For October, 2019 HaKol, news from the HS Book Discussion Group

The HS Book Group Discusses They May Not Mean To But They Do by Catherine Schine,

October 22^nd, 7:00 to 8:30 pm, at Havurah.

This is a compact novel about family, loss, aging and resilience. The early chapters dramatize how Joy’s husband’s fall through palliative care to hospice to death takes a toll on her, their children and grandchildren. While mourning her husband and her life, Joy suffers a minor stroke and a scary infection. She begins to feel ‘out of date, obsolete, and left-behind;’ useless to anyone. ..She didn’t seem to belong anywhere anymore.’  Much to Joy’s dismay, her two children, Molly and Daniel are full of ideas and solutions to deal with her aging and loneliness. She loses sleep worrying that they may send her to a nursing home. Sympathetic to both Joy and her adult children - and the granddaughter who decides to prep for a bat mitzvah - the book’s sweetness, psychological perceptions and dry humor  leaven its existential grimness.

Discussion led by Maud Naroll.

For November, 2019 HaKol, news from the HS Book Discussion Group

The HS Book Group Discusses Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver.

November 26^th,  7:00 to 8:30 pm, at Havurah

Dellarobia, a restless farm wife who gave up her own plans when she accidentally became pregnant at seventeen, has spent a decade of domestic disharmony on a failing farm. She seeks escape through a flirtation with a younger man. While hiking up a mountain road toward a secret tryst, she encounters a shocking sight: a silent, forested valley that looks like a lake of fire. While she understands it as a cautionary miracle, a raft of other explanations is heard from scientists, religious leaders, and the media. Rural farmers  cone into unexpected contact with urbane journalists, opportunists, sightseers, and a striking biologist with his own stake in the outcome. The community judges Dellarobia and her miracle, while she confronts her family, her church, her town, and a larger world, in a flight toward truth that could undo all she has ever believed.

“Kingsolver has written one of the more thoughtful novels about the scientific, financial and psychological intricacies of climate change….” (Ron Charles, Washington Post)

Discussion led by Andy Beers.

For December, 2019 HaKol, news from the HS Book Discussion Group

THERE WILL BE NO BOOK DISCUSSION GROUP MEETING IN DECEMBER. The group will resume its meetings in January, 2010.

For January, 2020 HaKol, news from the HS Book Discussion Group

The HS Book Group Discusses Necessary Stories, by Haim Watzman, January 28^th, 7:00 to 8:30 pm, at Havurah

Twenty-four stories of Israeli and Jewish life, chosen from the more than one hundred Haim Watzman has written over the last nine years in his "Necessary Stories" column in the Jerusalem Report. Bookended by a flashback to his first weekend in Israel forty years ago and a storytelling encounter on a recent flight back home from the US, these stories-funny, meditative, and sad, set in immigrant camps, the army, and the author's own neighborhood in south Jerusalem-uniquely capture what it is like, in our age, to be an Israeli and a Jew. The stories touch on technology, immigration, marriage, parenting, death, duty, and tradition in modern Israel and contemporary Judaism.

Necessary Stories is a quietly beautiful work, haunting in places, gently funny in others, written by a graceful, thoughtful, eloquent man who understands that life itself is not enough. One must live to tell the tale.”
— Joseph Skibell, from the Introduction  

Discussion led by Stacey Hankin.