Jewish Studies Sunday Book & Discussion Group

"Scliar is a world-class fabulist with a solid and distinguished oeuvre awaiting discovery by a larger audience. I’ve seen The Centaur in the Garden compared to works by Franz Kafka, Nikolai Gogol, Philip Roth, Mordecai Richler, and even John Updike. At its center is Guedali Tartakowsky, a Jewish centaur born into a family of Russian immigrants in Rio Grande do Sul. Scliar pushes the tragic destiny of Tartakowsky through an infusion of comedy. Its style is vintage Scliar: crisp, speedy, cinematic, succinct."

"The four long narratives in W.G. Sebald's The Emigrants at first appear to be the straightforward biographies of four people in exile: a painter, an elderly Russian, the author's schoolteacher as well as his eccentric great-uncle Ambrose. Following (literally) in their footsteps, the narrator retraces routes which lead from Lithuania to London, from Munich to Manchester, from the South German provinces to Switzerland, France, New York, Constantinople, and Jerusalem. Along with memories of the Holocaust, he collects documents, diaries, pictures. Each story is illustrated with enigmatic photographs, making The Emigrants seem at times almost like a family album - but of families destroyed." "Sebald weaves together variant forms (travelog, biography, autobiography, and historical monograph), combining precise documentary with fictional motifs. As he puts the question to "realism," the four stories merge gradually into one requiem, overwhelming and indelible."

Aleichem, the great Yiddish humorist whose Tevye and His Daughters became Fiddler on the Roof, is honored on the 150th anniversary of his birth with a complete translation of this sprawling novel, a panoramic view of the Yiddish theater in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Masterfully translated by Shevrin and including a foreword by Tony Kushner, the novel follows an antic troupe of Yiddish actors traveling from a small town in Bessarabia (present-day Moldova) across Europe to London and finally New York. As the novel opens, Leibel Rafalovitch, the rich man's son, and Reizel Spivak, the poor cantor's daughter, are entranced by a troupe performing in their small town. Enticed away by the promise of stage careers, they are soon separated, with Reizel becoming the concert star Rosa Spivak and Leibel, Leo Rafalesko, a serious stage actor. The colorful lives of the theater performers and the difficulties they face—including anti-Semitism, a lack of money, and matters of love—are even more captivating than what happens on the stage itself. As Leibel says to Reizel while they gaze at the sky above their village, stars don't fall but wander, as do these stalwart theater people.

In 1068, the scholar Salomon ben Isaac returns home to take over the family winemaking business and embark on a path that will indelibly influence the Jewish world—writing the first Talmud commentary, and teaching it to his daughters. Joheved, her mind and spirit awakened, knows the risk and keeps her learning hidden. When she weds, must she choose between marital happiness and her love of Talmud?