The Temple B’nai Abraham Book Group has engaging, meaningful, and edifying conversations about a different book each month. Books are available for purchase on Amazon and at other booksellers.

Each month, Book Group is on Zoom from 7:30-8:30 p.m.

The Most Human: Reconciling with My Father, Leonard Nimoy, by Adam Nimoy

September 18

While the tabloids and fan publications portrayed the Nimoys as a “close family,” to his son Adam, Leonard Nimoy was a total stranger.

The actor was as inscrutable as the iconic half-Vulcan science officer he portrayed on Star Trek, even to those close to him. Now, his son’s poignant memoir explores their complicated relationship and how it informed his views on marriage, parenting, and later, sobriety. Despite their differences, both men ventured down parallel paths: marriages leading to divorce, battling addiction, and finding recovery. Most notably, both men struggled to take the ninth step in their AA journey: to make amends with each other.

Discover how the son of Spock learned to navigate this tumultuous relationship—from Shabbat dinners to basement AA meetings—and how he was finally able to reconcile with his father—and with himself.

Adam Nimoy is a graduate of UC Berkeley and Loyola Law School. After seven years in entertainment law, he left to pursue a directing career. Nimoy has directed over forty-five hours of network television, as well as directing the critically acclaimed documentary film about his father. For the Love of Spock (2016) was the Official Selection at the Tribeca Film Festival. He was featured in the New York Times article "To Boldly Explore Jewish Roots of Star Trek" and he published a Father's Day piece about his relationship with his father for the Boston Globe. He is the author of My Incredibly Wonderful, Miserable Life and has been in 12-step recovery for twenty years.

Long Island Compromise by Taffy Brodesser-Akner - November 13

In 1980, a wealthy businessman named Carl Fletcher is kidnapped from his driveway, brutalized, and held for ransom. He is returned to his wife and kids less than a week later, only slightly the worse, and the family moves on with their lives, resuming their prized places in the saga of the American dream, comforted in the realization that though their money may have been what endangered them, it is also what assured them their safety.

But now, nearly forty years later, it’s clear that perhaps nobody ever got over anything, after all. Carl has spent the ensuing years secretly seeking closure to the matter of his kidnapping, while his wife, Ruth, has spent her potential protecting her husband’s emotional health. Their three grown children aren’t doing much better: Nathan’s chronic fear won’t allow him to advance at his law firm; Beamer, a Hollywood screenwriter, will consume anything—substance, foodstuff, women—in order to numb his own perpetual terror; and Jenny has spent her life so bent on proving that she’s not a product of her family’s pathology that she has come to define it. As they hover at the delicate precipice of a different kind of survival, they learn that the family fortune has dwindled to just about nothing, and they must face desperate questions about how much their wealth has played a part in both their lives’ successes and failures.

Long Island Compromise spans the entirety of one family’s history, winding through decades and generations, all the way to the outrageous present, and confronting the mainstays of American Jewish life: tradition, the pursuit of success, the terror of history, fear of the future, old wives’ tales, evil eyes, ambition, achievement, boredom, dybbuks, inheritance, pyramid schemes, right-wing capitalists, beta-blockers, psychics, and the mostly unspoken love and shared experience that unite a family forever.

Taffy Brodesser-Akner is a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine and the New York Times bestselling author of Fleishman Is in Trouble, which has been translated into more than a dozen languages. She is also the creator and executive producer of its Emmy-nominated limited series adaptation for FX. Long Island Compromise is her second novel.

The Hebrew Teacher by Maya Arad – December 11

Three Israeli women, their lives altered by immigration to the United States, seek to overcome crises. Ilana is a veteran Hebrew instructor at a Midwestern college who has built her life around her career. When a young Hebrew literature professor joins the faculty, she finds his post-Zionist politics pose a threat to her life’s work. Miriam, whose son left Israel to make his fortune in Silicon Valley, pays an unwanted visit to meet her new grandson and discovers cracks in the family’s perfect façade. Efrat, another Israeli in California, is determined to help her daughter navigate the challenges of middle school, and crosses forbidden lines when she follows her into the minefield of social media. In these three stirring novellas — comedies of manners with an ambitious blend of irony and sensitivity— celebrated Israeli author Maya Arad probes the demise of idealism and the generation gap that her heroines must confront.

Maya Arad is the author of eleven books of Hebrew fiction, as well as studies in literary criticism and linguistics. Born in Israel in 1971, she received a PhD in linguistics from University College London and for the past twenty years has lived in California where she is currently writer in residence at Stanford University’s Taube Center for Jewish Studies.

The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store by James McBride – January 15

In 1972, when workers in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, were digging the foundations for a new development, the last thing they expected to find was a skeleton at the bottom of a well. Who the skeleton was and how it got there were two of the long-held secrets kept by the residents of Chicken Hill, the dilapidated neighborhood where immigrant Jews and African Americans lived side by side and shared ambitions and sorrows. Chicken Hill was where Moshe and Chona Ludlow lived when Moshe integrated his theater and where Chona ran the Heaven & Earth Grocery Store. When the state came looking for a deaf boy to institutionalize him, it was Chona and Nate Timblin, the Black janitor at Moshe’s theater and the unofficial leader of the Black community on Chicken Hill, who worked together to keep the boy safe.

As these characters’ stories overlap and deepen, it becomes clear how much the people who live on the margins of white, Christian America struggle and what they must do to survive. When the truth is finally revealed about what happened on Chicken Hill and the part the town’s white establishment played in it, McBride shows us that even in dark times, it is love and community—heaven and earth—that sustain us.

Bringing his masterly storytelling skills and his deep faith in humanity to The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, James McBride has written a novel as compassionate as Deacon King Kong and as inventive as The Good Lord Bird.

James McBride is the author of the New York Times–bestselling Oprah’s Book Club selection Deacon King Kong, the National Book Award–winning The Good Lord Bird, the American classic The Color of Water, the novels Song Yet Sung and Miracle at St. Anna, the story collection Five-Carat Soul, and Kill ’Em and Leave, a biography of James Brown. The recipient of a National Humanities Medal and an accomplished musician, McBride is also a distinguished writer in residence at New York University.

The Punk Rock Queen of the Jews by Chef Rossi – February 12

This is Rossi’s wild, queer coming-of-age story. Rossi was taught only to aspire to marry a nice Jewish boy and to be a good kosher Jewish girl. At sixteen she flowers into a rebellious punk-rock rule-breaker who runs away to seek adventure. Her freedom is cut short when her parents kidnap her and dump her with a Chasidic rabbi—a “cult buster” known for “reforming” wayward Jewish girls—in Crown Heights, Brooklyn.

Rossi spends the next couple of years in a repressive, misogynistic culture straight out of the nineteenth century, forced to trade in her pink hair and Sex Pistols T-shirt for maxi skirts and long-sleeved blouses and endure not only bone-crunching boredom but also outright abuse and violence.

The Punk-Rock Queen of the Jews is filled with wonderfully rich characters, hilarious dialogue, and keen portraits of the secretive hothouse Orthodox world and the struggling New York City of the 1980s: dirty, on the edge, but fully vital and embracing.

Rossi has been published in outlets including The Daily News, The New York Post, Time Out New York, and Mcsweeney’s, to name a few. She has been the food writer of the “Eat Me” column for Bust magazine since 1998, hosts her own hit radio show on WOMR and WFMR in Cape Cod called Bite This, now in its nineteenth season, has been featured on The Food Network and NPR and has been a popular blogger for The Huffington Post. Her first memoir, The Raging Skillet: The True Life Story of Chef Rossi was published by The Feminist Press to rave reviews. In addition to memoir, Rossi has written two full-length plays and several short plays.

Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum: The Rise and Fall of an American Organized-Crime Boss

by Margalit Fox – March 12

In 1850, an impoverished twenty-five-year-old named Fredericka Mandelbaum came to New York in steerage and worked as a peddler on the streets of Lower Manhattan. By the 1870s she was a fixture of high society and an admired philanthropist. How was she able to ascend from tenement poverty to vast wealth?

In the intervening years, “Marm” Mandelbaum had become the country’s most notorious “fence”—a receiver of stolen goods—and a criminal mastermind. By the mid-1880s as much as $10 million worth of purloined luxury goods (nearly $300 million today) had passed through her Lower East Side shop. Called “the nucleus and center of the whole organization of crime,” she planned robberies of cash, gold and diamonds throughout the country.

But Mrs. Mandelbaum wasn’t just a successful crook: She was a business visionary—one of the first entrepreneurs in America to systemize the scattershot enterprise of property crime. Handpicking a cadre of the finest bank robbers, housebreakers and shoplifters, she handled logistics and organized supply chains—turning theft into a viable, scalable business.

The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum paints a vivid portrait of Gilded Age New York—a city teeming with nefarious rogues, capitalist power brokers and Tammany Hall bigwigs, all straddling the line between underworld enterprise and “legitimate” commerce. Combining deep historical research with the narrative flair for which she is celebrated, Margalit Fox tells the unforgettable true story of a once-famous heroine whose life exemplifies America’s cherished rags-to-riches narrative while simultaneously upending it entirely.

Margalit Fox originally trained as a cellist and a linguist before pursuing journalism. As a senior writer in The New York Times’s Obituary News Department, she wrote the front-page public sendoffs of some of the leading cultural figures of our age. She is the winner of the William Saroyan Prize for Literature and author of four previous nonfiction books, The Confidence Men, Conan Doyle for the Defense, The Riddle of the Labyrinth and Talking Hands.

The Goddess of Warsaw by Lisa Barr – April 9

The Goddess of Warsaw is an enthralling tale of a legendary Hollywood screen goddess with a dark secret about her life in the Warsaw Ghetto. When the famous actress is threatened by someone from her past, she must put her skills into play to protect herself, her illustrious career, and those she loves, then and now. 

Los Angeles, 2005. Sienna Hayes, Hollywood’s latest It Girl, has ambitions to work behind the camera. When she meets Lena Browning, the enormously mysterious and famous Golden Age movie star, Sienna sees her big break. She wants to direct a picture about Lena’s life—but the legendary actor’s murky past turns out to be even darker than Sienna dreamed. Before she was a Living Legend, Lena Browning was Bina Blonski, a Polish Jew whose life and family were destroyed by the Nazis.

Warsaw, 1943. A member of the city’s Jewish elite, Bina Blonski and her husband, Jakub, are imprisoned in the ghastly, cramped ghetto along with the rest of Warsaw’s surviving Jews. Determined to fight back against the brutal Nazis, the beautiful, blonde Aryan-looking Bina becomes a spy, gaining information and stealing weapons outside the ghetto to protect her fellow Jews. But her dangerous circumstances grow complicated when she falls in love with Aleksander, an ally in resistance—and Jakub’s brother. While Lena accomplishes amazing feats of bravery, she sacrifices much in the process.

Over a decade after escaping the horrors of the ghetto, Bina, now known as Lena, rises to fame in Hollywood. Yet she cannot help but be reminded of her old life and hungers for revenge against the Nazis who escaped justice after the war. Her power and fame as a movie star offer Lena the chance to right the past’s wrongs . . . and perhaps even find the happy ending she never had.

A gripping page-turner of one of history’s most heroic uprisings and an actress whose personal war never ends, The Goddess Of Warsaw is filled with secrets, lies, twists and turns, and a burning pursuit of justice no matter the cost.

Lisa Barr is the New York Times bestselling author of Woman on Fire, The Unbreakables, and the award-winning historical thriller Fugitive Colors. She has served as an editor for The Jerusalem Post, managing editor of Today's Chicago Woman and Moment magazine, and as an editor and reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times. She has appeared on Good Morning America and Today for her work as an author, journalist, and blogger. Actress Sharon Stone is set to produce and star in the film adaptation of Woman on Fire.

The Dove Keepers by Alice Hoffman – May 14

Nearly two thousand years ago, nine hundred Jews held out for months against armies of Romans on Masada, a mountain in the Judean desert. According to the ancient historian Josephus, two women and five children survived. Based on this tragic and iconic event, Hoffman’s novel is a spellbinding tale of four extraordinarily bold, resourceful, and sensuous women, each of whom has come to Masada by a different path. Yael’s mother died in childbirth, and her father, an expert assassin, never forgave her for that death. Revka, a village baker’s wife, watched the murder of her daughter by Roman soldiers; she brings to Masada her young grandsons, rendered mute by what they have witnessed. Aziza is a warrior’s daughter, raised as a boy, a fearless rider and expert marksman who finds passion with a fellow soldier. Shirah, born in Alexandria, is wise in the ways of ancient magic and medicine, a woman with uncanny insight and power.

The lives of these four complex and fiercely independent women intersect in the desperate days of the siege. All are dovekeepers, and all are also keeping secrets—about who they are, where they come from, who fathered them, and whom they love.

Alice Hoffman is the author of more than thirty works of fiction, including The Marriage of Opposites, Practical Magic, The Red Garden, the Oprah’s Book Club selection Here on Earth, The Museum of Extraordinary Things, and The Dovekeepers.

Books read and discussed Previously 
2023-24:

The Woman Beyond the Sea
by Sarit Yishai-Levi - June 5

An immersive historical tale spanning the life stories of three women, The Woman Beyond the Sea traces the paths of a daughter, mother, and grandmother who lead entirely separate lives, until finally their stories and their hearts are joined together.

Eliya thinks that she’s finally found true love and passion with her charismatic and demanding husband, an aspiring novelist — until he ends their relationship in a Paris café, spurring her suicide attempt. Seeking to heal herself, Eliya is compelled to piece together the jagged shards of her life and history. 

Eliya’s heart-wrenching journey leads her to a profound and unexpected love, renewed family ties, and a reconciliation with her orphaned mother, Lily. Together, the two women embark on a quest to discover the truth about themselves and Lily’s own origins…and the unknown woman who set their stories in motion one Christmas Eve.

Sarit Yishai-Levi was born in Jerusalem in 1947 to a Sephardic family that has lived in the city for seven generations. Before turning to journalism, Yishai-Levi acted in theater and film for several years. Yishai-Levi has published four non-fiction books. Her first novel, The Beauty Queen of Jerusalem, was a bestseller in Israel. It is now a series on Netflix.

Previously read this year:

Catch-67:  The Left, the Right, and the Legacy of the Six-Day War
by Micah Goodman – May 8

Since the Six-Day War, Israelis have been entrenched in a national debate over whether to keep the land they conquered or to return some, if not all, of the territories to Palestinians.

In a balanced and insightful analysis, Micah Goodman deftly sheds light on the ideas that have shaped Israelis' thinking on both sides of the debate, and among secular and religious Jews about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Through philosophical critique and political analysis, Goodman builds a creative, compelling case for pragmatism in a dispute where a comprehensive solution seems impossible.

Micah Goodman is the author of four best-selling books in Israel including Maimonides and the Book That Changed Judaism. He is president of Beit Midrash Yisraeli–Ein Prat, and a senior fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem.

The Night Travelers
by Armando Lucas Correa – April 17

Berlin, 1931: Ally Keller, a talented young poet, is alone and scared when she gives birth to a mixed-race daughter she names Lilith. As the Nazis rise to power, Ally knows she must keep her baby in the shadows to protect her against Hitler’s deadly ideology of Aryan purity. But as she grows, it becomes more and more difficult to keep Lilith hidden so Ally sets in motion a dangerous and desperate plan to send her daughter across the ocean to safety.

Havana, 1958: Now an adult, Lilith has few memories of her mother or her childhood in Germany. Besides, she’s too excited for her future with her beloved Martin, a Cuban pilot with strong ties to the Batista government. But as the flames of revolution ignite, Lilith and her newborn daughter, Nadine, find themselves at a terrifying crossroads.

Berlin, 1988: As a scientist in Berlin, Nadine is dedicated to ensuring the dignity of the remains of all those who were murdered by the Nazis. Yet she has spent her entire lifetime avoiding the truth about her own family’s history. It takes her daughter, Luna, to encourage Nadine to uncover the truth about the choices her mother and grandmother made to ensure the survival of their children. And it will fall to Luna to come to terms with a shocking betrayal that changes everything she thought she knew about her family’s past.

Separated by time but united by sacrifice, four women embark on journeys of self-discovery and find themselves to be living testaments to the power of motherly love.

Armando Lucas Correa is a Cuban author, editor, and an award-winning journalist, and the recipient of several awards from the National Association of Hispanic Publications and the Society of Professional Journalists. He is the author of the international bestseller The German Girl (Atria Books/Simon & Schuster), which is now being published in sixteen languages and in more than 30 countries. For The Night Travelers, Correa received the Creative Writing Awards of the Cintas Foundation. He lives in Manhattan with his husband and their three children.

Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel's Targeted Assassinations 
by Ronen Bergman – March 12

The Talmud says: “If someone comes to kill you, rise up and kill him first.” This instinct to take every measure, even the most aggressive, to defend the Jewish people is hardwired into Israel’s DNA. From the very beginning of its statehood in 1948, targeted assassinations have been used countless times, on enemies large and small, sometimes in response to attacks against the Israeli people and sometimes preemptively.

In this page-turning, eye-opening book, journalist and military analyst Ronen Bergman offers a riveting inside account of the targeted killing programs: their successes, their failures, and the moral and political price exacted on the men and women who approved and carried out the missions.

Bergman studied law at the University of Haifa and graduated cum laude from its law school. He also holds an M.Phil. degree in international relations, and a PhD, with his dissertation being on the Mossad. Bergman is the recipient of the 1995 Bnei Brith Worlds Center Award for Journalism and the 1996 Ha’aretz award for Best Story. 

Signal Fires: A Novel
by Dani Shapiro – February 7

Division Street is full of secrets. An impulsive lie begets a secret — one which will forever haunt the Wilf family. And the Shenkmans, who move into the neighborhood many years later, bring secrets of their own. Spanning fifty kaleidoscopic years, on a street — and in a galaxy — where stars collapse and stories collide, these two families become bound in ways they never could have imagined.

Dani Shapiro is the best-selling author of the memoirs Hourglass, Still Writing, Devotion, and Slow Motion, and five novels including Black & White and Family History. Dani's latest book, Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love was published in 2019.

Eulogy
by Michael Laser – January 10

You think you know your father — but what if he kept secrets until the day he died? Just hours after delivering his father's eulogy, Ken Weintraub learns that this hard-working, unassuming man spent three years in prison. Consumed by the astonishing news, Ken sets out to unravel the mystery. 

Michael Laser writes novels for adults and younger readers. His website is michaellaser.com. 

Kantika
by Elizabeth Graver – October 4

A kaleidoscopic portrait of one family’s displacement across four countries, Kantika ― “song” in Ladino ― follows the joys and losses of Rebecca Cohen, feisty daughter of the Sephardic elite of early 20th-century Istanbul. 

Exploring identity, place, and exile, Kantika also reveals how the female body―in work, art and love―serves as a site of both suffering and joy.

Elizabeth Graver was long-listed for the 2013 National Book Awards Long List in Fiction for her 2013 novel, The End of the Point. Graver is the author of three other novels: Awake, The Honey Thief, and Unravelling. 

Unearthed:  A Lost Actress, a Forbidden Book, and a Search for Life in the Shadow of the Holocaust
by Meryl Frank – November 15

As a child, Meryl Frank's Aunt Mollie told her about Meryl’s cousin, the radiant Franya Winter. Franya was the leading light of Vilna’s Yiddish theater, a remarkable and precocious woman. Yet there was one thing her aunt Mollie would never tell Meryl: how Franya died. 

Unearthed is the story of Meryl’s search for Franya and a timely history of hatred and resistance. How do we honor such memories while keeping them from consuming us? And what do we teach our children about tragedy?

Meryl Frank is an international champion of women’s leadership, human rights, and political participation. She is also a frequent speaker on gender, health, environment, and refugee issues worldwide.

Leaving Eastern Parkway
by Matthew Daub – December 6

1991. As a fifteen-year-old Hasidic boy living in Crown Heights, Zev's parents are killed in a hit-and-run and everything changes. When his new living arrangement becomes problematic, Zev heads to Urbana, Illinois, to stay with his sister, Frida. The trouble is that she left the Jewish faith behind years ago, and going to her means Zev must turn his back on the only sort of life he knows.

The culture shock is intense. It’s a world full of choices he’s never had to consider. And now, like it or not, he must decide the type of man he wants to be.

Matthew Daub's watercolors and drawings have been widely exhibited for over four decades. He's had more than twenty solo exhibitions at galleries and museums throughout the United States. Leaving Eastern Parkway is his first novel.