Join Israeli and U.S. Readers in Partnership Book Discussion

There are a number of Jewish book clubs in Louisville and even more general ones. Now, the Jewish Community Center’s Partnership 2Gether program offers you the opportunity to participate in a unique international book discussion.

This Partnership plans to host the Book Club webex once a year, and its first program will be Sunday, April 6. In Louisville, participants will gather at the Jewish Family & Career Services at 12:30 p.m. for registration and refreshments. At 1, we’ll be joined by a group in Israel’s Western Galilee as well as groups in other Central Area Consortium Partnership members for the webex chat, which will include a panel presentation and discussion. To date, that includes groups from San Antonio and Austin, TX; and Dayton, Toledo and Canton, OH.

The book we’ll be discussing is Our Holocaust, by Amir Gutfreund and translated by Jessica Cohen. Readers will get to hear directly from Gutfreund, who lives in the Western Galilee and will participate in the panel.

In the book, Amir and Effi are children who collected relatives. With Holocaust survivors for parents and few other ‘real’ relatives alive, relationships operated under a “Law of Compression” in which tenuous connections turned friends into uncles, cousins and grandparents.

Life was framed by Grandpa Lolek, the parsimonious and eccentric old rogue who put his tea bags through Selektion, and Grandpa Yosef, the neighborhood saint, who knew everything about everything, but refused to talk of his own past.

Amir and Effi also collected information about what happened Over There. This was more difficult than collecting relatives; nobody would tell them any details because they weren’t yet Old Enough.

This didn’t stop the intrepid pair, and their quest for knowledge results in adventures both funny and alarming, as they try to unearth their neighbors’ stories. As Amir grows up, his obsession with understanding the Holocaust remains with him, and finally Old Enough to know, the unforgettable cast of characters that populate his world open their hearts, souls, and pasts to him.

The book can be purchased online in hardcover, paperback or Kindle format.
The Partnership Book Club is one of many Partnership 2Gether activities that connect people to people in the fields of medicine, arts, education, twinning, co-existence, leadership development, culture, business development, economics, tourism and more.

Louisville has been active in Partnership since its establishment in 1997, and today is part of the Central Area Consortium of Communities that also includes Akron, Canton, Dayton, Toledo and Youngstown, OH; Indianapolis, Northwest Indiana and South Bend, IN; Louisville; Des Moines, IA; Omaha, NE; and Austin, Dallas and San Antonio TX.

These consortium cities partner with Israel’s Western Galilee area that includes the city of Akko, the Western Galilee Hospital and the rural communities of the Matte Asher Regional Council along the Mediterranean Sea.

Partnership is supported by the Jewish Federation of Louisville Campaign.
For more information on Partnership 2Gether, contact JCC Senior Vice President COO Sara Wagner at 238-2779 or swagner@jewishlouisville.org.

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