Join The Besters for their next Book Club event featuring author Lauren Grodstein on Friday, December 6 at 11:00 am on Zoom.

About the Book:

A heart-wrenching and intimate novel of defiance set inside the Warsaw Ghetto.

Adam Paskow is a schoolteacher forced to share a cramped one-bedroom apartment with two other families as their Jewish community is herded into the Ghetto and cut off from the rest of Warsaw in 1940.

Adam uses literature to try to help his students endure their unbearable situation, but it’s nearly impossible to focus on poetry when they are bartering daily for food and the war is intensifying just beyond the Ghetto’s walls.

As part of a project to keep the stories of the Ghetto’s residents alive, Adam begins to take testimonies from the children and others to help preserve their histories.

These testimonies teach him how to survive – even how to find joy –  in a place where young boys set up their own black markets, where young girls try to pass as Aryan, and where, in a desperate upside-down world, no choices are good ones.​

Inspired by the real-life archives that allowed Jewish Warsaw’s stories to survive World War II.

Purchase this book through WHC’s Mitzvah Mall

About the Author:

Lau­ren Grod­stein is the author of Our Short His­to­ry, The Wash­ing­ton Post Book of the Year The Expla­na­tion for Every­thing, and The New York Times best­selling A Friend of the Fam­i­ly, among oth­er works. Her sto­ries, essays, and arti­cles have appeared in var­i­ous lit­er­ary mag­a­zines and antholo­gies, and have been trans­lat­ed into French, Ger­man, Chi­nese, and Ital­ian, among oth­er lan­guages. Her work has also appeared in Elle, The New York Times, Refinery29, Salon​.com, Bar­rel­house, Post Road, and The Wash­ing­ton Post. She is a pro­fes­sor of Eng­lish at Rut­gers Uni­ver­si­ty-Cam­den, where she teach­es in the MFA pro­gram in cre­ative writing.

This event is free and open to everyone, but RSVP is required.

RSVP HERE