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The 2009-10 Sholom Aleichem Club
Calendar of Events
Sholom Aleichem Club
To Discuss All Other Nights,
“One Book, One Jewish Community” Selection
At May MeetingThe Sholom Aleichem Club will have its chance to discuss the book, All Other Nights, at the Club meeting on Sunday, May 16, at the Bala Cynwyd Library, North Highland Ave. & Old Lancaster Road. The program, which is free and open to the public, begins at 2 p.m. The book was selected by the Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia for this year’s “One Book, One Jewish Community” program. The discussion will be led by Dr. Dina Pinsky, Sociology Professor at Arcadia University. Dr. Pinsky’s latest research revolves around Jewish identity in the small town Jim Crow South. Her focus at the meeting will be how Southern Jewish life evolved from the circumstances depicted in All Other Nights until the present day.
Authored by Dara Horn, All Other Nights “is a gripping and suspenseful story of men and women driven to the extreme limits of loyalty and betrayal. It follows a Jewish soldier in the Union army during the Civil War. Based on real personalities like Judah Benjamin, the Confederacy’s Jewish Secretary of State, the book is also a brilliant parable of the rift in America that lingers a century and a half later between those who value family and tradition first, and those dedicated, at any cost, to social and racial justice for all," according to the author’s web site.
The book has received positive reviews from a wide-range of publications including The New York Times Book Review, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, The Forward, Los Angeles Times, Financial Times, Boston Globe, Booklist, The Baltimore Sun and Publisher’s Weekly. It was an Editors’ Choice selection by The New York Times Book Review, an honor she also received for her second novel, The World to Come, which has been translated into 11 languages.
The Forward opines about All Other Nights: “Riveting . . . . written in meticulous but energetic prose ... All Other Nights interrogates and celebrates nationhood and freedom. . . . Conflating Jewish and American history, Horn’s third and most accomplished novel portrays Passover, the festival of freedom, amid the carnage caused by slavery. Horn’s lively, timely tale extends the range of American Jewish literature beyond familiar themes of immigration, assimilation and extermination.” The Wall Street Journal writes: “An enjoyably fast-paced amalgam of historical romance, spy novel and political thriller . . . . a rare and memorable portrait of Jewish life during the Civil War.”
Just 33 years old, Horn received her Ph.D. in comparative literature from Harvard University in 2006, studying Hebrew and Yiddish. In 2007, Dara Horn was chosen by Granta magazine as one of the Best Young American Novelists. Her first novel, In the Image, published when she was 25, received a 2003 National Jewish Book Award, the 2002 Edward Lewis Wallant Award, and the 2003 Reform Judaism Fiction Prize. Her second novel, The World to Come, received the 2006 National Jewish Book Award for Fiction, the 2007 Harold U. Ribalow Prize, was selected as an Editors’ Choice by The New York Times Book Review and as one of the Best Books of 2006 by The San Francisco Chronicle.
For more information on the Club, call 215.233.2668 or e-mail meetinginfo@sholomaleichemclub.org.
2009-2010 Sholom Aleichem Club General Meetings
September 19: Kehillah of Secular Jews of Greater Philadelphia Observance
of High Holidays: Rosh Hashanah; September 28:Yom Kippur 3:45 p.m. at Germantown Friends School, 47 West Coulter Street, Germantown)
October 11: Revisiting Peretz: Re-imagining Diaspora
Dr. Michael Steinlauf, Professor of Jewish History and Culture at Gratz College
November 8: Israeli Peace Options In The Age Of Obama
Steve Masters, National President, Brit Tzedek V'Shalom
(Jewish Alliance for Justice and Peace)
December 6: “A Brivele Der Mamen” ( A Letter to Mother)”, 1939 classic Yiddish film
Presented at Gratz College, 7605 Old York Road, Melrose Park
January: No meeting
February:No meeting
March 14: Readings of Yiddish Translated Stories and A Memoir of An Unheralded Philadelphia Heroine
Longtime Sholom Aleichem Club Executive Board Members Sol Glassberg and Letta Schatz
May 16: Book discussion: All Other Nights, by Dara Horn, “One Book, One Jewish Community” selection
Led by Dr. Dina Pinsky, Sociology Professor at Arcadia University
June 14:
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