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

Let's Talk About It: Jewish Literature
Neighbors: The World Next Door

Join us for a five-part reading and discussion series on the theme "Neighbors."

The delicate, often tortuous relationship between neighboring cultures animates these works of history and fiction, which trace the Jewish experience from Muslim Spain to Bolshevik Russia to contemporary America.

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

Want to read more?

Discover Jewish Voices

All programs are from 7–8 p.m.
Hosted at Havurah Shalom
825 N.W. 18th Ave.

This series will also be at Central Library.

A Journey to the End of the Millennium bookjacket A Journey to the End of the Millennium by A.B. Yehoshua
In the waning months of the year 999, Ben Attar, a wealthy Jew from Tangiers, sets sails for Paris. Armed with his two wives, his Muslim trading partner, and an Andalusian Rabbi, Ben Attar undertakes the expedition to salvage his relationship with his beloved nephew Abulafia. The estranged young man has settled in Paris with his bride, a cunning woman from a family of renowned Jewish scholars in Ashkenaz. Her moral repulsion for Ben Attar's bigamy — common in his world, unheard of in hers — has alienated Abulafia from Ben Attar.
Red Cavalry bookjacket Red Cavalry by Isaac Babel
In 1920, Isaac Babel rode with the Red Calvary into Eastern Poland as part of Russia's first attempt to spread the glory of Communism throughout Europe. These brief, trenchant short stories, drawn from Babel's observations of that disastrous campaign, are marked by a cool detachment and gift for the arresting phrase: "The orange sun is rolling across the sky like a severed head."
Neighbors bookjacket Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland by Jan T. Gross
"Until the outbreak of the war," writes Jan Gross, "Jedwabne was a quiet town, and Jewish lives there differed little from those of their fellows elsewhere in Poland." Then, on a summer evening in 1941, just weeks after Germany invaded the Soviet Union, Polish residents took up axes, clubs, and torches and massacred all but seven of the town's 1,600 Jews. The perpetrators, who were brought to trial in 1949, never received official blame for the massacre, which instead went to the Nazis.
The Assistant bookjacket The Assistant by Bernard Malamud
Set in a failing Brooklyn grocery, Malamud's 1957 novel follows shop owner Morris Bober as his lightless existence is touched and confused by hardworking Frank Alpine, an "Italyener" he doesn't so much hire as inherit. Over the course of Alpine's short tenure, he steals from Bober, falls in love with his charmless daughter, and converts to Judaism.
Mona in the Promised Land bookjacket Mona in the Promised Land by Gish Jen
In this rollicking coming-of-age tale, Mona Chang's Chinese immigrant parents move their family to Westchester for its superior schools and majestic landscaping, only to find that their daughter develops a worrisome interest in the religion of her new friends. "Pretty soon Mona's tagged along to so many temple car washes and food drives ... that she's been named official mascot of the Temple Youth Group."

More "Let's Talk About It: Jewish Literature" — discuss the theme "A Mind of Her Own"

 

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.