Adult Education

Monday, December 16: The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum by Margalit Fox

This is an amazing true story about the first person to run an organized crime syndicate (before the mafia was born) – a Jewish immigrant mother on the Lower East Side during the 1850s-1880s. Frederica Mandelbaum was also a philanthropist, synagogue goer and mother who was a high level fence for stolen goods – furs, diamonds, silks, as well as cash from bank heists (including one in Boston) that she helped orchestrate. She was a Jewish mother with police and politicians on her payroll and several loyal thieves working for her!

Monday, January 20: All the Broken Places by John Boyne

In 1946, three years after a cataclysmic event tore their lives apart, a mother and daughter flee Poland for Paris. Nearly eighty years later, Gretel Fernsby lives a life that is a far cry from her traumatic childhood. When a couple moves into the flat below her in her London mansion block, the appearance of their nine-year-old son Henry brings back memories she would rather forget. Faced with a choice between her own safety and his, Gretel is taken back to a similar crossroads she encountered long ago.

Monday, February 17: The Jazz Club Spy by Roberta Rich

Giddy Brodsky, a young Jewish Russian immigrant on the Lower East Side in 1939, sees on the subway the Cossack who destroyed her village. She is determined to track him down and get justice for her family. A high level connection she makes at the jazz club where she is a cigarette girl embroils her in a plot involving the Russian mafia to keep America out of World War II.

Monday, March 17: Songs for the Brokenhearted by Ayelet Tsabari

In an immigrant camp for Yemeni Jews in Israel in 1950, a shy young man happens upon Saida, a beautiful girl singing by the river. In the midst of chaos and uncertainty, they fall in love. But Saida is married and has a child. In 1995, her daughter Zohara flies from New York to Israel after learning Saida has died, and learns her family’s secrets.