Federation Star - March 2019

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Four more events through April 8, 2019
All event tickets are $15 in advance and $20 at the door.
Attend both March 6 events for $25 and save $5.
Call the Federation office at 239.263.4205 or visit the
official festival website at www.JewishBookFestival.org.
Wednesday, March 6 • 9:30 am - 12:00 pm at Naples Conference Ctr. • Topic: Fiction
Moriel Rothman-Zecher – Sadness Is a White Bird
In this lyrical and searing debut novel, a young Israeli must
reconcile his close relationship with two Palestinian siblings and
his deeply ingrained loyalties to family and country. Moving
back to Israel at age 18, Jonathan is eager to join the army and
defend the Jewish state his grandfather helped establish. But
when he meets Nimreen and Laith, his worldview is altered. And
then a fateful day arrives that lands him in prison and changes
all three lives forever. Sadness Is a White Bird is the story of
one man’s attempts to find a place for himself, discovering a
beautiful against-the-odds love that flickers like a candle in the
darkness of a never-ending conflict.
Moriel Rothman-Zecher is an American Israeli writer, poet
and novelist. He is the recipient of a 2017 MacDowell Colony
Fellowship for Literature.
Carol Zoref – Barren Island
Barren Island begins with the arrival of the Eisenstein family,
immigrants from Eastern Europe, and then explores how the
political and social upheavals of the 1930s affect them and
their neighbors in the years between the stock market crash
of October 1929 and the start of World War II ten years later.
Labor strife, union riots, the New Deal, the World’s Fair, and
the struggle to save European Jews from the growing threat of
Nazi terror inform this novel as much as the explosion of civil
and social liberties between the two world wars. Barren Island
is a novel in which the existence of God is argued with a God
that may no longer exist or, perhaps, never did. It is a novel of
place and passion.
Carol Zoref is an award-winning fiction writer and essayist. She
teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and New York University.
Wednesday, March 6 • 1:30 - 4:00 pm at Naples Conference Center • Topic: Fiction
Elyssa Friedland – The Intermission
Told from the alternating perspectives of a husband and wife
who both have something to hide, The Intermission tunnels
beneath a seemingly happy marriage to ask: How much do
we really know about the people we love the most? Cass and
Jonathan’s story examines how class and religious differences
can become devastating pressure points. As the months pass, the
couple begins to see that the worst of their problems are rooted
in the personal and cultural history that separates them – and
in certain blistering secrets they may never be ready to share.
Elyssa Friedland served as managing editor of the Yale Daily
News, and is a graduate of Columbia Law School. Her debut
novel was Love and Miss Communication.
Mark Sarvas – Memento Park
After receiving an unexpected call from the Australian consulate,
Matt Santos becomes aware of a painting he believes was
looted from his family in Hungary during World War II. To
recover the painting, he must repair his strained relationship
with his judgmental father, uncover his family history, and
restore his connection to his own Judaism. Matt’s narrative is
as much about family history and father-son dynamics as it is
about the nature of art itself, and the infinite ways we come to
understand ourselves through it. Of all the questions asked about
family, art, history and spirituality – a central, unanswerable
predicament lingers: How do we move forward when the past
looms unreasonably large?
Mark Sarvas is the author of the novel Harry, Revised, which
was published in more than a dozen countries.
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Wednesday, March 27 • 1:00 - 3:30 pm at Temple Shalom • Topic: Fiction & Memoir
Rachel Kadish – The Weight of Ink
Set in London in both the 1660s and the early 21 st century, The
Weight of Ink is the interwoven tale of two women of remarkable
intellect: Ester Velasquez, an emigrant from Amsterdam who
is permitted to scribe for a blind rabbi, just before the plague
hits the city; and Helen Watt, an ailing historian with a love of
Jewish history. Electrifying and ambitious, sweeping in scope
and intimate in tone, The Weight of Ink is a sophisticated work
of historical fiction about women separated by centuries, and
the choices and sacrifices they must make in order to reconcile
the life of the heart and mind.
Rachel Kadish is the award-winning author of the novels From
a Sealed Room and Tolstoy Lied: A Love Story, and the novella
I Was Here.
Tova Mirvis – The Book of Separation
What happens when you decide at long last to heed your inner
compass? In The Book of Separation, Tova Mirvis tell the courageous
story of leaving her Orthodox faith and her marriage at
age forty and setting out to navigate the terrifying, liberating
terrain of a newly unmapped world. The Book of Separation
was a New York Times Book Review “Editor’s Choice” and one
of O magazine’s “Ten Books to Pick Up Now.”
Tova Mirvis is the author of three novels: Visible City, The
Outside World and The Ladies Auxiliary, a national bestseller.
Her essays have appeared in The New York Times, Boston
Globe Magazine and Poets and Writers, and her fiction has
been broadcast on NPR.
Monday, April 8 • 1:00 - 3:30 pm at Naples Conference Center • Topic: Non-Fiction
Marc E. Agronin – The End of Old Age
Old age is too often defined as a time of loss and decline. In
The End of Old Age, Dr. Marc Agronin presents a more hopeful
view of the aging process through inspiring stories of a Holocaust
survivor who journeys back to Auschwitz each year with
Jewish students, a famous aging artist who reinvented himself
after nearly dying as well as through other individuals. The
End of Old Age concludes with a practical action plan to help
readers identify and leverage their own emerging strengths to
live with greater purpose and meaning.
Dr. Marc Agronin is a renowned geriatric psychiatrist who
directs the memory center and research program at Miami Jewish
Health. He has written ten other books on related subjects
as well as articles for The New York Times and The Wall Street
Journal.
David Litt – Thanks, Obama
At age 24, David Litt became one of the youngest White House
speechwriters in history. Along with issues like climate change
and criminal justice reform, he was the president’s go-to writer
for comedy. As the lead writer on the White House Correspondents’
Dinner speech (the “State of the Union of jokes”), he
was responsible for some of President Obama’s most memorable
moments. Litt takes us inside his eight years on the front
lines of Obamaworld. His behind-the-scenes anecdotes answer
questions you never knew you had: What’s the classiest White
House men’s room? How do you force the National Security
Council to stop hitting “reply-all” on every email?
David Litt, in addition to writing for the White House, has
written for The Onion, Cosmopolitan, Vanity Fair, The Atlantic
and The New York Times.