Sitting By My Bedside
“One sure window into a person’s soul is his reading list.”
~ Mary B. W. Tabor ~
What are you reading? Are you looking for your next great read? Here is a look at what is sitting by my bedside, and which I am pleased to recommend. Let me know what you think!
Voyage of the Damned, by Gordon Thomas and Max Morgan Witts, 1974, Stein and Day/Publishers/ Scarborough house, Briarcliff Manor, New York.
“Then, suddenly, incredibly, he and a group of other men were released on condition they all leave Germany within fourteen days. They were driven out of the camp and dumped at Nuremberg’s station. there, waiting for him, aged and drawn but smiling was Rachel, with the children. She held a shabby suitcase filled with his clothes. She explained that her family had raised the money to buy him a Cuban visa and tourist-class ticket on the St. Louise; he wept as she said that she and the children would follow, later, on another boat.”
~M~
Watchmen on the Walls, An Eyewitness Account of Israel’s Fight for Independence from the Journal of Hannah Hurnard, by Hannah Hurnard, 1997, Monarch Publications Ltd., Broadway House, The Broadway, Crowborough, East Sussex, TN^ 1HQ, England.
“Back in November 1917, the Balfour Declaration had promised the Jews a homeland in Palestine, provided the rights of the indigenous population were not infringed upon. but no one had quite worked out how the hopes and aspirations of both peoples could be justly accommodated in such a circumstance. in the course of time, Britain made promises to both Arabs and Jews that proved to be incompatible and, in trying to please all parties, succeeded only in pleasing none.”
~M~
Lipstick Jihad, A Memoir of Growing Up Iranian In America And American In Iran by Azadeh Moaveni, 2005, PublicAffairs, New York, New York.
“All our lives were formed against the backdrop of this history, fated to be at home nowhere – not completely in America, not completely in Iran. For us, home was not determined by latitudes and longitudes. It was special. This, this was the modern Iranian experience, that bound the diaspora to Iran. We were all displaced, whether internally, on the streets of Tehran, captives in living rooms, strangers in our own country, or externally, in exile, sitting in this New York bar, foreigners in a foreign country, at home together.”
~M~
The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit, My Family’s Exodus from Old Cairo to the New World, by Lucetee Lgnado, 2007, HarperCollins Publishers, New York, New York.
“As we drove away, I felt that I was leaving all I cared about behind, not simply a stranger who had shown me such unexpected kindness, but another old woman, grandmother, Zarifa, and another, Nonna Alexandra, a young woman, too, my mother, Edith, crossing the threshold of Malaka Nazli as a twenty-year-old bride, and Baby Alexandra, the sister I had never known, and my two uncles who had seemed forever lost — the child of the souk and the priest, returned from his Jerusalem monastery — and my aunt Bahia, back from Auschwitz, clutching her husband and Violetta, and my father, about all, my father.
~M~
Jewett, Novels and Stories, Sarah Orne Jewett, Library of America College Edition, 1996, distributed by Penguin Books, New York, New York.
“The world goes on year after year. We can use its forces, and shape and mould them, and perfect this thing or that, but we cannot make new forces; we only use the tools we find to carve the wood we find. there is nothing new; we discover and combine and use.”
~M~
The Paris Wife, by Paula McLain, 2012, Ballantine Books Trade Paperbacks, New York, New York.
“Though I often looked for one, I finally had to admit that there could be no cure for Paris. Part of it was the war. The world had ended once already and could again at any moment.
~M~
The Greater Journey, Americans in Paris, by David McCullough, 2011, Simon & Schuster, New York, New York.
“The Greater Journey is the enthralling, inspiring – and until now, untold – story of the adventurous American artists, writers, doctors, politicians, architects, and others of high aspiration who set off of Pairs in the years between 1830 and 1900, ambitious to excel in their work.”
~M~
An Island Called Home, Returning to Jewish Cuba, by Ruth Behar, Photographs by Humberto Mayol, originally published in 2007, second paperback printing 2013, by Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, New Jersey, and London.
“Yiddish – speaking Jews thought Cuba was supposed to be a mere layover on the journey to the United States when they arrived there in the 1920’s. They even called it “Hotel Cuba.” But as the years passed, the many Jews who came from war-torn Europe remained, and the beloved island ceased to be a hotel and eventually became ‘home.’ When Fidel Castro came to power in 1959 the majority of the Jews left in a mass exodus, remaking their lives in the United States, yet mourning the loss of the Jewish community they had built.”
~M~
Tropical Diaspora, The Jewish Experience in Cuba, by Robert M. Levine, originally published in 1993, current edition 2010, by Markus Wiener Publishers, Princeton, New Jersey.
From the Foreword: “In proportional terms, Cuba offered refugee or migrant status to more Jews than did any other Latin American country. Proportionally more, in fact, that was offered by the United States. . . . In this scholarly and informative book, Robert M. Levine offers three reasons for this unusual circumstance.” ~ Anthony P. Maingot ~
“I go into my library and all history unrolls before me.”
~ Alexander Smith ~
