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"BHC is a warm, welcoming Jewish community.
- Philip Abraham 
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Book ClubINFO: Evelyn Gorman at 410-828-0144 To download a flyer, click here.
Monday, November 9, 7 pm • The Girl From Foreign by Sadia Shepard Facilitator Gerri Kobren In this elegantly crafted memoir, the author sets out to fulfill her grandmother’s dying wish that she learn about her heritage. Her grandmother had grown up among the Bene Israel, a small Jewish community in India; when she married a Muslim, she left Judaism and, eventually, India. Shepard herself is the product of a Pakistani Muslim mother and an American Christian father. After receiving a Fulbright, she undertook documenting the remaining Indian Jews, whose numbers have steadily dwindled through immigration to Israel. “Shepard’s —Excerpted from The New Yorker
Facilitator Evelyn Gorman In The Help, Kathryn Stockett’s button-pushing novel about black domestic servants working in white Southern households in the 1960s, one woman works especially tirelessly. She is Miss Skeeter Phelan, a white woman. The other white women of The Help don’t do demeaning jobs. They don’t do much of anything else either. Brave, tenacious Skeeter is slaving away on a book that will blow the lid off the suffering endured by black maids at the hands of their white employers in Jackson, Mississippi. She’s going to call it “Niceville,” but all Jackson’s post-sorority girls from Ole Miss will be up in arms if Skeeter’s tell-all book sees the light of day.
Monday, March 8, 7 pm • The Girl in the Green Sweater by Krystyna Chiger Facilitator Linda Litofsky In 1943, with Lvov’s 150,000 Jews exiled, killed, or facing extermination, a group of Polish Jews daringly sought refuge in the city’s sewer system. The last surviving member this group, Krystyna Chiger, shares one of the most intimate, harrowing, and ultimately triumphant tales of survival to emerge from the Holocaust, Chiger’s first-person account of the fourteen months she spent with her family in the fetid sewers of Lvov. It is also the story of sewer worker Leopold Socha, the group’s unlikely savior, Polish Catholic and former thief, who risked his life to help Chiger’s underground family survive. It is ultimately a tale of survival, friendship, and redemption.
Tuesday, May 11, 7 pm • The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit by Lucette Lagnado Facilitator Helene Waranch A stunning memoir about the author’s father, Leon Lagnado, a prosperous businessman in Cairo during and after World War II; one of the city’s most elegant boulevardiers, he and his family lived a life of unalloyed luxury. In the wake of the Suez Canal crisis, with anti-Semitism growing in Egypt and Nasser’s nationalization of more and more businesses, Jewish families began leaving the country in droves, driven by the realization that “life as they had known it was over.” Forced to leave in 1963, his family’s entire lives packed into 26 suitcases, Leon suddenly found himself “destitute, dependent on charity for himself and his family to survive,” fleeing to any country that would accept them. |
