P’nai Or Book Club
The P’nai Or Book Club reads and discusses books that reflect the Jewish experience.
It meets the second Sunday of every month from 4 pm to 5 pm, usually over zoom.
Free to P’nai Or members; donations from guests are appreciated.
Jump to:
Audiobook source for people with vision issues.
Upcoming Books
Currently on a hiatus
Interested in hosting or facilitating Book Club meetups in your home?
Send a message to info@pnaiorpdx.org to get the ball rolling!
Previous Books
Dec 15, 2024
4pm - 5pm
Signal Fires
Dani Shapiro
An ancient majestic oak stands beneath the stars on Division Street. And under the tree sits Ben Wilf, a retired doctor, and ten-year-old Waldo Shenkman, a brilliant, lonely boy who is pointing out his favorite constellations. Waldo doesn’t realize it but he and Ben have met before. And they will again, and again. Across time and space, and shared destiny.
Great Books with Jewish Themes
Abbreviations:
H = # hard copies;
e = # electronic copies;
A = Audio Available
Titles:
A - K
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For more than eighty years the Jewish Daily Forward's legendary advice column, 'A Bintel Brief' dispensed shrewd, practical, and fair-minded advice to its readers
Not in Library, Inexpensive used copies on Amazon. Not on Audio.
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Linda Lavin-best known for the title role in the sitcom Alice-brings warmth and charm to this story of a Jewish girl's coming of age in early 20th-century America. Lavin's Boston accent and Yiddish pronunciation lend authenticity to this first-person bildungsroman. Diamant's (Day After Night) latest has Addie Baum recounting to a granddaughter her attempts to leave the physical and cultural claustrophobia of her parents' tenement world. While attending a book discussion group at a settlement house, Addie makes several friends and begins to achieve liberation as women are winning the right to vote and deciding their own direction in life. VERDICT Detailed and charming, this work is recommended for fans of Boston, American history, and Jewish immigrant tales.
Availability: Mult 3 HC, 1 E-copy, Audio
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The classic novel of Jewish immigrants, with period photographs. This masterwork of American immigrant literature is set in the 1920s on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and tells the story of Sara Smolinsky, the youngest daughter of an Orthodox rabbi, who rebels against her father's rigid conception of Jewish womanhood. Sarah's struggle towards independence and self-fulfillment resonates with a passion all can share. Bread Givers is an essential historical work with enduring relevance. 16 black-and-white photographs
Availability Good but library does not have an audio copy. Mult Lib - many hard and E-copies. Audio available on Amazon for $5.99.
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From the indie rock sensation known as Japanese Breakfast, an unforgettable memoir about family, food, grief, love, and growing up Korean American—“in losing her mother and cooking to bring her back to life, Zauner became herself” (NPR). • CELEBRATING OVER ONE YEAR ON THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER LIST
Availability: Many copies in library, hundreds of holds.
(This book does not have a Jewish theme but it’s something we’d probably like to read).
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Hailed by the New York Times for the renowned feminist author’s “mesmerizing, thrilling” truths within its pages―has been selected by the publication’s book critics as the #1 Best Memoir of the Past 50 Years.
Mult H 4, E4, Audio on Amazon but not in library.
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Chava, a golem brought to life by a disgraced rabbi, and Ahmad, a jinni made of fire, form an unlikely friendship on the streets of New York until a fateful choice changes everything.
Availability good. Mult. H 7, E 24, A
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Availability good. Mult H 8, e7, A
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NYT Best Seller. It's 1969 in New York City's Lower East Side, and word has spread of the arrival of a mystical woman, a traveling psychic who claims to be able to tell anyone the day they will die. The Gold children -- four adolescents on the cusp of self-awareness -- sneak out to hear their fortunes. Their prophecies inform their next five decades. Golden-boy Simon escapes to the West Coast, searching for love in '80s San Francisco. Dreamy Klara becomes a Las Vegas magician, obsessed with blurring reality and fantasy. Eldest son Daniel seeks security as an army doctor post-9/11, hoping to control fate. Bookish Varya throws herself into longevity research, where she tests the boundary between science and immortality. The Immortalists probes the line between destiny and choice, reality and illusion, this world and the next. It is a deeply moving testament to the power of story, the nature of belief, and the unrelenting pull of familial bonds.
Availability good.
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A kaleidoscopic portrait of one family’s displacement across four countries, Kantika—“song” in Ladino—follows the joys and losses of Rebecca Cohen, feisty daughter of the Sephardic elite of early 20th-century Istanbul. When the Cohens lose their wealth and are forced to move to Barcelona and start anew, Rebecca fashions a life and self from what comes her way—a failed marriage, the need to earn a living, but also passion, pleasure and motherhood. Moving from Spain to Cuba to New York for an arranged second marriage, she faces her greatest challenge—her disabled stepdaughter, Luna, whose feistiness equals her own and whose challenges pit new family against old.
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Two bakers on opposite sides of a longtime family feud must set aside their differences for a satisfying ending
Availability good. Mult. Cty Lib H 7, E 3, A
Titles:
L - T
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Brooklyn’s Hasidic community of Lubavitchers is turned upside down when family tragedy strikes and everyday life changes forever in the life of Zev Altshul. He is first placed into the care of the closed and close-knit community where he grew up, but soon realizes he can’t stay. His saving grace is handball; it’s his gift from God, and the one thing he can rely on as he is shuttled, chased, and abandoned by trusted elders, family, and friends. Even as Zev never fully escapes from the guilt of his choices, he sets course across the United States to discover where loyalty really lies and what it means. He seeks out his long-lost sister, only to find himself as unprepared for life outside the Lubavitcher community as he was unwilling to remain. Forced out of his second home, Zev plays handball to support himself in the goyische world, but obligations he doesn’t fully understand still tie him to Crown Heights and follow him to Chicago and New Mexico threatening always to return Zev to life among the Lubavitchers. Lyrical, vivid, and thoroughly engaging, this is certainly among the first novels of its kind.
not in library
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Non-fiction
Historian and journalist Olson (Last Hope Island) vivifies the history of the French Resistance during WWII with a brilliant, cinematic biography of resistance leader Marie-Madeleine Fourcade. As Olson recounts, Fourcade was 31 in 1941, a mother of two by her long-estranged husband, wealthy, beautiful, and temperamentally born to lead.
Availability good.
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In London's strict Orthodox Jewish Charedi sect, girls are customarily matched up and married off at a young age. At 19, Chani Kaufman is almost on the shelf. It comes as a welcome relief for her to learn that Baruch Levi, a serious rabbinical student, would like to meet her. The news is less welcome to the parents of both young people, as it disrupts the business of matchmaking
Limited availability in library. Audio and many inexpensive copies on Amazon.
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The long-awaited memoir by the superstar of stage, screen and recordings.
Availability limited. Hundreds of copies but hundreds of holds.
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Infamous Dreyfus affair told as a chillingly dark, hard-edged novel of conspiracy and espionage.
Availability: Limited. Mult E4, A
Amazon - many used copies from $1.00, kindle $10
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Jewish Book Council: Lansky’s memoir fascinates as it recounts how his relatively simple quest for books, as a graduate student of Yiddish in Montreal in the late 1970’s, turned into a rescue mission of historic proportions. In the author’s own words, it is an “adventure story” involving capers with a truck (invariably in bad condition) and a friend or two, as they respond to late-night telephone calls about abandoned Yiddish books in basements or on the verge of being jettisoned into dumpsters. But the adventure aspect of the book (told with suspense and humor) is intertwined with pathos. As word went out about his interest in Yiddish books, Lansky’s road trips took him to apartments in decaying neighborhoods, where elderly Yiddish speakers waited to entrust him with their legacy. Before he could load up on books, however, he had to load up on kugel and tea, and listen for hours to the old folks’ stories. And what stories they were!
Mult Library 1 hardcopy, 1 ebook
Amazon - many used copies from $1.25. Audiobook available.
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Historical novel follows the fortunes of four enterprising, courageous Jewish women on New York's Lower East Side.
not available in library, $5 e-copies on Amazon.
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Nonfiction
Bernstein' s tale is clearly not a typical memoir of the Holocaust. She was born into a large family in rural Romania...and grew up feisty and willing to fight back physically against anti-Semitism from other schoolchildren. She defied her father' s orders to turn down a scholarship that took her to Bucharest, and got herself expelled from that school when she responded to a priest/teacher's vicious diatribe against the Jews by hurling a bottle of ink at him...After a series of incidents that ranged from dramatic escapes to a year in a forced labor detachment, Sara ended up in Ravensbruck, a women' s concentration camp, and managed to survive.
Availability limited. Library only has 1 audio copy, no hard or ecopies.
Inexpensive hard copies on Amazon.
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The Tin Horse is a rich multigenerational story about the intense, often fraught bond sisters share and the dreams and sorrows that lay at the heart of the immigrant experience.
Availability good. Library has 3 e-copies, 1 audio . No holds.
Titles:
U - Z
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Novel of faith, love, and acceptance, from the international bestselling author of The Devil in Jerusalem
Fiction
Availability limited. Mult. Cty Lib H 1
Amazon used copies, audio
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From the critically acclaimed artist, designer, and author of the bestsellers The Principles of Uncertainty and My Favorite Things comes a wondrous collection of words and paintings that is a moving meditation on the beauty and complexity of women’s lives and roles, revealed in the things they hold.
Availability good BUT no audio. Mult. Cty Lib H 5, E 2
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Desperate to get her 12-year-old daughter, Lea, out of 1941 Berlin, Hanni Kohn trusts Ettie, the teen daughter of a rabbi, to create a golem--a clay figure brought to life by Ettie's magic. Unusually, Ava is shaped as a woman, and her raison d'être is to keep Lea safe.
Availability Good.
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The true story of how the keepers of the Warsaw Zoo saved hundreds of people from Nazi hands. When Germany invaded Poland, Stuka bombers devastated Warsaw--and the city's zoo along with it. With most of their animals dead, zookeepers Jan and Antonina Żabiński began smuggling Jews into empty cages
Availability Good.
Low Vision Resources
The Talking Book and Braille Library at the State Library of Oregon is a FREE Braille and audio book library for any Oregonian with a print-disability, which means a person cannot read standard-size 12pt print for long periods of time comfortably. Eligibility for our library includes the following:
Visual Impairment: needing aids stronger than regular reading glasses to read. Examples include (but are not limited to): Legal Blindness, Macular Degeneration, Cataracts, Glaucoma, Diabetic Retinopathy, etc.
Physical Impairment: inability to handle a book or turn its pages. Examples include (but are not limited to): Muscular Sclerosis, Parkinson’s, stroke, severe arthritis, paraplegia, traumatic brain injury, etc.
Reading Impairment: impairment in print comprehension. Examples include (but are not limited to): dyslexia, dysphasia, etc.