Book Club Selections

(Fiction, 432 pp. 2020) A sheltered and refined 1930s Vienna childhood, suffused with music and the looming but unacknowledged threat of Nazi occupation, ends abruptly when Orly’s family flees Europe to the mountains of Bolivia. Music is a constant refrain as the uprooted narrator relates her family’s interludes of fear,…...

Memoir, 272 pages, 2019) A coming-of-age memoir of a tenth-generation Chasidic Jew, descended from the Baal Shem Tov, founder of Chasidism, destined to become a rabbinic leader who — despite the consequences — embraces her identity as a woman. Kirkus Review Review by Joshua Lewis Berg, Humanist.com, 17 December 17, 2019 Review by…...

(Fiction, 480 pp. 1939) This classic historical novel, written by an American rabbi, draws readers into the era of the great rabbis of the Talmud. At its center is the renegade sage Elisha ben Abuyah, whose doubts lead him to search for answers in the Greek and Roman world, with…...

(Fiction, 362 pp. 2010) Beginning in 1999 when a teenager discovers Rabbi Eliezer ben Zephyr in his parents’ freezer in suburban Memphis, Tennessee, this uproarious romp then jumps to 1899 to explain how the rabbi became encased in ice in the Jewish Pale. Through a series of surreal misadventures by…...

(Nonfiction, 368 pp. 2016)  In 1883, Moses Wilhelm Shapira—archaeological treasure hunter, inveterate social climber, and denizen of Jerusalem’s bustling marketplace—arrived unannounced in London claiming to have discovered the world’s oldest Bible scroll. Tigay, an award-winning journalist, follows every lead, no matter how unlikely, in his attempts to find the treasure and…...

(Fiction, 302 pp. 2015) Elijah Goldstein loves his uncle, Poxl West, who has for fifty years portrayed himself as a RAF hero during World War II, but who may or may not have been all the things he claimed to be. Winner of the National Jewish Book Award for fiction,…...

(Memoir, 336 pp. 2019) This memoir in sixteen personal essays by a young woman, born in Israel to a large family of Yemeni descent, shares her vivid memories as she travels the world, from New York to India, searching for love, belonging, and an escape from grief following the early…...

(Short Stories, 272 pp. 2016) These eleven stories, set between Israel and Canada, feature mothers and children, soldiers and bohemians, lovers and best friends, all searching for their place in the world. Tsabari’s Mizrahi characters grapple with love, violence, faith, the slipperiness of identity, and the challenges of balancing old…...

(Fiction, 324 pp. 2007) Chubby, biracial teenager Sasha Goldberg continually disappoints her overbearing mother until she manages to escape the confines of her bleakly named Siberian town, Asbestos 2. She first lands as a mail-order bride in Phoenix, then ditches her husband and makes her way to suburban Chicago where a…...

(Fiction, 304 pp. Bulgarian, 2000; English translation, 2008) Tragedy is overlaid with Jewish humor as an affable tailor survives war and nationalism in Central Europe between World War I and the death of Stalin. This darkly ironic novel, peppered with Yiddish jokes, fables from the Kolodetz shtetl, and the unorthodox…...