• Mary Lowenthal Felstiner: Out of Joint: A Private and Public Story of Arthritis
• Toobin Jeffrey: The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court
• Rodger Kamenetz: Burnt Books: Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav and Franz Kafka (to be published in October 2010)
• Mitchell Kaplan: By Fire, By Water
• Greg Mortenson: Stones into Schools: Promoting Peace with Books, Not Bombs, in Afghanistan and Pakistan
• Rachel Shukert: Everything Is Going to Be Great: An Underfunded and Overexposed European Grand Tour
• Burton L. Visotzky: A Delightful Compendium of Consolation: A Fabulous Tale of Romance, Adventure and Faith in the Medieval Mediterranean

The following books got top votes and nine of them will make it to the bookclub’s program. The following table includes information about two additional criteria for our selection: whether the book is available in paperback and whether the public library has a copy of it or not.

A movie about this episode of the Holocaust premiered in France last month, titled La Rafle (The Roundup) Although that movie is based on a different book, but I thought you might enjoy its trailer:

Rosnay’s book initially runs on two threads, but they meet in the book’s middle. In our discussion group some found the two thread approach confusing, others enjoyed the intermixing of the two eras, stories. One thread was about an America journalist who lives in Paris with her French husband and pre-teen daughter. She digs herself into the story of the roundup of 28,000 Jews on July 16, 1942. Many of those who were rounded up were stationed in inhuman condition in the aforementioned velodrome for eight days and many of them were women and children. Vast majority of them were killed in Auschwitz after they stopped over in an internment camp Drancy. The other leg of the story follows one such family, more specifically Sarah, the daughter. The journalist gets obsessed with her fate and eventually tracks down that she survived the Shoah. Telling more of the story would be cheating you out of the joy or learning for yourself what happened to the protagonist and what was the secret of the key. I cannot guarantee you though that it will be a joyous discovery though.

After the two threads met in the middle the book flattened. The excitement of the anticipation of what’s going to happen was mostly gone for me, although I faithfully read the book till the end. The personal dramas covered in the second half didn’t compare to the historic ones in the first. The ending was particularly disappointing for some in our group. Nevertheless the book was educational for all us, uncovering a forgotten part of the Shoah.

The book @ Amazon.com.

The story is sweet and educational too. It explains from the perspective of Izzy, a young child what Tashlich is about and what he seeks forgiveness for . It teaches how hard it can be to gain it, but also how rewarding to give it. Instead of writing more about the story I would like to show its book-trailer. (A book-trailer is a like a movie trailer but for books.)

P.s. If you read this blog entry via email, you may not be able to see the video above. In that case just lick the title if the email “Wayland: New Year at the pier (2009)” and you browser will take you to the page where you can watch the short clip.

I ask this, because otherwise it has the potential to be a hit. It is an inspirational story from going a couch potato with low self-esteem and worrying about unimportant things, to being an active person who stands up for herself and focuses on more important things, while having fun too. In the center of the story is an Isreali girl, who lives with his sister and overworking father in the US, while the mom is back in Israel taking care of her sister. The girls’ life is filled with eating junk food, watching TV and trying to look cool in other people’s eyes. All this changes when a girl moves with her colorful family to the neighboring house. She is a very different kind of Israeli, who instead of trying to fit in, does what she wants, while staying respectful and strong. She becomes the role model that makes our heroines reevaluate what’s important: wings of hair or being honest to themselves and others.

That’s the story’s essence, but of course many more activities are happening on the book’s 170 pages. One of the funniest and most funny aspect of the book is the short lists the protagonist reverts to every time she has to make a decision or take stock of her own feelings. These lists are set in a different typography than the rest of the book and pop out from the rest of the text as testaments of the heroine’s thoughts.

Despite the reservation I mentioned above I like this book and can recommend it. I think it can be of great help for young girls and can teach a few things about themselves and Israel too.

The other five cookbooks are all spiral bound volumes; three of them were produced by a sisterhood of a synagogue (Keneseth Israel in Louisville, KY; Adath Israel Synagogue in Cincinnati, OH; Temple Israel in Dayton, OH) and two by women of other type of communities: East Brunswick (NJ) Hadassah and Hillel Academy of Dayton, OH. Their publishing date ranges from 1946 to 1979 and their scope from 96 pages to 347 pages. They are all organized the traditional way following the order of the types of dishes one can make and serve. The condition of these cookbooks are all good, although it shows that every single one of them was used. In my view that just adds to the value of these books, because it proves that they were and are worthy to cook from. I hope you will come and pick up one or two to learn recipes from women of other communities.

I was taught that there are four
kinds of people in the world –
wise, wicked, simple,
and those who do not yet know
how to ask questions

I was taught that questions
are just as important as answers

I was a child when I learned these things,
Now I am old, but I still know
that life’s questions
outnumber life’s answers.

As you can guess from the subtitle of the book it follows the fears and quest of a new life of a Holocaust refugee. Daniel was barely bar-mitzvah-ed in 1939 when his parents purchased a ticket (using up all their money) for ship to New York. But the ship was not allowed to port in Canada or in New York, so it ended up in Cuba. There Daniel befriended a local girl of the same age, Paloma and an older Jewish man, who himself escaped from pogrom in Ukraine years ago. The book centers about their problems, perspectives and mutual support for each other.

It is made up of mostly one page long poems, most of them are internal monologues. The lines of the poems are short and the rhymes are varying. This combination makes the whole book with its staccato rhythm enjoyable. As you are reading the book tell your eyes to not to skip the very first line of the pages, which are differently typeset. That’s where we learn whose voice we read on the particular page, thus it is an important, integral part of the book.

The personal histories of these three characters reflect a part of history that most people didn’t know about: how successful the Third Reich’s spies, whom they sent to Cuba to incite anti-semitic feelings, were. How only the shock of Pearl Harbor turned the country against the Nazis. Another tragic tidbit of history of the island was how in their neophyte zeal they turned against Germany to such an extent that they had put every Germans, who were not Jews, onto a camp on a remote island. The book shows one fictional couple’s story, who have been married for 60 years, but as one of them was not Jewish they would have been separated by this short-lived law.

The book’s target audience is teenagers and it won the 2010 Sydney Taylor Book Award for the teen category. However everybody would enjoy it who is interested in history, life, big questions and enjoys poetry. I purchased it for our library with the hope that many of us will pick it up. I read it in an hour, but thought about it all day afterward. It is a well-crafted work in a nice presentation.

The book @ Amazon.com

Tel’s stories however were rich enough not necessarily wanting more. They all told an interesting story AND they had something to think about too. I will list below all the stories with a short summary. I will not share the ending or the secret in them, so I would not fully spoil your appetite for this book. But I will put down in a few words what I think the worthy idea was in them. If you think it might ruin enjoying the book for you stop reading now.

• A story about a bomb – about a story written from the perspective of a suicide bomber – question of responsibility in literature
• Ibrahim Kuttan is innocent – about a Jewish boy who pretends to be an Arab to avoid the draft – a question of identity
• Beautiful, strong, and modest – a young orthodox woman walks to the first date with her future, arranged husband – the definition of shame
• I may be a ghost but I’m not a slut – a woman wants a paramedic sitting in a cafe to deliver her suicide note – recognition of desperation
• Alte zakhen – a woman attends a Saturday afternoon ball in a hotel in Jerusalem in June 1948 – looks can be deceiving
• Her hero – a woman travels around the world to find the man she served with in the army and who is supposed to be dead – the idea of a hero lives in us and not outside
• Hatikvah – two Jewish youth from different part of the world meet in Israel but then their paths diverge – how the national anthem is a connection in world Jewry
• Mr. Fig and Mr. Pinapple – a man regularly buys fruits from a grocer and has a female shopping buddy – innocence is in the eye of the beholder
• Love and coffee – tracking down the woman who works in the factory that supplies coffee for the army, because she puts short poems in the coffee boxes – the world’s response to you depends on how you approach the world
• The chair at the edge of the desert – a man takes care of two old women, the only people left at an abandoned kibbutz – people’s motivations are mysterious and ever changing
• Shabah – a man working at a warehouse that gives chairs to new immigrants tells the story of how a torturer buys a chair – sometimes a chair is more than a chair
• The camel-hair-coat – two guys who are in the army reserve are called back for duty soon after one of them became and internet millionaire – easy come, easy go
• Spleen; or, the goy’s tale – an orthodox man buys some treif (non-kosher) meet when he learns that according to halacha (Jewish religious law) he is not Jewish – friendships can be found at unorthodox places
• Did Moshe Dayan have a galls eye? – a treatise made up mostly of testimonies about the existence, nature, color and other attributes of the glass eye that might have been behind Dayan’s eye-patch – the authority of some sources is questionable
• Shaking hands with Theodor Herzl – Herzel stays with a family in Israel and every member of the family has an agenda with him – famous people can have private life too
• A tooth for a tooth – dentist tells the story while treating a patient on how and why he extracted the healthy teeth of a Moroccan Jew – strict interpretation of biblical commandments does not always coincide with everybody’s common sense
• Arafat’s elephant – a wealthy Palestinian tells the story of how his ancestors took care of the Sultan’s elephant – the futility of self-sacrifice

I enjoyed the variety of these stories. These little nuggets didn’t paint a comprehensive picture of life in Israel, but they sure covered enough territory and lifestyles to get a sense of it.

The book at Amazon.com

On one hand this scene depicts quite well what’s happening in the book, despite that the people on the cover do not directly correspond to the people between the covers. But for the most part it seems that they pass each other without really caring or even noting. The book is a rollercoaster ride, where so many things are happening to so may people, that you may get dizzy. On the other hand if you think that the main character is looking for depths you would be mistaken. The shopping bag is more of a symbol that the author went to the writers’ supermarket and bought a lot of techniques, characters and trick and through them together in the attempt of trying to make a single book. While I enjoyed the ride, but won’t remember much o iit later as there is not much to remember beyond the events.

However that maybe the point of the book. On page 158 he writes, “Why do I linger over these trivial details? Because the truth of the story lies in the details, and I have no choice but to tell the story exactly as it happened.” It seems that Auster’s intention is to comply with post-modernist ideals and grab the surface of events before they disappear. Then on page 303 we found these lines,

“Most lives vanish. A person dies and little by little all traces of that life disappear… My idea was this: to form a company that would publish books about the forgotten ones, to rescue the stories and facts and documents before they disappeared—and shape them into a continuous narrative, the narrative of life.”

I love the idea and would love to be involved in such a process. (For example at the book club where we discussed the book we remembered and read the obituary of a former book club member, whose life covered a multitude of countries, languages and eras. The little I know about her makes me think that her life story would have been fascinating to read.) The problem is that Auster’s novel is not a real life story but a segment of his imagination. I haven’t read any of this other books, but I’ve been told this fast-paced novel full of comic elements is not his usual style. Maybe he should return to his more solemn prose.

P.s. A quick summary of the story: Nathan Glass, a life-insurance salesman, retires to Brooklyn after he divorced and got terminal cancer. There he encounters Tom Wood, his lost cousin, who works in a used books tore, owned by a(n ex-?)criminal who got out of prison for forgery. Nathan gets entangled with with characters of his neighborhood and his family members in other parts of the country, this his idea of dying peacefully gets dissolved in the lives of others. As a result he gets a new life through the lives of others and eventually of his own.