatherland, Burkhard Bilger. The New Yorker writer investigates his grandfather’s time as a Nazi Party chief in France.
- Portico: Cooking And Feasting In Rome’s Jewish Kitchen, Leah Koenig. Celebrating Shabbat in Rome, a Jewish food scene distinct from Ashkenazi and Sephardic cousins.
- The Everlasting Meal Cookbook, Tamar Adler. An alphabetized lexicon of leftovers and how to use them, including spare fish heads…
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