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Wrap-Up

I completed the challenge a while ago; it was fun to have occasion to highlight some of the reading I do for my job as a temple librarian and share some of the great books I read. You can see my reviews here. Thanks to Callista for hosting the challenge.

One!?!

But, I did a lot of book talks at the college library for "History post Civil War" assignments. The Zoo Keeper's Wife, Diary of Anne Frank, and Night were all big circulation winners; especially, Night because it is very short. You remember college days, right?!?

Book Read: The Year of Living Biblically by AJ Jacobs.

Thank you for hosting this moving challenge.

Lynne's Reviews and Wrap-Up

Lynne from Lynne's Little Corner of the Web finished this challenge a long time ago:

Reviews:
700 Sundays by Billy Crystal
A Stone for Danny Fisher by Harold Robbins
Eyewitness Auschwitz: Three Years in the Gas Chamber by Filip Muller
Empty the Ocean with a Spoon by Rosalie Sogolow
Jewish Culture and Customs by Steve Herzig

Wrap-up

Challenge Wrap-Up

Well I finished my challenge and had great fun. I'm glad so many people joined me for it. I fully intend to hold it again come Hanukkah.

Books I read:

Even Higher by Richard Ungar
Hanukkah by Roni Schotter
Hanukkah Lights, Hanukkah Nights by Leslie Kimmelman
The Channukah Tree by Eric A. Kimmel
The Channukah Guest by Eric A. Kimmel
I Have a Little Dreidel by Maxie Baum
The Christmas Revolution by Barbara Cohen
The Rabbi's Girls by Johanna Hurwitz
Something from Nothing by Phoebe Gilman
Emil and Karl by Yankev Glatshteyn
Hooray it's Passover by Leslie Kimmelman
A Woman in Jerusalem by A.B. Yehoshua

You can find all my review here.

My favourite novel was Emil and Karl by Yankev Glatshteyn and my favourite picture book was The Channukah Guest by Eric A. Kimmel.

A Woman in Jerusalem by A.B. Yehoshua

Stars: ****

This is a very interesting novel by a Jewish author. It’s written differently than most books I’ve read. It’s written from a third person point of view and makes me feel like I’m listening to a narrator.

What’s really interesting is every so often throughout the book is a small italicized paragraph or two that shows what is thought from the point of view of someone not important to the story; for example a neighbour or guard. I found this extremely interesting and a great idea.

The actual storyline is quite different. The title makes you think the book is about a woman who lives in Jerusalem when in fact, the beginning of the book, the woman is dead and the whole book takes place after that. This is quite a unique perspective. To the average person, when someone dies, a funeral is held and they are buried and that is that. If it’s not someone you knew personally, than the details don’t concern you at all. This book gives a glimpse of how things work after someone dies from identification to finding next of kin to making arrangements for funeral and burial. It’s not extremely depressing though like you may think it is.

I also liked that the main character’s dreams are described in detail. It shows how our minds take things in our lives and jumble them up to make our dreams. This is why our dreams often don’t make sense, because they are a bunch of stories jumbled up into one. It’s like taking the pages of a short story book and rearranging them completely.All in all this was a very interesting book

Becky's Completed List

Callista is hosting a new challenge, the Jewish Literature Challenge. It does have its own blog. I'm assuming she'll invite participants so they can post their as well as on their own blogs.


Golden Dreydl by Ellen Kushner
The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
All of a Kind Family by Sydney Taylor
The Entertainer and the Dybbuk by Sid Fleischman
I Will Plant You a Lilac Tree by Laura Hillman
The Mozart Question by Michael Morpurgo
The Cage by Ruth Minsky Sender
Diary of A Young Girl by Anne Frank
I Have Lived A Thousand Years by Livia Bitton-Jackson
My Bridges of Hope by Livia Bitton-Jackson

3M's Challenge Wrap-up

I read six books for this challenge:

• Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky
• Maus I by Art Spiegelman
• Maus II by Art Spiegelman
• Kaddish for a Child Not Born by Imre Kertesz
• Kanada by Eva Wiseman
• Detective Story by Imre Kertesz

I highly, highly recommend the first four books on my list, especially Maus I and II. I really enjoyed this challenge. Thanks for hosting, Callista!

Maus I and II

Brilliant. Powerful. Poignant. Intensely personal. In graphic novel format and the winner of a Pulitzer Prize Special Award in 1992, Maus is Vladek Spiegelman's story of his survival of Auschwitz during World War II. It is also a story of the father-son relationship between Vladek and Art. In this first book, Art interviews his father about his intense past. Each nationality is represented as a different animal. The Jews are mice, the Germans are cats, and the Poles are pigs. We not only see the absolute horrors of Auschwitz from a survivor's viewpoint, we also see one survivor's son deal with the guilt of just being the son of a survivor.

I first heard about this book through Dewey for the graphic novel challenge. Thanks so much, Dewey, for introducing me to this astounding work.

Highly recommended to all.

1986, 161 pp.
Rating:

The continuation of Maus, and subtitled And Here My Troubles Began (From Mauschwitz to the Catskills and Beyond), Maus II is every bit as astounding as Maus, and the two books really should be read together. In this book we learn more about the end of Vladek's life, and one of the questions that is posed from the book is:

They were survivors, but did they really and truly survive?

Art's struggles with his father's personality -- made so because of the war -- are clearly shown. He is very honest in his portrayal, even to the point of demonstrating his father's own prejudices -- something you would think would be non-existent in someone who had been persecuted himself.

Again, I highly recommend both books to all.

Serialized from 1973 to 1991, 127 pp.
Rating:

My Bridges of Hope

Bitton-Jackson, Livia. 1999. My Bridges of Hope.

My Bridges of Hope is the sequel to I Have Lived A Thousand Years. It is the middle book in a trilogy of the author's memoirs. (Though each book can and does stand alone just fine.) The book opens with Elli Friedmann and her mother and brother returning to their home town of Samorin after they were liberated by the Russian soldiers. Unlike some of the other returning Jews, they did find their home relatively intact. Stripped of furniture, yes, but still standing. The neighbors are shocked, extremely shocked to see them again. Shocked that they're living skeletons. But most of their closest neighbors are helpful. They give what they can, do what they can to make the Friedmann's home habitable again. This doesn't mean that every neighbor is this nice. And it doesn't mean that the family's possessions are returned from the neighbors who took them for safekeeping at the beginning of the war. But a few are ethical enough to return and restore.

"Out of Samorin's more than five hundred Jewis citizens, only thirty-six returned, mostly young men and women. Those who did not--our children, parents, grandparents, siblings, husbands, wives, aunts, uncles, cousins, friends, and lovers--have been replaced by an abyss." (18)

Imagine that if you will. Really think about it. My Bridges of Hope tells the stories of those in between years. Those years between 1945 and 1951 when Elli was growing up in such a strange and foreign environment. It looked a bit like her old home, her old town. But so many people missing, so many new people in their place, so many strangers--the Russians, the Communists coming to town and taking over. Nothing is ever the same, nothing could ever be the same.

In these years, Elli dreams of going to Israel. At the beginning of the book, it isn't even a state or nation yet. But the dreams, the Zionist dreams, are there both in Elli and in her friends. But it is decided that America will be their destination, if they can get in.

These are years of waiting and years of growing. A turbulent time of changing for Elli as she matures from a fourteen year old girl into a young woman of nineteen or twenty. The book records her hopes, her dreams, her loves, her losses, her disappointments.

Hanna's Suitcase, by Karen Levine

Hana's Suitcase, by Karen Levine, published in 2007, is the true story of a young Czech girl named Hana Brady, who was taken away by the Nazis along with her older brother George, and that of her suitcase, which through a chain of events ended up in Japan. It is also the story of a Japanese woman's efforts to find out about Hana- who she was and what happened to her. The book is incredibly moving. Illustrated with photographs of Hana and her family as well as the Holocaust center in Japan where her suitcase is found, Levine tells Hana's story in parallel with the story of the efforts to learn about her. This structure sets up two crushing waves of emotion that left me in tears by the end. It's bittersweet tragedy, told with beauty and sensitivity.

Yellow Star by Jennifer Roy

Another review from Natasha of Maw Books.