Adult Education

Monday, October 21: The Cookbook Collector by Allegra Goodman on Monday, Oct. 21

Two Jewish sisters lead very different lives on different coasts. One will get the help of a rabbi to change the direction of her life, and the two sisters’ lives will intersect at various points of the story.

Monday, November 18: Exile Music by Jennifer Steil

Based on an unexplored slice of World War II history, Exile Music is the captivating story of a young Jewish girl whose family flees refined and urbane Vienna for safe harbor in the mountains of Bolivia. As a young girl growing up in Vienna in the 1930s, Orly has an idyllic childhood filled with music. But in 1938, Orly's peaceful life is shattered when the Germans arrive. Her older brother flees Vienna first, and soon Orly, her father, and her mother procure refugee visas for La Paz, a city high up in the Bolivian Andes. Even as the number of Jewish refugees in the small community grows, her family is haunted by the music that can no longer be their livelihood.

Monday, December 16: The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum by Margalit Fox

It is an amazing true story of the first person to run an organized crime syndicate (before the mafia was born), a Jewish immigrant mother on the Lower East Side during the 1850s-1880s. Frederica Mandelbaum was also a philanthropist, synagogue goer and mother who was a high level fence for stolen goods – furs, diamonds, silks, as well as cash from bank heists (including one in Boston) that she help orchestrate. She had police and politicians on her payroll and several loyal thieves working for her. Her Jewish mother persona helped her get away with it longer than anyone else could.

Novels to ponder for January 2025 and beyond:

• All the Broken Places by John Boyne—In 1946, Three years after a cataclysmic event which tore their lives apart, a mother and daughter flee Poland for Paris, shame, and fear at their heels, not knowing how hard it is to escape your past. Nearly eighty years later, Gretel Fernsby lives a life that is a far cry from her traumatic childhood. When a couple moves into the flat below her in her London mansion block, the appearance of their nine-year-old son Henry brings back memories she would rather forget. Faced with a choice between her own safety and his, Gretel is taken back to a similar crossroads she encountered long ago.
• Long Island Compromise by Taffy Brodesser-Akner, who wrote Fleishman is in Trouble—A Jewish man is kidnapped in 1980, returned safe a week later, but 40 years after that he and his three grown children are feeling repercussions and having problems, and the family fortune is nearly gone. The novel spans the entirety of one family’s history, winding through decades and generations, all the way to the outrageous present, and confronting the mainstays of American Jewish life: tradition, the pursuit of success, the terror of history, fear of the future, old wives’ tales, evil eyes, ambition, achievement, boredom, dybbuks, inheritance, pyramid schemes, right-wing capitalists, beta-blockers, psychics, and the mostly unspoken love and shared experience that unite a family forever.
• The Jazz Club Spy by Roberta Rich—The book is about Giddy Brodsky, a young Jewish Russian immigrant on the Lower East Side in 1939. She sees the Cossack who destroyed her village on the subway and is determined to track him down and get justice for her family. A high level connection she makes at the jazz club where she is a cigarette girl embroils her in a plot to keep America out of World War II.
• The Promise of a Pencil by Adam Braun—A memoir about how his encounter with a poor Indian boy who wanted a pencil led to Braun’s founding of 200 schools. His strong Jewish identity was his guide while he also led a successful Wall Street career.