JACQUI RODGERS, Director. The Jacob Gitlin Library is thrilled to be a partner of the Jewish Literary Festival on 28 April. The books featured at the Festival are available at the Library for your reading enjoyment. You have a literary feast awaiting you – if you are not a member, join now! The Gitlin team wishes you a Chag Pesach Sameach.
A BRILLIANT LIFE by RACHELLE UNREICH. A powerful story of Holocaust survivor Mira, born in Czechoslovakia, as told to her daughter Rachelle after Mira’s terminal cancer diagnosis. Rachelle was expecting to hear the harrowing story again of her mother’s Holocaust imprisonment. Despite this, Mira tells of her life which she pursued with passion and purpose. A life-affirming story of love, loss and faith in this daughter’s love letter to her mother.
MUSIC AS MEDICINE by DANIEL LEVITIN. In his latest work, Levitin, neuroscientist and award-winning composer and musician, explores the curative powers of music. He shows how music can contribute to the treatment of a host of ailments from neurodegenerative diseases to cognitive injury, depression and pain. A dazzling work, including interviews with some of today’s celebrated musicians such as Sting.
THE PARIS MUSE by LOUISA TREGER. When Dora Maar, a French photographer, painter and poet, meets Pablo Picasso, she is immediately drawn to him. This is a fictionalised retelling of their disturbing love story. Set in France, Treger provides an insight into how Picasso was a genius who side-stepped the rules in his human relationships as he did in his art.
PRESENT TENSE by NATALIE CONYER. Retired police chief Piet Pieterse has been murdered and necklaced. Veteran policeman Schalk Lourens is trying to put the past behind him but, when his old boss is murdered, he is put on the case. It is a South African election year and the country is volatile. Schalk must tread the path between the new regime and the old, personal and professional relationships, and justice and revenge.
FERVOUR by TOBY LLOYD. In the opening chapter set in 1999, the Rosenthal family – Eric and Hannah and their three children – are facing the imminent death of Eric’s father, Yosef, a Holocaust survivor. Each of his grandchildren spoke to Yosef in his final hours and received some sort of wisdom. Following Yosef’s death, his granddaughter Elsie’s behaviour changes. Most of the narrative is written from the perspective of a family friend.
THE WILD DATE PALM by DIANE ARMSTRONG. During a train journey across Turkey’s Anatolian Plain in 1915, Shoshana Adelstein witnesses the slaughter of the Armenians. Convinced that her Jewish community in a small outpost of the Ottoman Empire will soon meet a similar fate, she enlists a group of co-conspirators to form a clandestine spy ring to pass on intelligence to the British. Based on a true story.
FAMILY ROMANCE by JEAN STROUSE. The author traces the story of the Wertheimers, a wealthy Anglo-Jewish family, and the American portrait painter John Sargent, commissioned to paint them. The Wertheimer children were part of the first generation of British Jews to attend Harrow, Cambridge and Oxford. The paintings are so evocative that Strouse uses them to introduce each one to the readers describing how they interacted as a family.
THE ONLY JEW IN THE ROOM by AVI SHALEV. After serving as an intelligence officer in the Israeli Defence Forces, primarily in the West Bank and Gaza, Avi Shalev enrolled in Al-Qasemi College, an Arab Islamic college near Netanya. He was the first Jewish student to attend, and his interest was to gain insight into Israel’s Arab Palestinian society.
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