Doris Bass Memorial Library & Book Club
Doris Bass, a beloved member of Israel Congregation, was a dedicated lover of books and literature. After a long career beginning in the Brooklyn Public Library and progressing to publishing, Doris moved to Vermont in 1996. Her passion for life was contagious and her passing has left us with a large hole in our lives. We have dedicated our extensive library in her memory. Today we are fortunate to have devoted congregants stewarding the library Doris championed.
The Doris Bass Library is currently overwhelmed with books that need to be catalogued and shelved with more coming in all the time and only two part time volunteers to do the work to sort through the donations. We deeply appreciate the huge effort our volunteers, are doing to accomplish this task having found some truly beautiful and special books among the donations received. We want to be able to continue to welcome the donation of engaging and educational books, but we need your help:
- Please box books or tie book donations—pre-approved by the library volunteers—with twine before dropping them off in the office, not in the library.
- If you would like your name or the name of your family member on a book plate in the book, please give us the pertinent information.
- Please consider making a donation to the Merkado Library Fund to help us in our work of making this a more user-friendly place for our congregation.
Thank You!
Join the Doris Bass Book Club!
Start your day off right with a good book. . .
On the 3rd Wednesday of each month participate in a lively and engaging conversation about
wonderful books of Jewish interest.
The next meeting of the Doris Bass Book Club is on Wednesday evening, August 20th at 7:00 pm.
Join the club as we meet via Zoom to discuss this month's title.
July/August Reading recommendation
and Book Club title: A Fools Kabbalah
In the ruins of postwar Europe, the world’s leading expert on the Kabbalah and Jewish mysticism goes on a hair-raising journey to recover sacred books stolen by the Nazis . . .
At the end of the Second World War Gershom Scholem, the magisterial scholar of Jewish mysticism, is commissioned by the Hebrew University in what was then British-ruled Palestine to retrieve a lost world. He is sent to sift through the rubble of Europe in search of precious Jewish books stolen by the Nazis or hidden by the Jews themselves in secret places throughout the ravaged continent.
The search takes him into ruined cities and alien wastelands. The terrible irony of salvaging books that had outlasted the people for whom they’d been written leaves Dr. Scholem longing for the kind of magic that had been the merely theoretical subject of his lamplit studies.
Steve Stern’s
A Fool’s Kabbalah, a novel featuring numerous real-life historic figures, reimagines Gershom Scholem’s quest and how it sparked in him the desire to realize the legacy of his dear friend, the brilliant philosopher Walter Benjamin.
At the heart of that legacy was the idea that humor is an essential tool of redemption. In a parallel narrative, Menke Klepfisch, self-styled jester and incorrigible scamp, attempts to subvert, through his antic behavior, the cruelties of the Nazi occupation of his native village.
A Fool’s Kabbalah intertwines the stories of these 2 quixotic characters, who,
though poles apart, complement
one another in their tragicomic struggles to oppose the supreme evil of history, using only the weapons of humor and a little magic.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Steve Stern is the author of several short story collections, including
The Wedding Jester
(winner of the National Jewish Book Award),
Isaac and the Undertaker’s Daughter (winner of a Pushcart Writer’s Choice Award and an O. Henry Prize), and
Lazar Malkin Enters Heaven (winner of the Edward Lewis Wallant Award for Jewish American fiction). He has also written three novels and two books for children. He teaches creative writing at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York.
In Praise of A Fool's Kabbalah:
“A writer of incandescent precision, vibrancy, wit, daring and bewitchment.” — Booklist, STARRED review
“A crushing, startling novel. . . about the kinds of communal wounds that even mystics struggle to soothe.” — Foreword, STARRED review
“Alternating narratives are steeped in a poignant form of gallows humor.” — The New York Times
“The juxtaposition of Klepfisch’s absurd antics with Sholem’s methodical seriousness gives the novel an intriguing frisson, and the intellectual complexity is shrewdly leavened by the author’s sardonic wit and pithy observations. Stern demonstrates his literary finesse with this life-affirming tale.” — Publishers Weekly
“Peppered with Yiddishisms, historical references, and Kabbalistic expositions, it is a novel immersed in Jewish culture — a culture marked by tragedy and hope, humor and brilliance.” — Brian Hillman, Jewish Book Council
