Book Club
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Yiddish Book Center Salutes Yiddish Women Writers
Yiddish women wrote poetry, short stories, novels, essays, memoirs, literary and cultural criticism, and autobiography, among other genres, exploring a wide range of topics — domesticity, desire, politics, the environment, and the ravages of war, and more. This March, in honor of Women’s History Month and of the vital contributions made by women writers to the field of Yiddish literature, the Yiddish Book Center has curated a diverse selection of items by and about Yiddish women writers.
These writers were brilliant and daring, complicated and compassionate, exuberant and quiet, and endlessly fascinating, the center says. Their work has much to tell us about the conditions and possibilities for women in the times in which they lived, and also modern Jewish culture, writing and publishing, immigration, and other topics. [Pictured, a Yiddish literary sisterhood, top row, from left: Malka Lee, Esther Shumiatsher, and Berta Kling. Bottom row, from left, Celia Dropkin, Sara Reyzen, and Ida Glazer.
To explore and listen to their stories, visit yiddishbookcenter.org/.
Book Circle To Delve Into Anthony Doerr’s Much-Anticipated Fantasy
The Book Circle will meet again on Wednesday, March 16, at 3 p.m. on Zoom, to uncover the inventiveness of Anthony Doerr’s much-anticipated novel, Cloud Cuckoo Land, a followup to his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, All the Light We Cannot See.
Cloud Cuckoo Land is a book about a book as told through sets of characters in past, present and future time periods. Doerr’s cast includes an orphan girl and farmer’s boy in Constantinople in the 1400s, an environmental activist setting off a bomb in a library in 2020, and a girl on a mission to a distant planet in the not-so-distant future. An ancient Greek tale and an old shepherd on a search for utopia intertwines them.
The book circle meets monthly to explore works about Jews and by Jewish writers. For information, email the shul at ctigreenport@gmail.com with a message for Susan Rosenstreich, coordinator of the group.
Book Circle To Explore Comic Novel In The Wake Of The Pandemic
The Book Circle will meet again on Wednesday, Feb. 23, at 3 p.m., on Zoom, to discuss Our Country Friends by Gary Shteyngart.
In the rolling hills of upstate New York, a group of friends gathers in a country house to wait out the pandemic. Over the next six months, new friendships and romances take hold, while old betrayals emerge, forcing each character to reevaluate whom they love and what matters most. The unlikely cast of characters includes a Russian-born novelist, his Russian-born psychiatrist wife, their precocious child obsessed with K-pop, a struggling Indian American writer, a wildly successful Korean American app developer, a global dandy with three passports, a Southern essayist, and a movie star. Described as elegiac and funny, Our Country Friends is an offering by the author of the popular Super Sad True Love Story.
The book circle meets monthly to explore works about Jews and by Jewish writers. For information, email the shul at ctigreenport@gmail.com with a message for Susan Rosenstreich, coordinator of the group.
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