Celia Gurevitch Jewish Community Library

I am aware that the online catalog is not always available. While working on fixing this problem I wanted to provide a temporary solution. Thus I created a downloadable file listing all the titles we have. I know that this is missing most of the benefits of the searchable version, but at least the list of books (and CDS, DVDs, audio and VHS tapes…) can be viewed. Without further due here is the file for your perusal. It is also available from our catalog page. It will be regularly updated as we add (and purge) items.

You might have noticed that the links I provide I these blog entries for specific books lead to the book’s page at Amazon.com. Click on these links to learn more about the books. If you do and purchase the book the library and CBA gets a small percentage of the price you pay. Even if you don’t buy that particular book, but go on exploring Amazon.com more in the same session and end up buying something else we will receive a small sum. You will also find a small Amazon.com search box at the bottom left of the front page of the CBA website. When you use that to find items on Amazon.com we get a bit of money too. Best of all, it doesn’t cost you anything. Therefore I urge you to go to Amazon.com through our site when you feel like purchasing a book.

The Feast of Jewish Learning 2008 is happening this Sunday from 1:30 till 5 PM at the Finley Community Center. The official description and details are on the Jewish Community Center and on the Bureau of Jewish Education sites. Congregation Beth Ami is one of the co-sponsors of the event. Our Rabbi George Schlesinger’s talk is titled “From Idolatry to Monotheism: Golden Calf to Shema.” As far s I know there is not a single book exactly on this topic. The Rabbi will use multiple sources to support his understanding. The closest volume I found was Stanley Rosenbaum’s “Understanding Biblical Israel: A Reexamination of the Origins of Monotheism.”

Deana Abramowitz donated several books recently to the library. Today I would like to recommend one of them, a novel by Myriam Chapman titled, “Why She Married Him.” It was inspired by the unpublished memoir by the author’s grandmother.

Set in Paris in the early 1900s, Why She Married Him tells the story of Nina Schavranski, a beautiful young Russian Jewish émigré at a crossroads in her life. At 22, in the immigrant community of Belle Epoque Paris, Nina’s choices are few. She works in her father’s tailor shop, attends political lectures and night school, striving to be an intellectual, “modern” woman. But Nina’s sensual nature and her longing for freedom remain unfulfilled. The answer to the question of why she marries Abraham Podselver, a struggling fashion illustrator with socialist dreams, lies in the sum of Nina’s experiences—which unwind like a bolt of silk as the novel moves backward in time. We see Nina enjoy her first real love—who abandons her for better opportunities in America. We see the Schavranskis when they first arrive in Paris, struggling to make it out of the Marais ghetto. We see the family in Yekaterinoslav in Ukraine, where they enjoyed a comfortable, cultured life until a series of bloody pogroms forced them into exile.

The publisher, Other Press provided a reader’s guide asking questions that helps to compare and contrast the protagonist’s experiences with our own in the 21st century. This makes the similarities of her underlying moral dilemmas with ours more explicit. On the same page we find an exciting interview with the author in which she shares the history of the book, how her grandmother’s notebooks were found, how they relate to family history and how they were turned into the novel. The interview itself is a fascinating read for those who are interested in personal oral history.

The re-forming CBA Library Committee is having its first meeting this Sunday at noon in the library. Please join us, share your ideas, cast your vote, shape the library’s future and become a member of the committee. Email me, Gabor, if you are interested at library@bethamisr.org

The library received an email from the author of a new novel about women in the Bible, to be published by Plume/Penguin on February 26th. Let us know that you are interested and we will order a copy.

Eva Etzioni-Halevy: The Triumph of Deborah

The novel brings to life the riveting tale of one of the most beloved biblical figures: the revered leader, judge and prophetess Deborah.

In ancient Israel, war is looming. Deborah has coerced warrior Barak into launching a strike against the neighboring Canaanites, who threaten Israel with destruction. Against all odds he succeeds, returning triumphantly with two daughters of the Canaanite King as his captives. But military victory is only the beginning of the turmoil, as a complex love triangle develops between Barak and the two princesses.

Deborah, recently cast off by her husband, becomes part of the turmoil. Yet she struggles to rebuild her existence on her own terms, while also groping her way toward the greatest triumph of her life: the attainment of peace.

Based on the book of JUDGES, and filled with brilliantly vivid historical detail, the novel shows that in her own life Deborah was very much a woman, and that her femininity did not detract from her stature as national leader. Thereby it pays tribute to Deborah’s feminine strength and independence from which present day women, seeking to build lives of their own and assert themselves in whatever they choose to do so, may derive inspiration.

THE TRIUMPH OF DEBORAH is biblical but also topical: it describes a prominent woman leader who led her people to war but also to peace. Hence it should be of special relevance in an American presidential election year in which a female candidate is a front runner, and also on the occasion of the sixtieth anniversary of Israel, where female leadership is gaining strength, a year in which the topic of female leadership in time of war and peace will be most prominent on both countries’ agendas.

With Best Regards,

Eva Etzioni-Halevy

The Library has its own Facebook group.  If you are already on Facebook, come and join it.

A little background information may be due. Facebook is one of the most popular online social networking site, with over 62 million registered users. It was originally open to college students only, but now anybody can join. It is free.

Within Facebook you can connect to your friends and people you previously didn’t know in a variety of ways. One of them is to join groups. Groups are formed around topics of shared interest. Lots of organizations created their own groups to share news about themselves and interact with their stakeholders. For example over 500 libraries have their own groups.  The number of synagogue groups is in a similar range. A local example is the SCUSY group.

At the library’s Facebook group you can ask questions, make recommendations for us, follow our activities and show your connection by joining the group. Please join us there, too.

The library will be closed today, Sunday. Currently we are open only on those Sundays, when the religious school is in session. As today they are not, we are closed too. In the future we plan to be open every Sunday.

Monday is Presidents Day and the Beth Ami campus will be closed.  Therefore the library will stay closed as well. From Tuesday on we are open again, in our regular business hours 3.45-6PM.

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This Sunday the Catskill Klezmorim  will play at the Friedman Center at 2 PM. The library doesn’t have their CD (yet), but we do have several items related to klezmer  music for those who would like to know more about the genre. Henry Sapoznik’s Klezmer! Jewish Music from old World to Our World won the Tayloy Award. This 300+ pages book from 1999 is heavily indexed making it easy to use as a reference book. Almost every third page contains an illustration, usually a photograph, making it visually appealing. But the strength of the book is the thoroughness of the text itself.  It provides an overarching cultural history of the past and present of the genre.

The other book on the topic we have is Seth Rogovoy’s The Essential Klezmer bearing the subtitle, “A Music Lover’s Guide to Jewish Roots and Soul Music, from the Old World to the Jazz Age to the Downtown Avant Garde.” It came out a year later after Sapoznik book. Its 90 page long discography, glossary and series of appendixes make it a unique volume. Anyone who wanted to get a headstart of getting familiar with klezmer could start with it.

If you want to play this beautiful music we also have a score for you. “Klezmerantics, a Musical Heritage was arranged by Seymour W. Milstein for three violins, bass and guitar. Its five thematic section covers 13 separate songs