Reading Selections
- In
the Image
by Dara Horn
Bill Landsmann, an elderly Jewish refugee
in a New Jersey suburb with a passion for travel, is obsessed with building
his slide collection of images from the Bible that he finds scattered throughout
the world. The novel begins when he crosses paths with his granddaughter's
friend, Leora, and continues by moving forward through her life and backward
through his, revealing unexpected links between his family's past and her
family's future.
Dara Horn Recommends:
- Tevye
the Dairyman by Sholem Alaichem
A superb introduction to the caustic
wit and keen observations of one of the world's greatest storytellers.
Included are "Tevye the Dairyman, " his masterpiece and the basis for
Fiddler on the Roof, and all 21 Railroad Stories, in which human nature
and the various shocks of modernity are perceived by men and women riding
the trains from shtetl to shtetl.
- An
Hour in Paradise by Joan Leegant
A
former drug dealer turned yeshiva student faces his past while visiting a
dying AIDS patient. A disaffected young American in the ancient city of Safed
ventures in Kabbalist mysticism and gets more than he bargained for. Three
sisters - one a Hindu, one an Orthodox Jew, and one a struggling actress just
trying to get by - find unexpected happiness with the help of an unseen, yet
beloved, hand. Interspersed with these are tales of love lost and found -
between fathers and sons, old childhood sweethearts past their prime, and
strangers thrown together by circumstance and chance.
Joan Leegant Recommends:
- The
Complete Stories
by Bernard Malamud
In all his work, Malamud was concerned
to identify and dramatize a quality he spoke of as "the human." This quality
is found in the way his characters cling to hope against all reason, in
their capacity for sudden deep feeling and their awareness of the world's
comic indifference to their aspirations.
April
2005
-
The
English Disease by Joseph Skibell
Described as "a wildly funny novel that
is equal parts Philip Roth, Groucho Marx and Woody Allen," this novel
by award winning author Skibell, engages us in the search for identity
of a neurotic and talented Mahler expert as he contemplates divorce, parenthood
and human compassion.
Joseph Skibell Recommends:
-
Ragtime
by E.L. Doctorow
An extraordinary tapestry, Ragtime
captures the spirit of America in the era between the turn of the
century and the First World War. One lazy Sunday afternoon, the famous
escape artist Harry Houdini swerves his car into a telephone pole
outside their house, and almost magically, the line between fantasy
and reality disappears.
-
A
Palestine Affair by Jonathan Wilson
This
swift and sensual novel of passion and politics transports us to
British Palestine, where the Arabs, the British, and the Jews mingle
in a scene of colonial excess and unease. It is 1924, and Mark Bloomberg,
a disillusioned London painter, arrives in Jerusalem to take up
a propaganda commission. When he and his American wife, Joyce, accidentally
witness the murder of a prominent Orthodox Jew near their cottage,
they become embroiled in an investigation that will test their marriage
and their characters.
Jonathan Wilson
Recommends:
-
The
Little Disturbances of Man by Grace Paley
With a sure and humorous
touch, Grace Paley explores the "little disturbances" that lie
behind our everyday lives. Whether writing about sexy little
girls, loving and bickering couples, angry suburbanites, frustrated
job seekers, or Jewish children performing a Christmas play,
she captures the loneliness, poignancy, and humor of human experience
with