Sunday, June 22, 2025 - 2:00--3:15pm
@ Library, Level 3
"From, To" --a short story
by David Bezmozgis
Facilitated by Lisa Silverman
Published in the New Yorker magazine, April 14, 2025, and online on April 6, 2025.
"From, To" is a rather long short story by David Bezmozgis. It begins with a call from the protagonist's aunt, which is unusual. The story explores themes of safety and love. The story is a masterpiece and evokes a post-October setting.
Email me at Rhonda.Rosen@lmu.edu for a copy of the short story!
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Sunday, July 27, 2025 - 2:00--3:15pm
@ Library, Level 3
"Allog" -- a short story
by Edith Pearlman
Facilitated by Lisa Silverman
An ailing man's wife hires a caregiver who comes to Israel looking for a better life, and, in the process, he finds an unlikely community. Mr. and Mrs. Goldfanger moved from South Africa to Israel almost ten years ago and have lived in the same apartment building ever since. When Mr. Goldfinger's dementia and mobility begin to worsen, Mrs. Goldfinger decides to apply for a caregiver through an Israeli program. The program sponsors caregivers from Southeast Asia, allowing them to immigrate to Israel. The caregiver, Joe, arrives and exceeds their expectations.
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Sunday, September 14, 2025 - 2:00--3:15pm
@ Library, Level 3
The Ravine: A Family, a Photograph, a Holocaust Massacre Revealed
By Wendy Lower
Facilitated by Dr. Elizabeth Drummond, LMU History Dept.
In 2009, the acclaimed author of Hitler's Furies was shown a photograph just brought to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The documentation of the Holocaust is vast, but there are virtually no images of a Jewish family at the actual moment of murder, in this case by German officials and Ukrainian collaborators. A Ukrainian shooter's rifle is inches from a woman's head, obscured in a cloud of smoke. The woman is bending forward, holding the hand of a barefoot boy. And--only one of the shocking revelations of Wendy Lower's brilliant ten-year investigation of this image--the photograph reveals the shins of another child, slipping from the woman's lap.
Wendy Lower's gripping detective work--in Ukraine, Germany, Slovakia, Israel, and the United States--recovers astonishing layers of detail concerning the open-air massacres in Ukraine. The identities of the victims, of the killers--and, remarkably, of the photographer who openly took the picture, as a secret act of resistance--are dramatically uncovered. Finally, in the hands of this exceptional scholar, a single image unlocks a new understanding of the place of the family unit in the history and aftermath of Nazi genocide.
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Sunday, November 9, 2025 - 2:00--3:15pm
@ Library, Level 3
Everything is Illuminated: novel
By Jonathan Safran Foer
Facilitated by Alexandra Lyon Perelman, Ed.D.
"With only a yellowing photograph in hand, a young man - also named Jonathan Safran Foer - sets out to find the woman who might or might not have saved his grandfather from the Nazis. Accompanied by an old man haunted by memories of the war, an amorous dog named Sammy Davis, Junior, Junior, and the unforgettable Alex, a young Ukranian translator who speaks in a sublimely butchered English, Jonathan is led on a quixotic journey over a devastated landscape and into an unexpected past." "As their adventure unfolds, Jonathan imagines the history of his grandfather's village, conjuring a magical fable of startling symmetries that unite generations across time."-