Diversify Your Reading: Jewish Experience

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all but my life

All But My Life by Gerda Weissmann Klein -15-year-old Gerda was living an idyllic life when the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939, and she and her family were sent to the camps. This is the unforgettable story of her six-year ordeal.

 

 book cover

A Backpack, A Bear, and Eight Crates of Vodka by Lev Golinkin - The vivid, darkly comic, and poignant story of a young boy in the confusing and often chilling final decade of the Soviet Union and the story of Lev Golinkin, the American man who finally confronts his buried past.

 

 color of love

The Color of Love by Marra B. Gad - In 1970, three-day-old Marra was adopted by a white Jewish family in Chicago. For her parents, it was love at first sight—but they quickly realized the world wasn’t ready for a family like theirs.  Marra’s biological mother was unwed, white, and Jewish, and her biological father was black.

 

inheritance

Inheritance by Dani Shapiro - In the spring of 2016, through a genealogy website to which she had whimsically submitted her DNA for analysis, Dani Shapiro received the stunning news that her father was not her biological father. She woke up one morning and her entire history--the life she had lived--crumbled beneath her.

 

 little failure

Little Failure by Gary Shteyngart - The all too true story of an immigrant family betting its future on America, as told by a lifelong misfit who finally finds a place for himself in the world through books and words. 

 

 orpheus clock

The Orpheus Clock by Simon Goodman - The passionate, gripping, true story of one man’s single-minded quest to reclaim what the Nazis stole from his family, their beloved art collection, and to restore their legacy.

 

 pawnbroker's daughter

The Pawnbroker’s Daughter by Maxine Kumin - Against all odds, Kumin channels her dissatisfaction with the life that is expected of her as a wife and a mother into her work as a feminist and one of the most renowned and remembered twentieth-century American poets.

 

pumpkin flowers

Pumpkinflowers by Matti Friedman - The hill, in Lebanon, was called the Pumpkin; flowers was the military code word for “casualties.” Award-winning writer Matti Friedman re-creates the harrowing experience of a band of young Israeli soldiers charged with holding this remote outpost.

 

 sababa

Sababa: Fresh, Sunny Flavors From My Israeli Kitchen by Adeena Sussman - In Hebrew (derived from the original Arabic), sababa means "everything is awesome," and it's this sunny spirit with which the American food writer and expat Adeena Sussman cooks and dreams up meals in her Tel Aviv kitchen.

 

 when rabbis bless congress

When Rabbis Bless Congress by Howard Mortman - An unprecedented examination of 160 years of Jewish prayers delivered in the literal and figurative center of American democracy. It uniquely tells the story of over 400 rabbis giving over 600 prayers since the Civil War days―who they are and what they say.

 

 white walls

White Walls by Judy Batalion - Confronted with the daunting task of raising a daughter after her own dysfunctional childhood, Batalion reflects on not only her own upbringing but the lives of her mother and grandmother, Jewish Polish immigrants who escaped the Holocaust.

 

why not say what happened

Why Not Say What Happened by Morris Dickstein - Morris Dickstein evokes his boisterous and close-knit Jewish family, his years as a yeshiva student that eventually led to fierce rebellion, his teenage adventures in the Catskills and in a Zionist summer camp, and the later education that thrust him into a life-changing world of ideas and far-reaching literary traditions.

 

 

 

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Jewish Experience April 2021.pdf 681.54 KB