Book Club
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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…
The Book Circle’s January Selection Considers The Power Of Love
Set against the backdrop of WWII, bestselling author Mitch Albom offers a powerful novel of hope, forgiveness and love in The Little Liar, a novel that explores the lives of three young people, forever changed by deception and the grace of redemption. Here, Albom confronts the destruction that lying can wreak on the world stage as well as individual lives.
The Book Circle meets monthly to address books on Jewish themes by Jewish writers. The January meeting will be held on Thursday, Jan. 25, at 3:30 p.m., on Zoom. For more information about the monthly meetings, email ctigreenport@gmail.com with a message for Susan Rosenstreich, coordinator of the group.
The Book Circle’s December Selection Is A Globe-Spanning Mystery
The shul’s Book Circle group has chosen The Lock-Up, a globe-spanning crime novel by Booker prize-winner John Banville, as its December selection. The session will take place on Thursday, Dec. 21, at 3 p.m., on Zoom.
When Rosa Jacobs is found dead in her car, the investigation leads two detectives to the mountaintops of Italy, the front lines of WWII Bavaria, the gritty streets of Dublin, and other unexpected settings in efforts to solve a complicated case that puts the duo’s personal lives in peril.
The Book Circle explores works by Jewish writers and Jewish themes. For more information about the group, email ctigreenport@gmail.com with a message for Susan Rosenstreich, coordinator of the group.
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