Thursday December 19 at 7:30 PM: The Only Daughter by A.B. Yehoshua – In-Person (with potluck)
“An old-fashioned book, free of cynicism, encroaching technology and intricate plotting, but imbued with a heartfelt and optimistic view of humanity—in other words, a book filled with feeling and moral values.”—New York Times Book Review From the internationally acclaimed, award-winning Israeli author, a stunning novel that brilliantly illuminates a young girl’s crisis of faith and coming-of-age in Italy. Rachele Luzzato is twelve years old when she learns that her father is gravely ill. While her family plans for her upcoming bat mitzvah, Rachele finds herself cast as the Madonna in her school’s Christmas play. Caught between spiritual poles, struggling to cope with her father’s mortality, Rachele feels as if the threads of her everyday life are unraveling. A diverse circle of adults is there to guide Rachele as she faces the difficult passing of childhood, including her charismatic Jewish grandfather, her maternal Catholic grandparents, and even an old teacher who believes the young girl might find solace in a nineteenth-century novel. These spiritual tributaries ultimately converge in Rachele’s imagination, creating a fantasy that transcends the microcosm of her daily life with one simple hope: an end to the loneliness felt by an only daughter. In this wondrous story A. B. Yehoshua paints a warm and subtle portrait of a young girl at the cusp of her journey into adulthood.

Tuesday January 21 at 7:30 PM: 1974 by Francine Prose – Zoom (with author)
“In this remarkable memoir, the qualities that have long distinguished Francine Prose’s fiction and criticism—uncompromising intelligence, a gratifying aversion to sentiment, the citrus bite of irony—give rigor and, finally, an unexpected poignancy to an emotional, artistic, and political coming-of-age tale set in the 1970s—the decade, as she memorably puts it, when American youth realized that the changes that seemed possible in the ’60s weren’t going to happen. A fascinating and ultimately wrenching book.”—Daniel Mendelsohn, author of The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million The first memoir from critically acclaimed, bestselling author Francine Prose, about the close relationship she developed with activist Anthony Russo, one of the men who leaked the Pentagon Papers–and the year when our country changed. During her twenties, Francine Prose lived in San Francisco, where she began an intense and strange relationship with Tony Russo, who had been indicted and tried for working with Daniel Ellsberg to leak the Pentagon papers. The narrative is framed around the nights she spent with Russo driving manically around San Francisco, listening to his stories–and the disturbing and dramatic end of that relationship in New York. What happens to them mirrors the events and preoccupations of that historical moment: the Vietnam war, drugs, women’s liberation, the Patty Hea rst kidnapping. At once heartfelt and ironic, funny and sad, personal and political, 1974 provides an insightful look at how Francine Prose became a writer and artist during a time when the country, too, was shaping its identity.

Tuesday February 18 at 7:30 PM: A Day in the Life of Abed Salama by Nathan Thrall – In-Person
Winner of the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction Named a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker, The Economist, Time, The New Republic, and the Financial Times. Immersive and gripping, an intimate story of a deadly accident outside Jerusalem that unravels a tangle of lives, loves, enmities, and histories over the course of one revealing, heartbreaking day. Five-year-old Milad Salama is excited for a school trip to a theme park on the outskirts of Jerusalem. On the way, his bus collides with a semitrailer. His father, Abed, gets word of the crash and rushes to the site. The scene is chaos―the children have been taken to different hospitals in Jerusalem and the West Bank; some are missing, others cannot be identified. Abed sets off on an odyssey to learn Milad’s fate. It is every parent’s worst nightmare, but for Abed it is compounded by the maze of physical, emotional, and bureaucratic obstacles he must navigate because he is Palestinian. He is on the wrong side of the separation wall, holds the wrong ID to pass the military checkpoints, and has the wrong papers to enter the city of Jerusalem. Abed’s quest to find Milad is interwoven with the stories of a cast of Jewish and Palestinian characters whose lives and histories unexpectedly converge. In A Day in the Life of Abed Salama, Nathan Thrall―hailed for his “severe allergy to conventional wisdom” (Time)―offers an indelibly human portrait of the struggle over Israel/Palestine and a new understanding of the tragic history and reality of one of the most contested places on earth.

Tuesday March 18 at 7:30 PM: Hope by Andrew Ridker – Zoom
A New York Times Editors’ Choice A Boston Globe, Forward, and Times of Israel Best Book of the Year “Riotous. . . . Hilarious . . . impeccably written . . . . Intelligent, bighearted, spew-your-gefilte-fish-funny.” —The New York Times Book Review “A writer with this much talent can take his readers anywhere.” —The Washington Post
“Painfully funny. . . . This rivals Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s Fleishman is in Trouble in its pitch-perfect portrayal of Jewish American life.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“A comedy of (bad) manners. . . . Engaging.” —The Boston Globe A hilarious and heartfelt novel about a seemingly perfect family in an era of waning American optimism, from the acclaimed author of The Altruists The year is 2013 and the Greenspans are the envy of Brookline, Massachusetts, an idyllic (and idealistic) suburb west of Boston. Scott Greenspan is a successful physician with his own cardiology practice. His wife, Deb, is a pillar of the community who spends her free time helping resettle refugees. Their daughter, Maya, works at a distinguished New York publishing house and their son, Gideon, is preparing to follow in his father’s footsteps. They are an exceptional family from an exceptional place, living in exceptional times. But when Scott is caught falsifying blood samples at work, he sets in motion a series of scandals that threatens to shatter his family. Deb leaves him for a female power broker; Maya rekindles a hazardous affair from her youth; and Gideon drops out of college to go on a dangerous journey that will put his principles to the test. From Brookline to Berlin to the battlefields of Syria, Hope follows the Greenspans over the course of one tumultuous year as they question, and compromise, the values that have shaped their lives. But in the midst of their disillusionment, they’ll discover their own capacity for resilience, connection, and, ultimately, hope.

Tuesday April 22 at 7:30 PM: The Pity of It All: A Portrait of the German-Jewish Epoch 1743 – 1933 by Amos Elon – In-Person
In this important work of historical restoration, Amos Elon shows how a persecuted clan of cattle dealers and wandering peddlers was transformed into a stunningly successful community of writers, philosophers, scientists, tycoons, and activists. In engaging, brilliantly etched portraits of Moses Mendelssohn, Heinrich Heine, Karl Marx, Hannah Arendt, and many others, Elon traces how a small minority came to be perceived as a deadly threat to German national integrity. “Brilliant, far-reaching, passionate. . .sweeping and marvelously detailed. . .finely, intimately, movingly drawn. . . a book for the ages.” ―The New York Times “[Elon] is a master of the telling anecdote. . ..One should be grateful for what Elon has done.” ―Los Angeles Times “A work packed with beautifully sketched portraits, and constructed with a practiced eye for memorable, well-executed anecdotes.” ―The New York Times Book Review “Impressive. . .Could hardly be improved upon.” ―The New York Review of Books “If there is one book Americans should read this winter, it is Amos Elon’s The Pity of It All–a meticulous and wrenching history of a people in a place at a moment in time that bears urgently upon our own.” ―Joan Didion, author of Political Fictions

Tuesday May 20 at 7:30 PM: City of Laughter by Temim Fruchter – Zoom
A rich and riveting debut spanning four generations of Eastern European Jewish women bound by blood, half-hidden secrets, and the fantastical visitation of a shapeshifting stranger over the course of 100 years An ambitious, delirious novel that tangles with queerness, spirituality, and generational silence, City of Laughter announces Temim Fruchter as a fresh and assured new literary voice. The tale of a young queer woman stuck in a thicket of generational secrets, the novel follows her back to her family’s origins, where ancestral clues begin to reveal a lineage both haunted and shaped by desire. Ropshitz, Poland, was once known as the City of Laughter. As this story opens, an 18th century badchan, a holy jester whose job is to make wedding guests laugh, receives a visitation from a mysterious stranger—bringing the laughter the people of Ropshitz desperately need, and triggering a sequence of events that will reverberate across the coming century. In the present day, Shiva Margolin, recovering from the heartbreak of her first big queer love and grieving the death of her beloved father, struggles to connect with her guarded mother, who spends most of her time at the local funeral home. A student of Jewish folklore, Shiva seizes an opportunity to visit Poland, hoping her family’s mysteries will make more sense if she walks in the footsteps of her great-grandmother Mira, about whom no one speaks. What she finds will make her question not only her past and her future, but also her present. Electric and sharply intimate, City of Laughter zigzags between our universe and a tapestry of real and invented Jewish folklore, asking how far we can travel from the stories that have raised us without leaving them behind.

Tuesday June 17 – TBD – In-Person (with potluck)