Join us for yet another illuminating and enjoyable evening of book discussion.

An actor, recently divorced, at loose ends in New York; a woman, no less lonely, perhaps even more desperate than the man: they meet by chance in an all-night diner and are drawn to each other on the spot. Roaming the city streets, hitting its late-night dives, dropping another coin into yet another jukebox, these two lost souls struggle to understand what it is that has brought them, almost in spite of themselves, together. They are driven—from moment to moment, from bedroom to bedroom—to improvise the most unexpected of love stories, a tale of suspense where risk alone offers salvation.

Georges Simenon was the most popular and prolific of the twentieth century’s great novelists. Three Bedrooms in Manhattan—closely based on the story of his own meeting with his second wife—is his most passionate and revealing work.

UPDATE: Sorry, I had written Tuesday, 11/24 – be assured, this group is meeting MONDAY, NOVEMBER 24th at 7:30 p.m.!!!!

New York is the city that never sleeps. But this renowned insomnia would not be possible without the more than 200,000 men and women who work the nightshift – the fry cooks and coffee jockeys, train conductors and cab hacks, cops, docs, and fishmongers selling cod by the crate. Inverting the natural rhythm of life, they keep the city running as it slows but never stops.In NIGHTSHIFT NYC, Russell Leigh Sharman and Cheryl Harris Sharman tell the stories of

New York City nightshift workers. This ethnography of the night investigates familiar sites, such as diners, delis and taxis, as well as some unexpected corners of the night, such as a walking tour of homelessness in Manhattan and a fishing boat out of Brooklyn. The Sharmans show how the nightshift is more than simply out of phase, it is another social space altogether, highly structured, inherently subversive, and shot through with inequalities of power. NIGHTSHIFT presents the narratives of those who sleep too little and work too much, revealing the soul of a city hidden in the graveyard shift of 24-hour commerce when the sun goes down and the lights come up.

Angel Wagenstein, the Bulgarian author and filmmaker, brings us a heartfelt story that brilliantly pairs tragedy and comedy with Isaac’s Torah: Concerning the Life of Isaac Jacob Blumenfeld Through Two World Wars, Three Concentration Camps, and Five Motherlands (out October 14). Having spent time in a concentration camp himself, Wagenstein creates a narrator whose magnetic voice can only be achieved though human experience, and destines the book to become a classic of modern Jewish literature.

Isaac’s Torah is the account of the irresistibly funny Isaac Jacob Blumenfeld, who has passed his youth content in the quaint town of Kolodetz near Lvov.  But history proves to have a different story in line for the paradoxically witty and foolish Isaac.  Sent to defend his numerous motherlands, Isaac survives countless tribulations and provides an irreplaceable account of human endurance. 

Magnificently translated by Elizabeth Frank, the book is Isaac’s reflection on a lifetime of loss and terror, beauty and friendship, and, finally, understanding and truth. Wagenstein takes his reader on an unforgettable journey through the history of 20^th Century Europe and simultaneously weaves into his tale Jewish jokes and fables that become as essential to his story as they are to his heritage.

Elizabeth Frank was born in Los Angeles, and attended high school in London and Geneva. In 1973, Frank received a Ph.D. in American Literature from the University of California at Berkeley. She is the author of two books Louise Bogan: A Portrait, which won the 1986 Pulitzer Prize in biography, and Cheat and Charmer (2004), a novel about Hollywood during the McCarthy period. Her fiction has appeared in Suvremminik (The Contemporary). Since 1982, she has been Professor of Modern Languages and Literature at Bard College.  Frank is currently working on a new novel. She lives in New York City with her daughter, and visits Bulgaria as often as possible.

  “Sweet Land of Liberty is a revelatory, daring, and ambitious book that overturns the conventional histories of America’s struggle for civil rights. Thomas Sugrue persuasively argues that what happened in the streets, churches, and courtrooms of Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles is every bit as important for understanding modern America as the oft-told histories of the southern freedom struggle. This is one of those rare books that completely reorients our understanding of the past.”
—Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Alphonse Fletcher University Professor, Harvard University

In this first major history of the struggle for civil rights in the North, Sugrue weaves together the stories of both well-known and obscure players, offering a panoramic view of an entire region and a long view of the history of civil rights, more than eighty of the most decisive years in American history.

The Northern battles over civil rights raised fundamental questions that we still grapple with today.  Who is responsible for racial inequality, for hostility, for crime, violence and poverty, for persistent racial divisions?  To understand our America, we must give as much attention to the unheralded struggles for civil rights in the schools, factories, and churches of Philly, New York, Detroit, Chicago, and Cincinnati as we have to the now-epic events of Greensboro, Birmingham, Selma, and Montgomery.  This history of the struggle for racial equality in the North opens up new ways of exploring the still unfinished history of race, rights, and politics in modern America.

THOMAS J. SUGRUE is Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Professor of History and Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. He is author of Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North, the first full-scale history of the black freedom struggle in the North. Sweeping in scope and scale, it spans the period from 1920 to the present.