Welcome to the Burbank Temple Emanu El Book Club
Whether a single book catches your eye or you’re looking for a regular connection with other readers, we invite you to join the Burbank Temple Emanu El Book Club. We have two book discussions scheduled before the end of June: April 18 offers readers a chance to pick their choice of books by Elie Wiesel to discuss and compare, and June 27 will be a discussion of Dara Horn's All Other Nights, a Civil War era romantic page-turner that tells about the divisions the war caused within the Jewish community.
We were pleased to host author Maggie Anton (in the red sweater) at BTEE in January for a discussion of her latest book, Rachel. This is the final book in her trilogy, Rashi's Daughers.
We meet every other month, usually at 12:30 p.m. on a Sundays. (Upcoming meetings are set for March 30 and June 22.) Everyone at BTEE is welcome to attend. Meetings are held at member’s homes, the temple or area cafes or restaurants. If you would like to join the Book Club or receive electronic notices of meetings, send an email to Jeannette Hartman at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it or call her at (818) 989-7571.
We have a planning meeting scheduled for Sunday, May 23, 2010. This is an important opportunity to discuss the future of the Book Club at BTEE.
Below is a list of the books the Club has already discussed:
Click here for a printable version of this information.
Abraham, Pearl, The Romance Reader. The story of a young girl coming-of-age in an ultra orthodox Hasidic home. Her limited exposures to the secular world make her yearn for a little more freedom and independence. F
Ackerman, Diane, Zookeeper’s Wife. The true story of the wife of the keeper of the Warsaw zoo. While not Jewish themselves, the zookeeper and his wife were active in the Polish underground and helped many Jews in the ghetto. You’ll close this book with vivid, exotic images of a zoo in wartime. NF
Albom, Mitch, Tuesdays with Morrie. Albom, an acclaimed sportswriter and radio personality, rediscovered his mentor and former college professor Morrie Schwartz in the last months of Schwartz’s life. Their weekly meetings turn into one final class on how to live. NF
Alcala, Kathleen, Spirits of the Ordinary: A Tale of Casas Grandes. The first of a trilogy, Alcala tells the tale of Zacarias Caraval, who in Mexico of the 1870s abandons family and the Jewish faith of his forefathers to search for gold in the desert. Wandering to the cliff dwellings of Casas Grandes in the mountains of Northern Mexico, he witnesses a massacre that changes his life and brings him back to Judaism. F
Anton, Maggie, Rashi’s Daughters I: Joheved; Rashi’s Daughter II: Miriam. A former member of Burbank Temple Emanu El, Maggie Anton broke ground with these books about the lives of Rashi’s three daughters. Legend says that Rashi’s daughters were learned in a time when women were forbidden to study the sacred texts. F
Bloom, Amy, Away. Arriving in New York in 1924, Lillian Leyb brings little beyond the memories of the pogrom that killed her husband and parents and separated her from her daughter, Sophie. With an instinct to survive at any cost, she becomes the mistress of a handsome actor and his well-connected father in New York City. Her obsession with finding her daughter leads her on a cross-country quest to find her daughter that eventually ends in the wilderness of Alaska. F
Blum, Jenna, Those Who Save Us. This story switches from the life of Trudy, a history professor at a Minneapolis university collecting oral histories of World War II survivors (both German and Jewish) and that of German her mother, Anna, who married an American soldier and immigrated to the U.S. Anna has an affair with a Nazi officer at Buchenwald to hide her affair with a Jewish doctor in the camp and the birth of their daughter, Trudy. Past and present collide with a shocking coincidence that opens up the nightmare of the past. F
Brooks, Geraldine, People of the Book. A novel about what may have happened to the Sarajevo Haggadah, one of the oldest known Jewish books with illustrations, before it came to rest in the Jewish community of Sarajevo. F
Cahan, Abraham, The Rise of David Levinsky. A fictional autobiography of a young man who grows up in poverty, becomes a Talmudic scholar and then looks to America. F
Cahill, Thomas, The Gift of the Jews: How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the Way Everyone Things and Feels. This book focuses on Jewish culture and how it influences our Western cultural perspectives today. NF
Chabon, Michael, The Yiddish Policeman’s Union. Think Raymond Chandler steeped in Sholem Aleichem and you might have a taste of this book. Readers either love it or hate it. Chabon imagines an alternative to history that gave the Jews displaced by the Holocaust a 60-year lease on Alaska. This book uses a lot of Yiddish – including some magnificent puns. F
Cheuse, Alan, The Grandmother Club. As her life comes to a close, Minnie Bloch tells the story of her late husband; her son, the rabbi turned businessman; and her angry granddaughter Sarah. F
De Silva, Cara. In Memory’s Kitchen: A Legacy from the Women of Terezin. This cookbook was compiled from memory by Jewish women imprisoned at Terezin. Subsisting on scraps and potato peels, they put together their recipes in hopes of a future where their grandchildren might receive a fragment of their history and traditions. NF
Diament, Anita, The Red Tent. The red tent is where women gathered during their cycles of birthing, menses and illness. It is also the story of Jacob’s daughter Dinah, who tells the stories of her four mothers – Rachel, Leah, Zilpah and Bilhah. She eventually tells of her own saga of betrayals, grief and a call to midwifery. F
Dubner, Stephen, Turbulent Souls. Son of parents who converted from Judaism to Catholicism, Dubner himself converted from Catholicism to Judaism. The story tells of his childhood and his adult efforts to reconstruct both his own and his parents’ pasts. NF
Edelson, Marjorie, Malkeh and Her Children. Edelson has based her story on family legends of life in pre-Revolutionary Russia. The story focuses on an obstinate provincial Jewish woman whose children are destined to immigrate to America. The story carries forward to her grandchildren, who one by one make homes in San Francisco. F
Ehrlich, Elizabeth, Miriam’s Kitchen. Ehrlich blends recipes, memories and insights about her own evolution as a Jew. She weaves in stories from four generations of her family. Her mother-in-law Miriam reveals how she, her mother and her husband survived a Nazi labor camp while showing Ehrlich how to make chicken livers with noodles. NF
Elkin, Stanley, Mrs. Ted Bliss. Widow of a Chicago butcher, Mrs. Ted Bliss has been living in a Miami condo since Mr. Bliss’s death. She’s stepping out with more than one shady gentleman who is overly interested in the late Mr. Bliss’s Buick LeSabre. Funny and touching the book was Elkin’s last before his death. The book won the 1995 National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction. F
Ellenson, Ruth Andrew, The Modern Jewish Girl’s Guide to Guilt. Ellenson, the daughter of a rabbi, has collected these essays on sources of guilt for modern Jewish women – not being married, childlessness, saying no, mothers, eating bacon and other familiar issues. NF
Gluckel, The Memoirs of Glueckel of Hameln. Begun in 1690, this diary of a 44-year-old German Jewish widow tells how she guided the financial and personal destinies of her 14 children, ran her own factory and promoted the welfare of her family. She tells of war, plague, pirates, soldiers and the hysteria of the false messiah Sabbtai Zevi. NF
Goldstein, Rebecca, Mazel. A weaving of history, memory, fairy tales and Yiddish folktales, this book looks at the twists of fate that have affected three generations of a Jewish family. F
Goodman, Allegra, Kaaterskill Falls. Three Orthodox Jewish families face different challenges in an upstate New York town. A keen observer of human nature, Goodman captures the details of daily rhythms in her characters’ lives and their intersections with the secular world. F
Greene, Joshua M. and Shiva Kumar, Witness: Voices from the Holocaust. This book weaves together the testimonies of 27 people who lived through the Nazi era, before, during and after World War II. It includes the stories of a soldier who helped liberate Mauthausen, a member of the Hitler Youth, a death march survivor, a partisan and concentration camp survivors. The result is an eyewitness description of a terrible era from many perspectives. NF
Greene, Melissa Faye, The Temple Bombing. Rabbi Jacob Rothschild of Atlanta’s oldest and most prominent synagogue is an outspoken supporter of civil rights and the work of the Rev. Martin Luther King. In 1958, neo-Nazi extremists bomb the temple. Greene writes eloquently of the time, the place, the social context and the shifting struggles and conflicts experienced by Jews and their southern communities in the early days of civil rights. NF
Grossman, David, The Yellow Wind. A translation of a report that records the devastation that 20 years of Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip has caused Palestinians and Israelis alike. The author is an Israeli novelist in his 30s who was assigned by an Israeli newsweekly to spend seven weeks in the area. NF
Gruen, Sara, Water for Elephants. Jacob Jankowski is about to sit for his veterinary exams when his parents are killed, leaving him penniless. He ends up on a circus train, stopping in small towns throughout Depression-era America. As he cares for the animals, he falls in love with Marlena, the wife of August, the animal trainer and a paranoid schizophrenic, whose fits of brutality and madness creep ever closer to Jacob. F
Hamill, Pete, Snow in August. In a gang besieged Brooklyn neighborhood in the 1940s, an 11-year-old Irish Catholic boy becomes friends with a Czech rabbi and refugee – a relationship as unlikely as snow in August. The friendship endangers both when the dreaded Falcons gang discovers the friendship. F
Hegi, Ursula, Stones from the River. Trudi Montag is a dwarf living in Germany during two world wars. Although normal in every way except her size – and exceptional in many ways – Trudi is doomed to be an outsider. Her life heightens the grotesqueness of Nazi Germany’s racial purity policies. F
Heschel, Abraham Joshua, The Sabbath. A classic essay by a Reconstructionist rabbi about the sacredness of the space in time that Shabbat creates. NF
Horn, Dara. In the Image. Horn entwines the story of William Landsman and Leora, Landman’s late granddaughter’s best friend. A native of Vienna, Landsman is the son of an abusive man who abandons his wife to a Nazi mental institution and survives in the gray fringes of war-torn Europe. Leora, by contrast lives in a modern world of prosperity and religious freedom, she reaches into the past to hold on to her Jewish roots. F
All Other Nights. A Civil War page-turner that brings together Jacob Rappaport, sone of a wealthy Jewish import-export family and Eugenia Levy. Rappaport has enlisted in the Union Army and becomes a spy. His assignment is to marry the feisty Confederate spy Eugenia Levy. What starts as a dangerous game becomes a true romance. The book highlights the divisions within the Jewish community during the Civil War. F
Isler, Alan, The Prince of West End Avenue. Broadway has nothing on the politics and ambitions of a retirement home production of Hamlet. The director, a survivor of Auschwitz, becomes haunted by his memories as the show goes on. Moving and funny by turns. F
Kamenetz, Rodger, The Jew in the Lotus. This is the thought-provoking pairing of two stories – the history-making meeting between the Dalai Lama and eight rabbis and Jewish scholars and Kamenetz’s own examination of how the shared pilgrimage deepens his own understanding of Judaism. NF
Kirsch, Jonathan, The Harlot by the Side of the Road: The Forbidden Tales of the Bible. A retelling of some of the juicer stories from the Bible. Each story includes a sketch of the scholarly research into the story and the speculation that surrounds it. NF
Krause, Nicole, The History of Love. This novel spans more than 60 years, ranging from Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe to modern day Brighton Beach. Holocaust survivor Leo Gursky and 14-year-old Alma Singer each grapple with loneliness and the gaping loss of loved ones. The result is a hauntingly beautiful story. F
Kritzler, Edward, Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean: How a Generation of Swashbuckling Jews Carved out an Empire in the New World in Their Quest for Treasure, Religious Freedom -- and Revenge. This is the fascinating story of what happened to the Jews after their expulsion from Spain in 1492 and the largely untold story of their contributions to the exploration of the New World. NF
Kurzweil, Arthur, On the Road with Rabbi Steinsaltz. Kurzweil served a volunteer chauffeur for Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz during his lecture tours for more than 20 years. The book is a worshipful accounting the wisdom Rabbi Steinsaltz imparted in their conversations. The book also tells of Kurzweil’s own journey from a secular upbringing to his return to Judaism as a Hasid. NF
Kushner, Rabbi Harold, How Good Do We Have to Be? A New Understanding of Guilt and Forgiveness. In a world obsessed with perfection, people experience unnecessary guilt and anxiety, according to Rabbi Kushner. Blending psychology and spirituality, Kushner speaks to the power of acceptance and forgiveness. NF
Kushner, Rabbi Lawrence, The Book of Words: Talking Spiritual Life, Living Spiritual Talk. Short essays on 30 spiritually charged Hebrew words. Each essay has a meditative exercise to “help the reader ‘live in the word.’” NF
Lansky, Aaron, Outwitting History: The Amazing Adventures of a Man Who Rescued a Million Yiddish Books. Lansky describes his transformation from a graduate student of Yiddish into the founder of the National Yiddish Book Center, saving 1.5 million volumes of books written in Yiddish from destruction and abandonment. NF
McBride, James, The Color of Water. A fascinating story of a man born to a Polish Orthodox Jewish mother and a black man. He tells of his childhood growing up in mostly black neighborhoods and how race and religion colored his relationships. NF
Mirvis, Tova, The Ladies Auxiliary. A tightly knit Orthodox Jewish community in Memphis comes unglued when an unconventional, widowed New York Jewish convert settles there with her five-year-old daughter. F
Morinis, Alan, Everyday Holiness: The Jewish Spiritual Path of Mussar. Mussar is an ancient traditional approach to taking tikkun olam to an individual and personal level. NF
Platt, Anthony, Bloodlines: Recovering Hitler’s Nuremberg Laws, From Patton’s Trophy to Public Memorial. The Nuremberg Laws, signed by Adolf Hitler in 1935, made Jewish genocide legal in Nazi Germany. Today on view at the Skirball Cultural Center, Platt’s book tells the fascinating story of how this pivotal document spent 50 years hidden in the archives of the Huntington Library, which had received the document from Gen. George Patton, six months before his death. NF
Ragen, Naomi, Jephte’s Daughter. The Covenant. Sotah. Jephte’s Daughter deals with a beautiful intelligent Hasidic woman struggling to be a good Jew, wife and mother but challenged by her curiosity and desire for knowledge. Sotah focuses on Dina, the middle of three daughters in an ultra religious Jewish family. Though devout, Dina becomes a sotah, a woman suspected of adultery. She is banished from seeing her husband and young child. The Covenant tells of four women survivors of Auschwitz who have promised to help each other. The covenant is called into action when the daughter and son-in-law of one are kidnapped from a Jerusalem street by Hamas. F
Rosenbaum, David, Zaddik. Alcoholic and recently divorced, ex-NYPD cop Dov Taylor is called to recover a stolen 72-carat diamond. The gem was to be the dowry in a historic wedding uniting two powerful, feuding Hasidic families. The stone is now in the hands of the Magician, a Nazi collaborator and war criminal. To recover it, Taylor calls through time to his ancestor Hirsh Leib of Orlik, a zaddik and prince of Israel from 19th century Poland. F
Schlink, Bernard, The Reader. A woman on trial for unspeakable crimes in Nazi Germany forces Michael Berg to face challenging questions. At 15, he had started a long, obsessive affair with her. As he follows the trial, he struggles with the question of what his generation should do with its knowledge of the Holocaust. F
Schulweis, Rabbi Harold, For Those Who Can’t Believe. Rabbi Schulweis presents an alternative perspective for people who find either/or questions about religion (Are miracles true or false? Is the Bible fact or fiction?) stifling their faith. NF
Singer, Isaac B., Enemies: A Love Story. You saw the movie, now read the book. F
Speigelman, Art, Maus I & II. In comic book form, these two books tell the story of Vladek Spiegelman, a Holocaust survivor, and his son, a cartoonist, trying to come to terms with his father’s experiences. F
Steinberg, Milton, As a Driven Leaf. The characters of this book include Akiba, Yohanan, Joshua, Eleazar, Beruriah – and Elisha ben Abuyah, whose struggle to be Jewish and assimilated cuts him off from life. F
Telushkin, Rabbi Joseph, Words That Hurt, Words That Heal: How to Choose Words Wisely and Well. Gossip, lies and words hurled in anger – all can injure. Rabbi Telushkin draws on the Talmud and traditional Jewish stories to explore how we can approach the act of speaking in a more ethical and sacred way. NF
Trillin, Calvin, Messages from My Father. An affectionate memoir of Trillin’s late father, a taciturn, Kansas City grocer and his profound impact on his son’s life and values. NF
Wasserstein, Wendy, Shiksa Goddess, or, How I Spent My Forties. A collection of essays by a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright. The book includes an interview with Bette Midler, a portrait of her family, her sister’s battle with cancer, the disease that ultimately took Wasserstein herself, and the birth of her daughter.
Weber, Katharine. Triangle. The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire of 1911 was the 9/11 of its era. The fire killed 146 workers, mostly women, many of whom jumped to their deaths to escape the flames. The tragedy spurred major reforms of the working conditions in sweatshops. Triangle tells the story in three voices. Esther Gottesfeld, a survivor of the fire, is heard only indirectly through interviews and trial transcripts and has kept key secrets for a lifetime. Ruth Zion is a self-serving feminist researcher with a nose for missing information and an astute ability to suggest what fits in the blanks. George Botkin is an internationally renown composer who becomes Esther’s granddaughter’s husband. He gives life to the fullness of the tragedy, including Esther’s secrets as he understands them. F
Weisel, Elie, Messengers of God. A look at the varied interpretations of the characters of Adam, Cain, Abel, Isaac, Joseph, Jacob, Esau, Moses and Job from the perspective that all are messengers of God. NF
Wolpe, Rabbi David, Why Be Jewish? Rabbi Wolpe presents a portrait of Judaism for the curious, the inquiring and those about to marry into a Jewish family. NF
Zusak, Markus, The Book Thief. Narrated by Death, this story takes place in a German town near Dachau. Nine-year-old Liesel Meminger arrives on the doorstep of her new foster parents Hans and Rosa Hubermann. Her brother, Werner, dies on the train nd her mother says goodby when the car arrives to take her to the Hubermanns. Set in the worst of times, The Book Thief is story about the importance of the connections between human hearts. F
