Book Club Selections

(Fiction, 246 pp. 1957) Plagued by guilt after taking part in the robbery of a small New York grocery, Italian-American Frank Alpine tries to make good by taking a job helping the struggling shop’s poor Jewish owner.  As he works through his moral debt and falls in love with the…...

(Fiction, 352 p. 1966) Malamud won both the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize for his novel set in Kiev in 1911. During a period of heightened anti-Semitism, an apolitical, nonobservant Jewish handyman is arrested and imprisoned for the ritual murder of a young Russian boy. Refusing to confess to…...

(Fiction, 471 p. 2019) Eleven-year old Romy and her parents flee 1938 Vienna to Shanghai, and in 2016 her granddaughter Alexandra rushes from England home to Melbourne, Australia, to be with her dying grandfather. This historical novel deals with friendship, motherhood, the price of love, and the power of hardship…...

(Fiction, 320 pp. 2012) This multilayered story is a sensitive consideration of tradition and commitment, and the conflict between individual independence and the obligations of faith. It follows four generations of the Stern family, members of the Satmar Hasidic sect, from Transylvania to Paris and Brooklyn, focusing on the diverging…...

(Fiction, 226 pp. 2005) Thirteen linked stories imitate in prose the complex poetic form called a sestina, inviting readers into the lives of four generations of a Jewish family, once from Russia and now scattered across North America. Moments of joy, despair, hope, and puzzlement weave through stories that move…...

Memoir, 256 pp. 1995 Ruth McBride Jordan narrates the hardships she overcame as a Polish Jewish immigrant in rural Virginia who chose to marry a black man in 1942 and convert to Christianity. Her account is interspersed in alternating chapters with her son’s struggle to discover his mother’s past and…...

(Fiction, 277 pp. Hebrew, 1987; English translation, 2003) When an Israeli historian agrees to find a translator for a passionate Yiddish poet and Holocaust survivor whom he barely knows, he unwittingly throws his marriage and personal life into tragic confusion.  Winner of a Koret Jewish Book Award, this rich novel…...

(Fiction, 244 pp. Hebrew, 1987; English translation, 2003) Set in 1982 in the Arab quarter of Haifa, the Iraqi-born author’s bestseller paints a sensitive picture of a Christian Arab family, one of whose daughters enters into a romance with the Russian Jewish immigrant who moves upstairs.  Contending with this unlikely…...

(Fiction, 240 p. 1945) A reticent personnel manager living with his mother shares the prejudices of his times and of his neighbors, until he begins wearing glasses, and others begin to mistake him for a Jew. Miller’s only novel investigates the insidious effects of increasing anti-Semitism in New York in…...

(Fiction, 304 pp. 2005) This humorously insightful novel follows Tzippy, a 22-year old modern Orthodox woman eager to marry, who unexpectedly falls for Bryan, who, following a year in yeshiva in Israel, has become stringently observant and now calls himself Baruch.  The couple moves to the small Orthodox community of…...