Summer 2021 Season—Join the
Book Club on Zoom!!!

Led by Gail Robinson. Join us Wednesdays at 2pm.

Books of Jewish Interest (BJI) 2021 – Book Selection

We are starting our 2021 season. Join in a lively discussion of Jewish-themed books.  This year seems particularly important to focus our readings on moral choices.  The protagonist/s in these stories have a moral decision to make:  should they follow their conscience and what they know is right or do they follow family traditions or in some cases, the desire for revenge?  Do they tempt being ostracized and begin to mend old wounds for the sake of future generations? These books will totally captivate and provoke unease among us. Thank you for all your suggestions.  Each book I read made it difficult for me to only pick four. 

I invite all to join Books of Jewish Interest (BJI). Participants are expected to read the book listed for the date. Some of our newest BHC members have volunteered to lead our discussions; others are seasoned moderators for each of the four books. Like last year, the leader will present an informative summary of the book’s story or thesis and provide questions to stimulate the discussion.  Virtual snacks will be served at your own home.

Last year all four authors participated. We will approach the authors to discuss their books this summer; but whether or not the author can participate, our moderators are well equipped to lead a lively discussion.

Our co-sponsor, Bethlehem Public Library will not be hosting BJI this year.  Instead, we will use Zoom conference capability to host our meetings. Like last year, we will meet on Wednesday afternoons at 4 p.m.  Our meeting dates will be held on July 7, July 21, August 11, and August 25.

Books selected for this season are:

·      July 7th  Henna House, Nomi Eve. This extraordinary family saga begins in Yemen in 1923. Five-year-old Adela is the ninth child and only daughter and lives in fear of ‘confiscation’ under the Muslim ‘Orphan’s Decree’ should her sick father die prematurely. Hence her mother’s desperate and sometimes cruel machinations to find her a husband. Although not a meekly conformist child, Adela’s days are filled with mundane tasks, like her mother, cousins and sisters-in-law, but when she meets her cousin Hani she is drawn into the seductive and ritualistic art of henna. All the primary characters here are female and, although deferential to the men, these are forceful women living in difficult times. Their sacred rituals bind them in their tasks of marriage, child-rearing and housekeeping, and a woman’s domain is inviolable. Bridal henna and the ‘shackles of beauty’ are definitely a woman’s domain. Review by Fiona Alison, Historical Novel Society.  Annie Hoyer will moderate.

·      July 21st  The Color of Water, James McBride.  Here are two voices in this complex and moving narrative, and -- on the surface -- they could not seem more different. One is the voice of a black musician, composer and writer who traces his own evolution and that of his 11 brothers and sisters from childhood in a Brooklyn housing project to accomplished maturity.

The second voice is that of Rachel Shilsky, daughter of a failed itinerant Orthodox Jewish rabbi in a virulently anti-Semitic and violently racist small Southern town. She recalls her own bitter childhood, her flight to the Jewish Bronx and then to the Harlem of the early 1940's, and her marriage to a black minister.

With him, she bore her first eight children, fervently adopted Christianity and founded a black Baptist church. Widowed, she remarried -- this time to a solid, kindhearted black furnace fireman for the housing authority -- and bore four more children. Widowed again, alone and poor, she struggled fiercely to raise her family and assure her children's success.

Inevitably, these voices are connected and ultimately convergent, for Rachel Shilsky and James McBride are mother and son. Just as inevitably, their accounts are suffused with issues of race, religion and identity. Yet those issues, so much a part of their lives and stories, are not central. The triumph of the book -- and of their lives -- is that race and religion are transcended in these interwoven histories by family love, the sheer force of a mother's will and her unshakable insistence that only two things really mattered: school and church. Review by H. Jack Geiger, NYTimes.  Elizabeth Sokolow will lead the discussion.

·      August 11: Apeirogon, Colum McCann.  On Sept. 4, 1997, 13-year-old Smadar Elhanan — dressed in a Blondie T-shirt, her hair cut short, her Walkman playing Sinead O’Connor’s “Nothing Compares 2U” — was walking down Ben Yehuda Street in Jerusalem when three young Palestinian men detonated suicide belts, killing themselves, Smadar and four others. A decade later, and less than three miles away, 10-year-old Abir Aramin, wearing her school uniform and holding a candy bracelet she’d just bought, was shot in the back of the head by an 18-year-old Israeli soldier as his jeep sped around a corner. She died two days later at Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem, the same hospital where Smadar was born.

These real-life events form the seed of “Apeirogon,” Colum McCann’s powerful and prismatic new novel. An apeirogon is a polygon with an infinite yet countable number of sides. This novel, divided into 1,001 fragmentary chapters — a number alluding to “The Thousand and One Arabian Nights” — reflects the infinite complications that underlie the girls’ deaths, and the unending grief that follows. Its primary subject is the fraternal relationship between the girls’ fathers, Bassam Aramin, a Palestinian Muslim, and Rami Elhanan, an Israeli Jew. Aramin co-founded the activist group Combatants for Peace; Elhanan joined up after his son Elik brought him to a meeting, some seven years before Abir’s death. By the time Abir was shot, Elhanan and Aramin were close friends. The new loss made them brothers. Since 2007 they’ve traveled all over the world together, speaking about what they experienced and why they believe that a peaceful end to the occupation is not only possible, but necessary.  Review authored by Julie Orringer, NYTimes.  Rabbi Donna Kirschbaum will lead the discussion.

·      August 25:  Becoming Eve, Abby Chava Stein.  Abby Stein was raised in a Hasidic Jewish community in Brooklyn, isolated in a culture that lives according to the laws and practices of eighteenth-century Eastern Europe, speaking only Yiddish and Hebrew and shunning modern life. Stein was born as the first son in a dynastic rabbinical family, poised to become a leader of the next generation of Hasidic Jews. 

But Abby felt certain at a young age that she was a girl. She suppressed her desire for a new body while looking for answers wherever she could find them, from forbidden religious texts to smuggled secular examinations of faith. Finally, she orchestrated a personal exodus from ultra-Orthodox manhood to mainstream femininity-a radical choice that forced her to leave her home, her family, her way of life. 

Powerful in the truths it reveals about biology, culture, faith, and identity, Becoming Eve poses the enduring question: How far will you go to become the person you were meant to be? Review by Goodreads.  Melissa Potter will moderate.

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All books are available at Amazon and Abe’s Books https://www.abebooks.com and are available at the Bethlehem Public Library.  Gail Robinson will also loan out her copies.

Meetings are open to anyone and everyone interested in participating in a reading group.  The actual dates for each book will depend on volunteer and Author availability.  Please call (202) 744-4646 or email Gail Robinson at gailkr48@gmail.com if you want to volunteer.