Book Club

Previous Posts

Book Circle Discovers Nice Jewish Mother Was Actually A Crime Boss

It going to be a fun read for the bookies when they get into Margalit Fox’s The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum: The Rise and Fall of an Organized Crime Boss. It turns out that this nice Jewish mother planned robberies of cash, gold and diamonds throughout the country, rising from tenement poverty to vast wealth, a fixture of high society and an admired philanthropist. How did she do it?

When the Book Circle meets on Thursday, September 5, at 3 p.m., in Andrew Levin Park, all will be revealed. What The Shofar knows so far is that Fredericka Mandelbaum wasn’t just a successful crook; she was a business visionary — one of the first entrepreneurs in America to systemize the scattershot enterprise of property crime. Handpicking a cadre of bank robbers, housebreakers ad shoplifters, she turned theft into as viable business.

The Book Circle meets monthly to read and discuss books about Jews and Jewish interest. For more information, email ctigreenport@gmail.com with a message for Suzi Rosenstreich, coordinator of the group.

Book Circle To Delve Into Family Life in Internment In Muslim Pakistan

At the next Book Circle meeting, to be held on Thursday, July 25, at 3 p.m., in Andrew Levin Park, the group will study the effects on family members held for six years in an internment camp. Hazel Selzer Kahane has written a harrowing account of the experiences in A House in Lahore: Growing Up Jewish in Pakistan.

Drawing on extensive boarding school correspondence, the book examines the power of letter writing to bind a scattered family. When the author returns to her beloved childhood house, she finds that it still stands, but she is unprepared for what she finds.

The Book Circle meets monthly to discuss books on Jewish topics and/or by Jewish writers. For more information, email Susan Rosenstreich, coordinator, at ctigreenport@gmail.com./

Random Reads

The Money Kings, by Daniel Schulman

The saga of the German-Jewish immigrants — with now familiar names like Goldman and Sachs, Kuhn and Loeb, Warburg and Schiff, Lehman and Seligman — who influenced the rise of modern finance. These industrious immigrants would soon go from peddling trinkets and buying up shopkeepers’ IOUs to forming what would become some of the largest investment banks in the world. Schulman chronicles their paths to Wall Street dominance, as they navigated the deeply antisemitic upper class of the Gilded Age, and the complexities that tested their empires and identities as Americans, Germans and Jews.

When Women Ran Fifth Avenue, by Julie Satow

Here, journalist Julie Satow draws back the curtain on the 20th-century American department store and the three visionary women who took great risks, forging new paths for the women who followed in their footsteps: Hortense Odlum of Bonwit Teller, Dorothy Shaver of Lord & Taylor, and Geraldine Stutz of Henri Bendel. This stylish account, rich with personal drama and trade secrets, captures the department store in all its glitz, decadence and fun, and showcases the women who made that beautifully curated world go round.