We are a lively group of dedicated readers who meet from September to June, generally on the second Thursday of the month in the Chapel at 7:00 PM. The club gives us an opportunity to share our reactions about our Jewish and personal identity through our selections. Books are chosen by their Jewish content and/or author.
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Upcoming 2009 - 2010 Events/Books
September Reading (9/10/09): THE KIDNAPPING OF EDGARDO MORTARA, by David I. Kertzer
This book, published in 1997, played a central role in the controversy over the beatification of Pope Pius IX. In 1858, on orders of the Inquisition, a six-year-old Jewish boy was taken from his parents in Bologna, then part of the Papal States. Years earlier, the family’s Catholic servant girl, fearful that the infant might die of an illness, had secretly baptized him (or so she claimed). The boy recovered, but when the story reached the Bologna Inquisitor, he was taken from his parents and sent to a special monastery where Jews were converted into good Catholics. According to Church teachings, no Christian child could be raised by Jewish parents.
The case of Edgardo Mortara became an international cause célèbre. Although such kidnappings were not uncommon in Jewish communities across Europe, this time the political climate had changed. As news as the family’s plight spread to Britain, France, and the U.S., public opinion turned against the Vatican. Refusing to return the child to his family, Pope Pius IX began to regard the boy as his own child. The fate of this one boy came to symbolize the entire revolutionary campaign to end the dominance of the Catholic Church and establish a modern, secular state (Italy).
This book has been made into a play, which opened in 2003.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
David Kertzer has become America’s foremost expert on the modern history of the Vatican’s relations with the Jews. He teaches anthropology and Italian Studies at Brown University. He is the recipient of many academic and journalistic honors. He debated one of the Vatican archbishops responsible for the beatification of Pope Pius IX (live, on the radio) two days before John Paul II presided over the ceremony. In another of his books, “The Popes Against the Jews,” he shows how the popes – contrary to the “official” Vatican version – worked covertly to help build a modern anti-Semitic movement.
October Reading (10/08/09): SOTAH, by Naomi Ragen
In the strict Jewish Orthodox world, a sotah is a wife suspected of infidelity who can be tried by ordeal to prove she is guiltless. The book was inspired by a story in an Israeli paper in which an ultra-Orthodox married woman described her adulterous affair with an equally religious married man, her neighbor. She described her pleasure in it, her guilt, and how she was discovered by the Modesty Patrol. She was thrown out of her home without a penny, deprived from her children. The book, written in English, was translated into Hebrew and published in Israel. It was top on the bestseller list for a long time there.
November Reading (11/12.09): THE HIDDEN POPE, by Darcy O’Brien
(From Amazon.com Review) John Paul II has made greater strides toward understanding and atoning for Rome’s complicity in anti-Semitism than any other pope in history. (This book) shows how and why this rapprochement is taking place by telling the story of John Paul’s lifelong friendship with Jerzy Kluger, a Polish Jew. The text is a fascinating and detailed depiction of John Paul’s personal life but the book’s real significance lies in its frank demonstration of the way Karol Wojtyla (the future pope) brings his personal experience to bear on the eternal truths (sic) of Catholic theology.
December Reading (12/10/09): SUDDENLY JEWISH: JEWS RAISED AS GENTILES DISCOVER THEIR JEWISH ROOTS, by Barbara Kessel
(From Publishers Weekly and Library Journal) Stimulated by Madeline Albright’s well-publicized 1997 discovery that her grandparents were Jewish, Kessel, the Director of the Administration of the Board of Jewish Education of Greater New York, decided to explore the question of “hidden roots.”
Kessel interviewed over 160 people who were raised as non-Jews and later learned that they were of Jewish descent. She classified her respondents into four groups: “crypto- Jews” (descendants of the Jewish victims of the Spanish Inquisition), “hidden children” (those placed with non-Jewish families to save them from the Nazis), children of Holocaust survivors and adoptees. While their reactions ranged from shock to disinterest to an enthusiastic embrace of Jewish culture and religion, each gained a fuller sense of self from the discovery.
January Reading (01/14/10): TOWERS OF GOLD: HOW ONE JEWISH IMMIGRANT NAMED ISAIAS HELLMAN CREATED CALIFORNIA, by Frances Dinkelspiel
(From Booklist) Hellman was California’s premier financier during the late XIX and early XX centuries, a man whose financial acumen catapulted the state into the modern era and laid the groundwork for one of the worlds’s most dynamic economies. Bankers such as Hellman were the men who smoothed the rough edges of the economy. They offered credit and invested in companies. Dinkelspiel, Hellman’s great-great-granddaughter, posits that during financial panics – which happened about every 10 years in the XIX century – bankers provided stability. Hellman was both a builder and a financier, a major investor and a promoter of eight industries that shaped California – banking, transportation, education, land development, water, electricity, oil, and wine. At the height of his power, at the end of the first decade of the XX century, he controlled more than $100 million in capital, equivalent to $38 billion in 2006.
(From the San Francisco Chronicle) “Carefully researched and superbly written memoir. … Dinkelspiel’s biography not only brings to life the transformation of California into the state with the strongest economy in the nation, and the outside personalities that forged it, but rescues from the proverbial dustbin of history the remarkable life and achievements of a man whose energy, creativity, resourcefulness and love for his adopted country had been all but forgotten. A marvelous resource, a dramatic slice of Western history and a splendid read.”
February Reading (02/11/10): CHURCHILL AND THE JEWS, by Martin Gilbert
(From Publishers Weekly) This work by acclaimed Churchill biographer Martin Gilbert examines an often-neglected aspect of the British leader’s career: his relationship to Jews and Jewish issues. Drawing on a treasure trove of primary documents, Gilbert shows how Churchill grew beyond the kind of friendship with individual British Jews that his father enjoyed into a supporter of Jewish causes – most notably a Jewish state in Palestine. (In later years, Churchill even referred to himself as an old Zionist).
(From The Washington Post) Churchill’s profound admiration for the Jews, which was not shared by many of his closest political colleagues, was all the more amazing because it survived the rise of Bolshevism, which Churchill abhorred and which he believed was dominated, intellectually and politically, by men and women of Jewish origin. It even survived the turbulent years during and after World War II when Zionist extremists conducted a campaign of political murder against British officials, policemen and soldiers.
Why did the great man shower his affection on a people who could be, by his own reckoning, so cantankerous and problematic? It was, Gilbert writes, partly because Churchill saw Jewish ethics as the foundation stone for Western moral teachings. The Jews, Churchill wrote, “grasped and proclaimed an idea of which all the genius of Greece and all the power of Rome were incapable.” Impressed as what he saw as Jews’ sense of loyalty, vitality, self-help and determination, he endorsed their national aspirations. A Jewish homeland “will be a blessing to the whole world,” he told an audience in Jerusalem in 1921.
March Reading (03-11-10): ALL OTHER NIGHTS, by Dara Horn
Based on real personalities like Judah Benjamin, the Confederacy’s Jewish Secretary of State and spymaster, and on historical facts and events ranging from an African-American spy network to the dramatic self-destruction of the city of Richmond, All Other Nights is a gripping and suspenseful story of men and women driven to the extreme limits of loyalty and betrayal. It is also a brilliant parable of the rift in America that lingers a century and a half later between those who value family and tradition first, and those dedicated, at any cost, to social and racial justice for all.
April Reading (04/08/10): THE MAN IN THE SHARKSKIN SUIT: MY FATHER’S EXODUS FROM OLD CAIRO TO THE NEW WORLD, by Lucette Lagnado.
(From The New Yorker and Booklist) This memoir of an Egyptian Jewish family’s gradual ruin is told without melodrama by its youngest survivor, now a reporter at the Wall Street Journal. Lagnado’s story hinges on her father, “the Captain,” who cut a dashing figure in mid-century Cairo, consorting with British officers and Egyptian royalty at French cafes while his family, neglected, stayed home. At first refusing to join the tide of Jews fleeing Egypt under the Nasser regime, the Captain finally yields, in 1963, when the family escapes to Paris and then Brooklyn. Deprived of wealth, status, and any means of coping, Lagnado’s father fades, but he never loses his air of chivalry.
Leon, once a prosperous, independent businessman and investor, was reduced to selling ties in the street. In Lagnado’s accomplished hands, this personal account illuminates its places and times, providing indelible individual portraits and illustrating the difficulty of assimilation. An exceptional memoir.
Lagnado is this year’s recipient of the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature. The memoir offers us an insight into the messiness and confusion of forced migration, something which those who have never experienced it simply cannot comprehend.
May Reading(05/13/10): A WOMAN IN JERUSALEM, by A.B.Yehoshua
(From The Washington Post) The heroine of this book is a corpse: Yulia Ragayev, a fortyish, lovely, lonely worker in a Jerusalem bakery who’s mortally wounded in a terrorist bombing in the city market, dies in a hospital after two days of solitude and then is left in the hospital’s morgue abandoned and unidentified, her fate unmourned and her burial unprovided for. A muckraking local newspaper finds that she was identified only by her pay stub and assails the bakery for heartlessness in an expose entitled “The Shocking Inhumanity Behind our Daily Bread.” The firm wealthy old owner tells his melancholy human resources manager to try and make amends by finding out what went wrong and by giving Yulia a proper funeral. (The novel’s original title, translated from Hebrew, is The Mission of the Human Resources Manager).
This book is about a mission and a memorial. It turns out to be anything but gloomy: it’s lively, fleet, sometimes funny and ultimately hopeful. Some of the author’s older concerns – such as the misgivings of Palestinians living in awkward proximity to the Jewish state, a major theme of his splendid previous novel The Liberated Bride – are touched on in brilliantly light asides.
A small masterpiece, a compact, strange work of Chekhovian grace, grief, wit and compassion. “I’d like a yes or no answer: are we guilty or not?” the bakery owner asks at one point. “Responsible is more like it,” the human resources manager replies. “Responsible for what?” the old man wants to know. “I’ll tell you later,” replies the emissary.
June Readings (06/10/10):
1) DISGUISED AS CLARK KENT: JEWS, COMICS, AND THE CREATION OF THE SUPERHERO, by Danny Fingeroth
(From Publishers Weekly). Not only do comic book superheroes Batman and Superman disguise themselves to save the world, but according to former Marvel group editor Fingeroth, they also disguise their Jewish heritage and values. In Fingeroth debut, he uncovers Jewish themes in comics history, starting with the introduction of Superman in 1938 and ending with a look at what the current crop of mainstream comics creators are doing with the freedom to explore overtly their religion. Chronicling the creation of each new “Jewish” superhero, Fingeroth notes the concurrent changes in the comic industry, including the audience shift from children to adults. Looking back at the gold and silver eras of comics, he uses close reading and artistic testimony (Stan Lee, Joe Simon and Will Eisner among them) to explore parallels between Superman and Moses, Spider-Man’s morality tales and the Torah, Fantastic Four arch-nemesis Hate Monger and Hitler, and others.
(From Review) comes from a comics industry veteran who explores the backgrounds of famous superheroes and their creators – who, as it turns out, were largely young American Jewish men from Eastern European backgrounds. The focus on the hero icon in history, Jewish history and culture, and the comics industry as a whole thus makes for a strong recommendation not just for Judaic studies collections, but for any collection strong in either comics or cultural icons and analysis.
Fingeroth’s book is an easy, intriguing read, exploring the histories of superheroes and their creators. This is clearly a topic in which Fingeroth is eminently well-versed.
2) FROM KRAKOW TO KRYPTON: JEWS AND COMIC BOOKS, by Arie Kaplan
(From Editoprial Reviews) Jews created the first comic book, the first graphic novel, the first comic book convention, the first comic book specialty store, and they helped create the underground comics (or “Comix”) movement of the late ’60 and early 70’s. Many of the creators of the most famous comic books, such as Superman, Spider-Man, X-Men, and Batman, as well as the founders of Mad Magazine, were Jewish. (This book) tells their stories and demonstrates how they brought a uniquely Jewish perspective to their work and to the comics industry as a whole. Over-sized and in full color, (the book) is filled with sidebars, cartoon bubbles, comic book graphics, original design sketches, and photographs. It is a visually stunning and exhilarating history.
(From “The Eclectic Reader) The illustrations are beautifully and lovingly reproduced in a glossy tone, either invoking fond memories if you’ve read the comics or a warm invitation to explore. Overall there is a nice balance between covering both the content of the comics and biographical material, quotes and stories about the writers and artists.
