Feb. 27: The Seven Good Years by Etgar Keret. Discussion Leader: Cathy Taylor. Israeli short-story writer Keret offers a nonfiction book detailing the seven years between the birth of his son following a terrorist attack and the death of his father, a Holocaust survivor.

March 27: The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara by David I. Kertzer. Discussion leader: Blanch Kahn. Historian Kertzer details the June 1858 kidnapping of a Jewish boy in Bologna, Italy. Because a household servant had secretly “baptized” Edgardo, he was considered a Catholic by the Church and taken from his family by officers of the Inquisition to a special monastery where his conversion would be completed.

April 24: Moonglow by Michael Chabon. Discussion leader: Helaine Weinstein. Jewish LearningWorks selected Moonglow for its One Bay One Book program. Pulitzer Prize-winning and local Bay Area author Chabon delivers a novel of truth and lies, family legends, and existential adventure—and the forces that work to destroy us. It is a tale of madness, of war and adventure, of sex and desire and ordinary love and of existential doubt that travels from the Jewish slums of prewar South Philly to the invasion of Germany, a Florida retirement village and New York’s Wallkill Prison.

May 15: An Officer and a Spy by Robert Harris; facilitated by Julie Lekach House.
Robert Harris returns to the thrilling historical fiction he has so brilliantly made his own. This is the story of the infamous Dreyfus affair told as a chillingly dark, hard-edged novel of conspiracy and espionage.

June 26: Book selections for 2017-18.