Book Club

The Jewish Center’s Book Club reads and discusses books of Jewish interest.

Our Book Club usually meets on the third Tuesday of the month.   Relax with a good book — and then join us for a lively and engaging discussion.  Everyone is welcome to participate, whether you enjoyed the book or not, and even if you haven’t finished it.

Multiple copies of our selections are usually available at the Princeton Public Library on the “Book Club” shelves.  Or you can purchase the book from Amazon. Every time you visit Amazon from our website, The Jewish Center earns up to 15% of each sale. 

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Best wishes to all for wonderful Thanksgiving gatherings—such a great American holiday!

We have the following Book Club meetings planned:

 

January 21 – The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum by Margalit Fox

A Jewish mother of four, a gracious society hostess, a beloved community member—and the first widely renowned crime boss in America. Discover the true story from the bestselling author of The Confidence Men.

In 1850, Fredericka Mandelbaum traveled to New York in steerage and worked as a peddler on the streets of Lower Manhattan. By the 1870s she was a widow with four children, a fixture of high society, and an admired philanthropist. What had enabled a woman on the margins of American life to ascend from tenement poverty to immense wealth?

In the intervening years, “Marm” Mandelbaum, as she was known, had become the country’s most notorious “fence”—a receiver of stolen goods—and a successful criminal mastermind. By the mid-1880s as much as $10 million worth of purloined luxury goods (the equivalent of nearly $300 million in today’s money) had passed through her modest haberdashery shop on the Lower East Side. Called “the nucleus and center of the whole organization of crime in New York City” by the New York Times, she planned, financed, and profited from robberies of cash, gold, diamonds, and silk throughout the city and across the United States.

But Fredericka Mandelbaum wasn’t just a successful person; she was a business visionary—one of the first entrepreneurs in America to systemize the formerly scattershot enterprise of property crime. Handpicking a cadre of New York’s foremost bank robbers, housebreakers, and shoplifters and neatly bribing anyone who stood in her way, she handled logistics and organized supply chains—turning theft into a viable, scalable business.

The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum paints a vivid image of Gilded Age New York—a city teeming with delightful rogues, capitalist power brokers, and Tammany Hall bigwigs, all of whom straddled the line between underworld enterprise and the realm of “legitimate” commerce. Combining deep historical research with the narrative flair for which she is celebrated, Margalit Fox tells the unforgettable story of a once-famous, now-forgotten heroine, a tale that exemplifies the cherished rags-to-riches narrative of Victorian America while simultaneously upending it altogether.

Get ready for the upcoming titles:

February 18 – Moonflower Murders by Anthony Horowitz 

‘A beautiful puzzle: fiendishly clever and hugely entertaining. A masterpiece.’ Lucy Foley, author of The Hunting Party

Retired publisher Susan Ryeland is running a small hotel on a Greek island with her long-term boyfriend. But life isn’t as idyllic as it should be: exhausted by the responsibility of making everything work on an island where nothing ever does, Susan is beginning to miss her literary life in London – even though her publishing career once entangled her in a lethal literary murder plot.

So when an English couple come to visit with tales of a murder that took place in a hotel the same day their daughter Cecily was married there, Susan can’t help but find herself fascinated.

And when they tell her that Cecily has gone missing a few short hours after reading Atticus Pund Takes The Case, a crime novel Susan edited some years previously, Susan knows she must return to London to find out what has happened.

The clues to the murder and to Cecily’s disappearance must lie within the pages of this novel.

But to save Cecily, Susan must place her own life in mortal danger…

March 18 – The Paris Daughter by Kristin Harmel

From the bestselling author of The Book of Lost Names comes a gripping historical novel about two mothers who must make unthinkable choices in the face of the Nazi occupation.

Paris, 1939: Young mothers Elise and Juliette become fast friends the day they meet in the beautiful Bois de Boulogne. Though there is a shadow of war creeping across Europe, neither woman suspects that their lives are about to irrevocably change.

When Elise becomes a target of the German occupation, she entrusts Juliette with the most precious thing in her life—her young daughter, playmate to Juliette’s own little girl. But nowhere is safe in war, not even a quiet little bookshop like Juliette’s Librairie des Rêves, and, when a bomb falls on their neighborhood, Juliette’s world is destroyed along with it.

More than a year later, with the war finally ending, Elise returns to reunite with her daughter, only to find her friend’s bookstore reduced to rubble—and Juliette nowhere to be found. What happened to her daughter in those last, terrible moments? Juliette has seemingly vanished without a trace, taking all the answers with her. Elise’s desperate search leads her to New York—and to Juliette—one final, fateful time.

If you’d like your name removed from our email list, please let me know, but please remember that all other Book Club business should be sent to Louise.

Be safe! Stay well! 

Regards,
– Donna