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Events & Classes > Let's Talk About It: Jewish Literature

Let's Talk About It: Jewish Literature
A Mind of Her Own

Join us for a five-part reading and discussion series on the theme "A Mind of Her Own."

"I carried her in my arms," Tevye sighs as another daughter goes her own way — and so begins a modern literary tradition of Jewish fathers and daughters who get carried away with politics, money, sex, religion, and, above all, one another.

Interested readers are encouraged to register and pick up a copy of the first book at Northwest Library. Please register for each session individually.

Dr. Laura Leibman, associate professor of English and Humanities at Reed College, will serve as discussion leader for the series.

All programs are from 6:30–7:30 p.m.
Northwest Library
2300 N.W. Thurman St.
503.988.5560

Tevye the Dairyman bookjacket Tevye the Dairyman by Sholem Aleichem
Sholem Aleichem's most famous character is an educated workingman in tsarist Russia, struggling to make a living, marry off his many daughters, and — despite a wife who raises cursing to an art form — live an old-fashioned life. Instead his children present him with all the troubles of a world in transition. Tsaytl's insistence on marrying for love is hard enough on Tevye, but his younger daughters' romantic entanglements bring more serious ills — antireligious socialists, class struggle, superstitious ignorance, and finally the anti-Semitism that drives the Jews from their shtetl homes.
Bread Givers bookjacket Bread Givers: A Struggle Between a Father of the Old World and a Daughter of the New by Anzia Yezierska
Yezierska, who emigrated from Poland to America in 1890, tells the story of Sara Smolinsky, the youngest of five daughters living on the Lower East Side's Hester Street in the 1920s. Sara's father is a rabbi, a learned man who studies undisturbed while his wife and daughters struggle to cobble together a meager existence. After her father marries each of her sisters off in loveless (and often dubious) arrangements, Sara flees home, desperate to escape the same fate and determined to breathe in "the new air of America."
O My America! bookjacket O My America! by Johanna Kaplan
A provocatively and aggressively charming social critic, Ezra Slavin quotes De Tocqueville, Marx, and the rabbinic Ethics of the Fathers with equal measure. When he dies, his first daughter, Merry — product of the first of many marriages and affairs — must make sense of her father's life.
American Pastoral bookjacket American Pastoral by Philip Roth
"Being wrong about people is how we know we're alive," Nathan Zuckerman, Roth's recurring narrator, muses after discovering exactly how wrong he was about the golden-haired idol of his youth. Fifty years after high school, Zuckerman can see that Seymour "Swede" Levov's charming façade obscures complicated and tragic depths. Swede marries a beauty queen and runs his immigrant grandfather's prosperous company only to see his daughter become a bomb-throwing fugitive.
Bee Season bookjacket Bee Season by Myla Goldberg
Nine-year-old Eliza, the least impressive member of the brainy Naumann family, amazes everyone by winning the local spelling bee, then the state contest. When she nearly prevails at nationals, her father, a cantor, introduces her to the works of medieval mystic Abraham Abulafia in hopes that understanding the world "in alphabetical terms" will help her win it all next year. As Eliza gallops towards enlightenment, she outshines her geeky older brother, Aaron; no longer the family star, he turns his back on his family and faith.

More "Let's Talk About It: Jewish Literature" — discuss the theme "Neighbors"

 

Let's Talk About It: Jewish Literature, a reading and discussion series, has been made possible by a grant from Nextbook, the American Library Association and the National Endowment for the Humanities.