CBE Book Group

Discussions are held in Rabbi Bachman’s study, from 7:30 p.m. to 9:00 p.m., on the dates listed below. There is no charge, and both members and non-members are welcome to join our lively discussions. Please contact linda.quigley@verizon.net if you have any questions.

The CBE Book Group’s upcoming books and meeting dates are as follows:

February 27: Great House by Nicole Krauss: “The novel consists of four stories divided among eight chapters, all touching on themes of loss and recovery, and anchored to a massive writing desk that resurfaces among numerous households, much to the bewilderment and existential tension of those in its orbit, among them a lonely American novelist clinging to the memory of a poet who has mysteriously vanished in Chile, an old man in Israel facing the imminent death of his wife of 51 years, and an esteemed antiques dealer tracking down the things stolen from his father by the Nazis.”

March 26: The Hare with Amber Eyes by Edmund de Waal. “In this family history, de Waal, a potter and curator of ceramics at the Victoria & Albert Museum, describes the experiences of his family, the Ephrussis, during the turmoil of the 20th century. At the heart of Edmund de Waal’s strange and graceful family memoir, … is a one-of-a-kind inherited collection of ornamental Japanese carvings known as netsuke.”

April 23: The Free World by David Bezmozgis, a 2011 New York Times Notable Book. The Krasnansky family are Soviet Jewish refugees awaiting passage to the West in Rome in 1978. An “assured, complex social novel, ” it is a “tragic yet comic tale of reckless brothers and long-suffering sisters, ailing parents and innocent children, of love affairs and criminal liaisons of a wonderfully troubled family and their search for a home.”

May 21: The Arrogant Years by Lucette Lagnado. A memoir by the author of the award-winning The Man in the Sharkskin Suit, it is the coming-of-age story of her mother in Cairo, and the story of her own early years in Brooklyn. Lagnado writes of the women of her childhood synagogue, the young coeds at Vassar and Columbia, and her mother and her contemporaries in Cairo. She “reflects on their stories as she struggles to make sense of her own choices.”

June 25: In the Garden of Beasts by Erik Larson, a 2011 New York Times Notable Book. It is Berlin in 1933 and Martha Dodd, the flamboyant daughter of America’s first ambassador to Hitler’s Germany William E. Dodd, embarks on a series of affairs with the “handsome young men of the Third Reich.” There is mounting evidence of Jewish persecution which Dodd communicates to a “largely indifferent State Department.” The book is a “dazzling, addictively readable work suffused with the tense atmosphere of the period.”

Summer (for September) : The Invisible Bridge by Julie Orringer. Orringer immerses us in 1930s Budapest just as a young Hungarian Jew, Andras Lévi, departs for the École Spéciale d’Architecture in Paris. He hones his talent for design, works backstage in a theater, and allies with other Jewish students in defiance of rising Nazi influence. And then he meets Klara, a captivating Hungarian ballet instructor nine years his senior with a painful past and a willful teenage daughter. Against Klara’s better judgment, love engulfs them, drowning out the rumblings of war for a time. But inevitably, Nazi aggression drives them back to Hungary, where life for the Jews goes from hardship to horror.”