We are very excited to share with you the books we have selected for the 2023-2024 season of the Marsha Razin z”l Book and Film Club.
Due to the tense current situation in the country, we decided to postpone our discussion on American Dirt. As soon as calm returns and the matnas reopens, we will resume book club activities and adjust the schedule accordingly. We all look forward to peaceful times.
We wish we could tell you where all the meetings will take place – at the Library or on Zoom, but as you know, nothing right now can be predicted, so we’ll be taking the location month by month for a while.
Our Book and Film Club is open to all interested adults in the area. All meetings and materials are in English. The meetings will be held on the second Monday of each month, unless otherwise indicated. When are discussing a book, the meeting will start at 7:30 p.m. When we watch a film, the meeting will start at 7:15 p.m.
A 10 NIS donation is requested when films are shown.
2023-2024 season lineup:
West With Giraffes by Lynda Rutledge – December 4, 2023 at 7:30 p.m.
It’s 1938. The Great Depression lingers. Hitler is threatening Europe, and world-weary Americans long for wonder. They find it in two giraffes who miraculously survive a hurricane while crossing the Atlantic. What follows is a twelve-day road trip in a custom truck to deliver Southern California’s first giraffes to the San Diego Zoo. Behind the wheel is the young Dust Bowl rowdy, Woodrow. Inspired by true events, the tale weaves real-life figures with fictional ones, including the world’s first female zoo director, a crusty old man with a past, a young female photographer with a secret, and assorted reprobates as spotty as the giraffes.
Part adventure, part historical saga, and part coming-of-age love story, West with Giraffes explores what it means to be changed by the grace of animals, the kindness of strangers, the passing of time, and a story told before it’s too late.
The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams – January 8, 2024 at 7:30 p.m.
The NY Times Book Review] described this book as a “captivating and slyly subversive fictional paean to the real women whose work on the Oxford English Dictionary went largely unheralded.”
Esme is born into a world of words. Motherless and irrepressibly curious, she spends her childhood in the Scriptorium, an Oxford garden shed in which her father and a team of dedicated lexicographers are collecting words for the very first Oxford English Dictionary. Young Esme’s place is beneath the sorting table, unseen and unheard. One day a slip of paper containing the word bondmaid flutters beneath the table. She rescues the slip and, learning that the word means “slave girl,” begins to collect other words that have been discarded or neglected by the dictionary men.
As she grows up, Esme realizes that words and meanings relating to women’s and common folks’ experiences often go unrecorded. And so she begins in earnest to search out words for her own dictionary: the Dictionary of Lost Words. To do so she must leave the sheltered world of the university and venture out to meet the people whose words will fill those pages.
Set during the height of the women’s suffrage movement and with the Great War looming, The Dictionary of Lost Words reveals a lost narrative, hidden between the lines of a history written by men. Inspired by actual events, author Pip Williams has delved into the archives of the Oxford English Dictionary to tell this highly original story. The Dictionary of Lost Words is a delightful, lyrical, and deeply thought-provoking celebration of words and the power of language to shape the world.
The Lincoln Conspiracy by Brad Meltzer and Josh Mensch – February 12, 2024 at 7:30 p.m.
Everyone knows the story of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination in 1865, but few are aware of the original conspiracy to kill him four years earlier on his way to Washington, D.C. For his first inauguration. The conspirators were part of a white supremacist secret society opposed to abolition.
The plot was investigated by famed detective Allan Pinkerton, who infiltrated the group with undercover agents, including one of the first female detectives in America. Had the assassination succeeded, there would have been no Lincoln presidency and of course the Civil War and American history would have forever been altered. This is the true story of how that was prevented.
The Plot by Jean Hanff Korelitz – March 11 at 7:30 p.m.
Jacob Finch Bonner was once a promising young novelist with a respectably published first book. Today, he is teaching in a third rate Masters of Fine Art program and struggling to maintain what’s left of his self-respect. He hasn’t written, let alone published, anything decent in years. When Evan Parker, his most arrogant student, announces he doesn’t need Jake’s help because the plot of his book- in progress is a sure thing. Jake is prepared to dismiss the boast as typical amateur narcissism. But then he hears the plot.
Jake returns to the downward trajectory of his own career and braces for the supernova publication of Evan’s first novel: but it never comes. When he discovers that his former student died, presumably without ever completing his book, Jake does what any self-respecting author would do with a story like that—a story that absolutely needs to be told.
In a few short years, all of Evan Parker’s predictions have come true, but Jake is the author enjoying the wave. He is wealthy, famous, praised and read all over the world. But at the height of his glorious new life, an email arrives, the first salvo in a terrifying, anonymous campaign: “You are a thief”, it says.
As Jake struggles to understand his antagonist and hide the truth from his readers and publisher, he begins to learn more about his late student, and what he discovers terrifies him. Who was Evan Parker, and how did he get the idea for his “sure thing” of a novel? What is the real story behind the plot, and who stole it from whom?
A Play for the End of the World by Jai Chakrabarti – April 8, 2024 at 7:30 p.m.
New York City, 1972. Jaryk Smith, a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto, and Lucy Gardner, a southerner, newly arrived in the city, are in the first bloom of love when they receive word that Jaryk’s oldest friend has died under mysterious circumstances in a rural village in eastern India.
Traveling there alone to collect his friend’s ashes, Jaryk soon finds himself enmeshed in the chaos of local politics and efforts to stage a play in protest of the government—the same play that he performed as a child in Warsaw as an act of resistance against the Nazis. Torn between survivor’s guilt that he carried for decades and his feelings for Lucy, Jaryk must decide how to honor both the past and the present, and how to accept a happiness he is not sure he deserves.
It is said to be a “dazzling novel-set in the early 1970’s New York and rural India-the story of a turbulent, unlikely romance, a harrowing account of lasting horrors of WorldWar II, and a searing examination of one man’s search for forgiveness and acceptance”.
The Diamond Eye by Kate Quinn – May 20, 2024 at 7:30 p.m.
Based on a true story, the Diamond Eye is the unforgettable World War II tale of a quiet bookworm who becomes history’s deadliest female sniper. In 1937 in the snowbound city of Kyiv, wry and bookish history student Mila Pavlichenko organizes her life around her library job and her young son—but Hitler’s invasion of Ukraine and Russia sends her on a different path. Given a rifle and sent to join the fight, Mila must forge herself from studious girl to deadly sniper—a lethal hunter of Nazis known as Lady Death. When news of her three hundredth kill makes her a national heroine, Mila finds herself torn from the bloody battlefields of the east.
Still reeling from war wounds and devastated by loss, Mila finds herself isolated and lonely in the glittering world of Washington, DC—until an unexpected friendship with First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and an even more unexpected connection with a silent fellow sniper offer the possibility of happiness. But when an old enemy from Mila’s past joins forces with a deadly new foe lurking in the shadows, Lady Death finds herself battling her own demons and enemy bullets in the deadliest duel of her life.
The Diamond Eye is a haunting novel of heroism born of desperation, of a mother who became a soldier, of a woman who found her place in the world and changed the course of history forever.
Hang the Moon by Jeanette Walls – June 3, 2023 at 7:30 p.m.
The New York Times called this book a “rip-roaring, action-packed novel about an indomitable young woman in prohibition-era Virginia.” The protagonist, Sallie Kincaid, is the daughter of the biggest man in a small town, the charismatic Duke Kincaid.. Born at the turn of the 20th century into a life of comfort and privilege, Sallie remembers little of her mother who died in a violent argument with Duke. By the time she is eight years old, the Duke has remarried and had a son, Eddie. While Sallie is her father’s daughter, sharp witted and resourceful, Eddie is his mother’s son, timid and cerebral. When Sallie tries to teach him to ride her wagon, her daredevil coaching leads to an accident, and Sallie is cast out. Nine years later, she returns, determined to reclaim her place in the family. That is far more complicated than she expected, as she enters a world of conflict and lawlessness. Sallie confronts the secrets and scandals that hide in the shadows of the big house, navigates the factions in the family and town, and finally comes into her own as a bold and sometimes reckless bootlegger.