All Kehilla members are welcome to join us for our customary meetings on the second Monday of the month at 7pm in the Fireside Room.
November 14: In An Antique Land by Amitav Ghosh
Indian writer Ghosh reconstructs a 12th-century master-slave relationship that confounds modern concepts of slavery. A prosperous Tunisian Jewish merchant spent two decades on India’s Malabar Coast, where he hired a slave or servant, probably of Indian origin, who acted as his business agent and made overseas trips for him. In medieval India and the Middle East, servitude was often a career opportunity, the principal means of recruitment into privileged strata of the army and bureaucracy. Researching letters and documents in Egypt, where he lived for several years, Ghosh evokes a world of mud-walled houses and class warfare between Egyptian laborers and landowners. He also writes vividly of southern India, a tapestry of castes, cults and worship of spirit-deities.
December 12: The Thread by Victoria Hislop
A beautiful and epic novel that spans nearly a hundred years, The Thread is a magnificent story of a friendship and a love that endures through the catastrophes and upheavals of the twentieth century—both natural and man-made—in the turbulent city of Thessaloniki, Greece. From fire to civil war to Nazi brutality and economic collapse, The Thread is historical fiction at its finest, colorful and captivating with truly unforgettable characters—a novel that brilliantly captures the energy and life of this singular Greek city.