I find it difficult to believe that June is already over! Sweet Girl finished 7th grade and went to summer camp, only to return home after 2 weeks having contracted Covid. After a few days of misery and fever, she is now all better.
I spent those days while she was away catching up with Mr. B, taking some classes, and enjoying the quiet and space. I felt good that I finally organized all the little packets of leftover diamond painting beads into a binder.
I have a few tasks I hope to complete in July: reorganizing my bookshelves, creating a scrapbook of SG’s bat mitzvah, going through emails, among others. We’ll see if that happens!
OK. On to the books!
Summer Hours at the Robbers Library by Sue Halpern
This is a quick read and an engaging story about people who come together for various reasons in a small town library and help each other heal from various life events.
“Listen Kit, Dr. Bondhi said to her, what you’ve got to understand is that you didn’t lose your life. You lost the life you thought you were living and those are two different things. You are alive. It may not feel like it, but you are and part of being alive means experiencing loss. We lose things everyday. I’m not talking about eyeglasses (yes we lose those too). I mean things like eyesight. Eyesight diminishes over time. Hair falls out. That’s natural. It’s so natural that we chalk it up to inevitability, but that’s loss. Loss is inevitable. It comes in many sizes. Yours is huge, don’t think I’m discounting it, but the smaller everyday losses help us deal with the big ones. It’s muscle memory and the fact that you are in so much pain is actually a good sign. I’d be worried if you were numb. It tells me that you are alive.”
Book Lovers by Emily Henry
I don’t know why I read this one… it just kept appearing in ads and emails. It was an engaging story about two rival editors who end up together.
People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present by Dara Horn
Horn finds that her value of Judaism if far different from how non-Jews think of it. “What Jewish identity meant to those people, it turned out, was simply a state of non-being: not being Christian or Muslim or whatever else other people apparently were (in Britain, for instance, more people identify as Jedis than as Jews), being alienated, being marginalized, or best of all, being dead.” She says that she “had mistaken the enormous public interest in past Jewish suffering for a sign of respect for living Jews. I was very wrong.”
So she goes on to unravel and “articulate the endless unspoken ways in which the popular obsession with dead Jews, even in its most apparently benign and civic-minded forms, is a profound affront to human dignity.”
“Jewish Heritage Sites” is a much better name than “Property Seized from Dead or Expelled Jews.” Horn tells about the fascination with Anne Frank, why people believe Jewish family names were changed at Ellis Island and what happened instead, the history of Harbin, China, and much more. We even get to listen in on her discussion with her 10-year-old son about Shylock in The Merchant of Venice.
“The lethal attacks on American Jews in recent years have been so shocking and disorienting not merely because of their sheer violent horror, but because they contradict the story American Jews have told themselves for generations, which is that America has never been a place where antisemitism affected anyone’s life. We don’t simply prefer this founding legend. We need it. The story is more important than the history, because the story is the device that makes meaning.”
“Since ancient times, in every place they have ever lived, Jews have represented the frightening prospect of freedom. As long as Jews existed in any society, there was evidence that it in fact wasn’t necessary to believe what everyone else believed, that those who disagreed with their neighbors could survive and even flourish against all odds. The Jews’ continued distinctiveness, despite overwhelming pressure to become like everyone else, demonstrated their enormous effort to cultivate that freedom: devotion to law and story, deep literacy, and an absolute obsessiveness about consciously transmitting those values between generations. The existence of Jews in any society is a reminder that freedom is possible, but only with responsibility—and that freedom without responsibility is no freedom at all.”
“But these questions fall short by assuming that the perpetrators were irrelevant. As long as we are questioning the choices that were made, shouldn’t we be considering the possibility of the Holocaust not happening at all? If someone was in a position to choose whether to save person A or person B, shouldn’t whole societies have been in the position to reject the notion of genocide altogether? Why didn’t everyone become Denmark?”
“The Holocaust didn’t happen because of a lack of love. It happened because entire societies abdicated responsibility for their own problems, and instead blamed them on the people who represented—have always represented, since they first introduced the idea of commandedness to the world—the thing they were most afraid of: responsibility.”
The Music Shop: A Novel by Rachel Joyce
“Frank could not play music. He could not read a score. He had no practical knowledge whatsoever, but when he sat in front of a customer and truly listened, he heard a kind of song. He wasn’t talking a full-blown symphony. It would have been a few notes at the most, a strain. It didn’t happen all the time. Only when he let go of being Frank and inhabited a space that was more in the middle.”
Frank connects people with the song they most need to hear. This is a love story about a woman who comes into his shop and ultimately (like over decades!) helps him heal from very old wounds. It’s a lovely, if quirky, quick read with many enjoyable characters.
“Jazz was about the spaces between notes. It was about what happened when you listened to the thing inside you, the gaps and the cracks, because that was where life really happened, if you were brave enough to free fall.”
If All the Seas Were Ink: A Memoir by Ilana Kurshan
Tens of thousands of Jews around the world learn daf yomi, and they are all literally on the same page. This is because daf yomi is not just about learning a page of Talmud a day. It’s about learning a specific page, the same page that everyone else is learning, following a schedule that was fixed in 1923 when Rabbi Meir Shapiro of the Lublin Yeshiva first conceived of the program. Kurshan writes about her life in the context of her regular Talmud study.
Please see my review of this book here.
Thanks for reading!
