Thursday February 3 7:30 pm
Five
years ago in Cleveland Kristin Ohlson spotted an ad for Christmas Mass at St. Paul’s Shrine and, although she had long
been a lapsed Catholic, on impulse decided to attend. She was surprised to find
at St. Paul’s sixteen cloistered Franciscan nuns, called the Poor Clares,
worshipping from behind a wooden grate. Ohlson became fascinated by the Poor
Clares, who live entirely inside the monastery and maintain a twenty-four-hour
schedule of prayer. Stalking the Divine is both
an engrossing portrait of the anachronistic order and a memoir of the author, as
she seeks to integrate her skepticism with a deep longing to believe.
Monday February 7 7:30 pm
Fred Rosenbaum is a
founder of Lehrhaus Judaica, an adult school for Jewish studies in the Bay Area.
He joins us tonight with Taking
Risks: A Jewish Youth in the Soviet Partisans and His Unlikely Life in
California, which he
co-wrote with its subject, Joseph Pell. At eighteen Pell was a Polish Jewish
refugee who was living in a Ukrainian ghetto. By sheer chance he escaped the
slaughter suffered by the rest of the Jews there, including his family, and fled
into the surrounding forest, where he joined a resistance group. In 1947, he
emigrated to San Francisco’s Sunset District and, starting with little money and
no English, began a new life as a successful businessman. Taking
Risks details
in unsparing language a remarkable life of courage, grief, and resilience.
Thursday February 10 7:30 pm
When
Eastern European Jews immigrated to early Zionist Palestine they were encouraged
to give up Yiddish, their mother tongue, in favor of Hebrew, the sacred language
being revived for everyday use. In What
Must Be Forgotten: The Survival of Yiddish in Zionist Palestine,
Yael Chaver, who
teaches Yiddish in the Department of German at UC Berkeley, documents an
unrecognized, alternative literature that arose out of this conflict between
Yiddish and Hebrew, a literature that flourished vigorously but without
legitimacy. “This book exhibits independent archival research of the most
valuable kind . . . and a subtle understanding of the complex relations between
literature and ideology.” Robert Alter
Tuesday February 15 7:30 pm
Brad
Reynolds will
discuss his historical survey of the writings of Ken Wilber, one of the key
theorists of the transpersonal psychology movement. Beginning with his first
book, Spectrum
of Consciousness, written
when he was 23, Wilber has viewed human consciousness through the disciplines of
psychology, philosophy, anthropology, and religion. In
Embracing Reality: The Integral Vision of Ken Wilber, Reynolds
gives an overview of Wilber’s life and thought, including chapter-by-chapter
summaries of his major works, charts correlating his concepts with those of
other philosophers, and a bibliography of his books and articles. “Brad Reynolds
has done us an enormous favor in providing superb, concise, careful, and deep
summaries of Wilber’s work.” Roger Walsh
Wednesday February 16 7:30 pm
Marc
Sapir reads
from his delightfully inventive novel The
Last Tale of Mendel Abbe: Sonny Bush and the Wise Men of Chelm. It is
September 15, 2001, and Mendel Abbe, an aging manic-depressive storyteller
re-turning from a trip to Philadelphia, has somehow managed to miss the events
of September 11th. In shock from the sight of the New York skyline, empty of the
two towers and billowing smoke, and further traumatized by the chauvinistic
rhetoric that has started to become the official version of events, Mendel
begins to spin a fantasy, resurrecting a group of foppishly naïve characters
from a little-known Jewish shtetl in nineteenth-century Poland named Chelm. |
Thursday February 17 7:30 pm
Masha
Hamilton has
worked as a journalist for ten years in the Middle East, Russia, and, most
recently, in Afghanistan, experience that informs her haunting new novel, The
Distance Between Us. Based in
Jerusalem, veteran correspondent Caddie Blair takes for granted her journalistic
detachment until her lover, a photographer, is killed in an ambush while they
are together on assignment. As she gradually starts to register shock and grief,
Caddie meets a Russian professor who subtly urges her toward revenge. The
Distance Between Us is a
powerful meditation on violence and our voyeuristic relationship to it that asks
whether the loving knowledge of one other person can win out over anonymous,
implacable hatred.
Monday February 21 7:30 pm
Bill
Hayes, author of Sleep
Demons, which
chronicled insomnia, joins us with Five
Quarts: A Personal and Natural History of Blood, a
profusely illustrated examination that ranges through history, medicine,
literature, and myth. From ancient Rome (where gladiators drank the blood of the
vanquished), through the discoveries of circulation and the microscope, to
modern-day struggles to understand immunology and find a cure for AIDS, Hayes
brings both a panoramic view and a deeply private vision of what blood means to
us all. “A remarkable journey, at once highly erudite and profoundly personal,
that leads us through history, religion, science—and our own bodies.” Perri
Klass, M.D.
Wednesday February 23 7:30 pm
Poet,
author, teacher, and translator Andrew
Schelling returns
to Black Oak to read from Erotic
Love Poems from India: A Translation of the Amarushataka.
The Amarushataka ( “One
Hundred Poems of Amaru” ), written in Sanskrit in the eighth century, is to this
day the most popular book of love poetry in India. The graceful and passion-ate
language of this translation, the first in English, eloquently captures the
sublime nature of erotic love. Included is an extensive essay on the background
and history of the original text. The opening poem, an invocation to the goddess
Mridani, warrior and lover, shows her drawing a bow: “Red nails / by her ear a
cluster of moist / glistening petals . . .”
Thursday February 24 7:30 pm
The
introduction to Under
Her Skin: How Girls Experience Race in America quotes
Anne Lamott quoting Flannery O’Connor: “Anyone who survived childhood has enough
material to write for the rest of his or her life.” This anthology of essays by
women explores through children’s eyes the sometimes savage, sometimes innocent,
and always complex ways in which awareness of race shapes our lives. Join editor Pooja Makhijani and
contributors Ana
Chavier Caamaño, Colleen Nakamoto, Lisa Drostova, and
Traise Yamamoto as they
share their experiences of growing up in racially charged America.
Monday February 28 7:30 pm
In previous books such as Nine
Below Zero and A
Stranger in This World, Kevin
Canty has been
a stunning chronicler of the possibilities of ruin and redemption.
Winslow in Love, his new
novel about a poet in decline, offers this protagonist a second chance in the
form of a visiting professorship at a small college in Montana. Richard Winslow
is overweight, alcoholic, and his wife is leaving him. Since he is running out
of money, he reluctantly accepts the teaching position. In his first class his
possible redemption arrives in the unlikely guise of a woman half his age and in
worse shape than he is. “Emily Dickinson, Route 66, and Winslow
in Love. It
doesn’t get better than this.” Amy Bloom |
