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Check out our past selections:

Love with Noodles

by Harry Freund

Synopsis

Stockbroker Dan Gelder, age sixty, has a posh Fifth Avenue address, is two years a widower, and remains faithful to his deceased wife. Numbed by grief, he is annoyed by the attentions of the women introduced to him by friends. Then he meets Violet Finkel, Susan Klein, Myra Cox, and Tatiana Andrevsky. Violet tempts him with limitless luxury and profound affection, which he discovers on a journey with her to Jerusalem. But plumpish, pretty Susan offers him cookies in her kitchen. Myra, an activist dedicated to the cause — and jewelry — of Native Americans, tests the strength of his lower back. Exotic Tatiana weds beauty to mystery, and grace to pride, as she strives to overcome a Russian immigrant's poverty for herself and her young son. Meanwhile, Dan's son, Eric, is facing bankruptcy, which Dan can handle more readily than Eric's marriage proposal to the gorgeous shiksa Carol Hoffman. Forced to examine this unexpected crisis in terms of his own faith and his Jewish heritage, Dan finds that more than his libido has been renewed.

This comic, yet wise, delightful novel views the follies and fallibilities of romance at a certain age — serving up love deliciously, with noodles.

Omaha Blues: A Memory Loop

by Joseph Lelyveld

 

Synopsis

In the basement of the Cleveland synagogue where his father, Arthur, was a celebrated rabbi, Joseph Lelyveld finds a musty trunk of souvenirs. Applying his award-winning investigative skills, as both a newspaperman and author, Lelyveld uses his father's letters and mementos to rediscover his shakily remembered childhood, and his parent's unhappy marriage. Lelyveld's journey through personal history unexpectedly touches landmarks of the past century--the Scottsboro trials, the Zionist movement, the Hollywood blacklist, and Mississippi's "freedom summer" of 1964--and, in the words of Joan Didion, "this astonishing journal of personal discovery" combines "both a powerfully affecting family history and a political history of the most complex kind."

Ordinary Heroes

Stewart Dubinsky knew his father had served in World War II. And he'd been told how David Dubin (as his father had Americanized the name that Stewart later reclaimed) had rescued Stewart's mother from the horror of the Balingen concentration camp. But when he discovers, after his father's death, a packet of wartime letters to a former fiancée, and learns of his father's court-martial and imprisonment, he is plunged into the mystery of his family's secret history and driven to uncover the truth about this enigmatic, distant man who'd always refused to talk about his war.
As he pieces together his father's past through military archives, letters, and, finally, notes from a memoir his father wrote while in prison, secretly preserved by the officer who defended him, Stewart starts to assemble a dramatic and baffling chain of events. He learns how Dubin, a JAG lawyer attached to Patton's Third Army and desperate for combat experience, got more than he bargained for when he was ordered to arrest Robert Martin, a wayward OSS officer who, despite his spectacular bravery with the French Resistance, appeared to be acting on orders other than his commanders'. In pursuit of Martin, Dubin and his sergeant are parachuted into Bastogne just as the Battle of the Bulge reaches its apex. Pressed into the leadership of a desperately depleted rifle company, the men are forced to abandon their quest for Martin and his fiery, maddeningly elusive comrade, Gita, as they fight for their lives through carnage and chaos, the likes of which Dubin could never have imagined.
In reconstructing the terrible events and agonizing choices his father faced on the battlefield, in the courtroom, and in love, Stewart gains a closer understanding of his past, of his father's character, and of the brutal nature of war itself.

The World to Come by Dara Horn

An intoxicating combination of mystery, spirituality, redemption, piety, and passion, The World To Come is Dara Horn's follow-up to her breakout critically acclaimed debut novel In the Image. Using a real-life art heist as her starting point, Horn traces the life and times of several characters, including Russian-born artist Marc Chagall and the New Jersey-based Ziskind family.