BOOKS WITH FRIENDS
A story is always better if you have someone to share it with. What greater way to feel a sense of community and engagement than to share the stories with Temple Israel's Book Club. Come gather with friends for some laughter, and discussion about our favorite books. The book club experience is social and a great way to create deep meaningful relationships with our readers. We will explore different perspectives and interpretations, gain a deeper understanding of life experience and open our hearts to the transformative power of literature.
The Night Sparrow
Author: Shelly Sanders - 368 pages
Thursday, September 18, 2025 @ 7:30pm
***As an added bonus, Shelly Sanders will be our in-person guest speaker.
For fans of Kate Quinn and The Nightingale, a gripping story of a young Jewish girl who joins an elite Russian sniper unit and embarks on a mission targeting the highest prize of World War II: The Furor.
With the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, Elena Bruskina’s world collapses. The ambitious university student and her Jewish family are quickly forced into the Minsk ghetto where thousands are immediately murdered, including her father and brother. Then her younger sister is publicly executed on false charges and her mother is shot. Alone with her grief, Elena escapes the ghetto, determined to avenge her family’s deaths.
Heading to Moscow, she enrolls in the Red Army’s newly created Central Women’s Sniper Training School. After rigorous training, she becomes a member of an all-female sniper platoon, a community of brave young women willing to give their lives to defend their country. Then Elena is chosen for a secret mission—a daring and highly dangerous plan to capture the face of evil itself: The Furor.
Inspired by the real-life female snipers and interpreters in the Red Army during World War II, The Night Sparrow is a portrait of friendship, resilience, courage, and sacrifice under extraordinary circumstances.
To purchase this book from any of the retailers below just click the name.
The Little Liar
Author: Mitch Albom - 352 pages
Thursday, November 6, 2025 @ 7:30pm
An instant New York Times Bestseller
Beloved bestselling author Mitch Albom returns with a powerful novel of hope and forgiveness that moves from a coastal Greek city during WWII to America in the golden age of Hollywood, as the intertwined lives of three young survivors are forever changed by the perils of deception and the grace of redemption.
Eleven-year-old Nico Krispis has never told a lie. His schoolmate, Fannie, loves him because of it. Nico’s older brother Sebastian resents him for both these facts. When their young lives are torn apart during the war, it will take them decades to find each other again.
Nico’s innocence and goodness is used against his tightly knit community when a German officer barters Nico’s reputation for honesty into a promise to save his loved ones. When Nico realizes the consequences of the betrayal, he can never tell the truth again. He will spend the rest of his life changing names, changing locations and identities, desperate to find a way to forgiveness—for himself and from the people he loves most.
Albom’s extraordinary storytelling is at its powerful best in his first novel to confront the destruction that lying can wreak both on the world stage as well as on the individual lives that get caught up in it. As The Stranger in the Lifeboat spoke to belief, The Little Liar speaks to hope, in a breathless page-turner that will break your heart open and fill it with the power of the human spirit and the goodness that lies within us all.
Narrated by the voice of Truth itself, The Little Liar is a timeless story about the power of love to ultimately redeem us, no matter how deeply we blame ourselves for our mistakes.
To purchase this book from any of the retailers below just click the name.
Shanda: A Memoir of Shame and Secrecy
Author: Letty Cottin Pogrebin - 432 pages
Thursday, December 4, 2025 @ 7:30pm
An intimate memoir from a founding editor of Ms. magazine who grew up in a Jewish immigrant family mired in secrets, haunted by their dread of shame and stigma, determined to hide their every imperfection—and in denial or despair when they couldn’t.
“A frank and often amusing tabulation of well-kept family secrets... a story of high-stakes melodrama and surreptitious relations, in which runaway brides, false marriages, lost children and other moral crises abound. But there is more here than mishegas.” - Jake Nevins, New York Times
“The richness of Pogrebin’s stories, the complexity and beauty of her storytelling, and her devastatingly honest soul-baring make Shanda a powerfully stunning piece of life and art.” - Mayim Bialik, actor, author, neuroscientist, & co-host of Jeopardy
The word “shanda” is defined as shame or disgrace in Yiddish. This book, Shanda, tells the story of three generations of complicated, intense 20th-century Jews for whom the desire to fit in and the fear of public humiliation either drove their aspirations or crushed their spirit.
In her deeply engaging, astonishingly candid memoir, author and activist Letty Cottin Pogrebin exposes the fiercely-guarded lies and intricate cover-ups woven by dozens of members of her extended family. Beginning with her own long-suppressed secret, the story spirals through the hidden lives of her parents and relatives - revealing the truth about their origins, personal traumas, marital misery, abandoned children, religious transgressions, sexual identity, radical politics, and supposedly embarrassing illnesses. While unmasking their charades and disguises, Pogrebin also showcases her family’s remarkable talent for reinvention in a narrative that is, by turns, touching, searing, and surprisingly universal.
To purchase this book from any of the retailers below just click the name.
Long Island Compromise
Author: Taffy Brodesser-Akner - 442 pages
Thursday, January 16, 2026 @ 7:30pm
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • An exhilarating novel about one American family and the dark moment that shatters their suburban paradise, from the New York Times bestselling author of Fleishman Is in Trouble
New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice • New York Magazine’s Beach Read Book Club Pick • Belletrist Book Club Pick
A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, Oprah Daily, The New Yorker, Time, The Washington Post, NPR, Vogue, Town & Country, New York Post, Harper’s Bazaar, Elle, Parade, Kirkus Reviews
“Joins the pantheon of great American novels.”- Los Angeles Times
“Exuberant and absorbing . . . a big old-fashioned social novel.”- The Atlantic
“Were we gangsters? No. But did we know how to start a fire?”
In 1980, a wealthy businessman named Carl Fletcher is kidnapped from his driveway, brutalized, and held for ransom. He is returned to his wife and kids less than a week later, only slightly the worse, and the family moves on with their lives, resuming their prized places in the saga of the American dream, comforted in the realization that though their money may have been what endangered them, it is also what assured them their safety.
But now, nearly forty years later, it’s clear that perhaps nobody ever got over anything, after all. Carl has spent the ensuing years secretly seeking closure to the matter of his kidnapping, while his wife, Ruth, has spent her potential protecting her husband’s emotional health. Their three grown children aren’t doing much better: Nathan’s chronic fear won’t allow him to advance at his law firm; Beamer, a Hollywood screenwriter, will consume anything—substance, foodstuff, women—in order to numb his own perpetual terror; and Jenny has spent her life so bent on proving that she’s not a product of her family’s pathology that she has come to define it. As they hover at the delicate precipice of a different kind of survival, they learn that the family fortune has dwindled to just about nothing, and they must face desperate questions about how much their wealth has played a part in both their lives’ successes and failures.
Long Island Compromise spans the entirety of one family’s history, winding through decades and generations, all the way to the outrageous present, and confronting the mainstays of American Jewish life: tradition, the pursuit of success, the terror of history, fear of the future, old wives’ tales, evil eyes, ambition, achievement, boredom, dybbuks, inheritance, pyramid schemes, right-wing capitalists, beta-blockers, psychics, and the mostly unspoken love and shared experience that unite a family forever.
To purchase this book from any of the retailers below just click the name.
The Last Kings of Shanghai
Author: Jonathan Kaufman - 384 pages
Thursday, February 19, 2026 @ 7:30pm
An epic, multigenerational story of two rival dynasties who flourished in Shanghai and Hong Kong as twentieth-century China surged into the modern era, from the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist.
Shanghai, 1936. The Cathay Hotel, located on the city's famous waterfront, is one of the most glamorous in the world. Built by Victor Sassoon - billionaire playboy and scion of the Sassoon dynasty - the hotel hosts a who's who of global celebrities: Noel Coward has written a draft of Private Lives in his suite and Charlie Chaplin has entertained his wife-to-be. And a few miles away, Mao and the nascent Communist Party have been plotting revolution.
By the 1930s, the Sassoon’s had been doing business in China for a century, rivaled in wealth and influence by only one other dynasty - the Kadoories. These two Jewish families, both originally from Baghdad, stood astride Chinese business and politics for more than 175 years, profiting from the Opium Wars; surviving Japanese occupation; courting Chiang Kai-shek; and losing nearly everything as the Communists swept into power. In The Last Kings of Shanghai, Jonathan Kaufman tells the remarkable history of how these families participated in an economic boom that opened China to the world, but remained blind to the country's deep inequality and to the political turmoil at their doorsteps. In a story stretching from Baghdad to Hong Kong to Shanghai to London, Kaufman enters the lives and minds of these ambitious men and women to forge a tale of opium smuggling, family rivalry, political intrigue, and survival.
The book lays bare the moral compromises of the Kadoories and the Sassoons - and their exceptional foresight, success, and generosity. At the height of World War II, they joined together to rescue and protect eighteen thousand Jewish refugees fleeing Nazism. Though their stay in China started out as a business opportunity, the country became a home they were reluctant to leave, even on the eve of revolution. The lavish buildings they built and the booming businesses they nurtured continue to define Shanghai and Hong Kong to this day. As the United States confronts China's rise, and China grapples with the pressures of breakneck modernization and global power, the long-hidden odysseys of the Sassoons and the Kadoories hold a key to understanding the present moment.
To purchase this book from any of the retailers below just click the name.
Metropolis
Author: B. A. Shapiro - 368 pages
Thursday, March 19, 2026 @ 7:30pm
The New York Times bestselling author of The Art Forger delivers a spellbinding and moving novel about what we hang on to, what we might need to let go, and how unexpected events can lead us to deeper truths.
Six people, six secrets, six different backgrounds. They would never have met if not for their connection to the Metropolis Storage Warehouse in Cambridge, Massachusetts. When someone falls down an elevator shaft at the facility, each becomes caught up in an intensifying chain of events.
We meet Serge, an unstable but brilliant street photographer who lives in his storage unit, which overflows with thousands of undeveloped pictures; Marta, an undocumented immigrant finishing her dissertation and hiding from ICE; Liddy, an abused wife and mother, who recreates her children’s bedroom in her unit; Jason, a former corporate lawyer now practicing in the facility; Rose, the office manager, who takes illegal kickbacks to let renters live in the building; and Zach, the building’s owner and an ex-drug dealer, who scans Serge’s photos as he searches for clues to the accident.
But was it an accident? A murder attempt? Suicide? As her characters dip in and out of one another’s lives trying to find answers and battling societal forces beyond their control, B. A. Shapiro both questions the myth of the American dream and builds tension to an exhilarating climax. Taught and emotional, Metropolis is impossible to put down and impossible to forget.
To purchase this book from any of the retailers below just click the name.
Nobody Will Tell You This But Me
Author: Betty Kalb - 208 pages
Thursday, May 14, 2026 @ 7:30pm
Even after she left home for Hollywood, Emmy-nominated TV writer Bess Kalb saved every voicemail her grandmother Bobby Bell ever left her. Bobby was a force - irrepressible, glamorous, unapologetically opinionated. Bobby doted on Bess; Bess adored Bobby. Then, at ninety, Bobby died. But in this debut memoir, Bobby is speaking to Bess once more, in a voice as passionate as it ever was in life.
Recounting both family lore and family secrets, Bobby brings us four generations of indomitable women and the men who loved them. There’s Bobby’s mother, who traveled solo from Belarus to America in the 1880s to escape the pogroms, and Bess’s mother, a 1970s rebel who always fought against convention. But it was Bobby and Bess who always had the most powerful bond: Bobby her granddaughter’s fiercest supporter, giving Bess unequivocal love, even if sometimes of the toughest kind.
Nobody Will Tell You This But Me marks the creation of a totally new, virtuosic form of memoir: a reconstruction of a beloved grandmother’s words and wisdom to tell her family’s story with equal parts poignancy and hilarity.
To purchase this book from any of the retailers below just click the name.
The Trade Off: A Novel
Author: Samantha Greene Woodruff - 383 pages
Thursday, June 25, 2026 @ 7:30pm
A brilliant and ambitious young woman strives to find her place amid the promise and tumult of 1920s Wall Street in a captivating historical novel by the author of The Lobotomist’s Wife.
Bea Abramovitz has a gift for math and numbers. With her father, she studies the burgeoning Wall Street market’s stocks and patterns in the financial pages. After college she’s determined to parlay her talent for the prediction game into personal and professional success. But in the 1920s, in a Lower East Side tenement, opportunities for women don’t just come knocking. Bea will have to create them.
It’s easier for her golden-boy twin brother, Jake, who longs to reclaim all their parents lost after fleeing the pogroms in Russia to come to America. Well-intentioned but undisciplined, Jake has a charm that can carry him only so far on Wall Street. So, Bea devises a plan. They’ll be a secret team, and she’ll be the brain behind the broker. As Jake’s reputation, his heedless ego, and the family fortune soar, Bea foresees catastrophe: an impending crash that could destroy everything if she doesn’t finally take control.
Inspired by the true story of a pioneering investment legend, The Trade Off is a powerful novel about identity, sacrifice, family loyalties, and the complex morality of money.
To purchase this book from any of the retailers below just click the name.
Jackpot Summer
Author: Elyssa Friedland - 383 pages
Thursday, August 20, 2026 @ 7:30pm
After the Jacobson siblings win a life-changing fortune in the lottery, they assume their messy lives will transform into sleek, storybook perfection–but they couldn’t be more wrong.
The four Jacobson children were raised to respect the value of a dollar. Their mother reused tea bags and refused to pay retail; their father taught them to budget before he taught them to ride a bike. And yet, now that they’re adults, their financial lives are in disarray.
The siblings reunite when their newly widowed father puts their Jersey Shore beach house on the market. Packing up childhood memories isn’t easy, especially when there’s other drama brewing. Matthew is miserable at his corporate law job and wishes he had more time with his son; Laura’s marriage is imploding in spectacular fashion; Sophie’s art career is stalled while her boyfriend’s is on the rise; and Noah’s total failure to launch has him doing tech repair for pennies.
When Noah sees an ad for a Powerball drawing, he and his sisters go in on tickets while their brother Matthew passes. All hell breaks loose when one of the tickets is a winner and three of the four Jacobsons become overnight millionaires. Without their mother’s guidance, and with their father busy playing pickleball in a Florida retirement village, the once close-knit siblings search for comfort in shiny new toys instead of each other.
To purchase this book from any of the retailers below just click the name.
Please purchase the book and read prior to the program, by clicking on the image of the book above, you will be taken directly to Amazon, where there are several options to choose from including, Audiobook, Kindle & Hardcover copies.
If you have a library card, you can get books for free through Hoopla - the Nassau county book lending service.
In our hopes to offer something for everyone, we want to share a free audiobook resource, Libby by OverDrive. Libby allows you to digitally download books to various devices including iPhone, Android and a tablet. Given your busy and hectic schedules, we believe an audio option may be beneficial to you. This option is also useful for people who struggle with fine print. The website https://www.
Please feel free to contact Elaine.Prusack@tilny.org if you have any comments or questions.
To support our programs or if you know someone who would like to attend our future events, please call the Temple Israel office at (516) 239-1140.
We look forward to our discussion. Thank you.
Your Book Club Hosts,
Elaine Prusack and Jon Lipow
Fri, July 25 2025
29 Tammuz 5785
