Adult Education

Monday, February 17: The Jazz Club Spy by Roberta Rich
The book is about a young Jewish Russian immigrant on the Lower East Side in 1939 who is determined to track down the Cossack who destroyed her village and get justice for her family. A cigarette girl at a jazz club, she gets embroiled in a plot to keep America out of World War II.

Monday, March 17: Long Island Compromise by Taffy Brodesser-Akner
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.  It’s a bit quirky, but fascinating.