Jewish Counterpart to City Program
is Launched with One Book, One Community

October 28-November 10, 2011

By Gila Wertheimer for the Chicago Jewish Star

Get ready, get set, get reading.

One Book, One Chicago has now been joined by its Jewish counterpart — One Book, One Community.

The book selected is a debut novel, A Day of Small Beginnings by Lisa Pearl Rosenbaum, published in 2006. It is a story of generations, of Europe and America, of heritage lost and reclaimed, and it opens in 1906, in a cemetery in Poland, narrated by one Freidl Alterman, who died, aged 83, the previous year.

Not exactly with her consent, she returns to the Land of the Living to protect a young boy, Itzik Leiber. And so begins this family saga.

One Book, One Community is a new project of Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies that will take place during November and early December, to coincide with Jewish Book Month.

It will be accompanied by a number of programs, with the first one, titled Getting Inside the Story, a look at Jewish traditions of storytelling and papercutting, which play parts in the novel.

The program takes place November 13, at 2 p.m., at Spertus Institute, 610 S. Michigan Avenue, Chicago.

The culminating program will be author events with Lisa Pearl Rosenbaum on December 4.

According to Beth Schenker, Director of Programming at Spertus, A Day of Small Beginnings was the One Book, One Community selection “because the novel addresses ideas about Jewish faith on both a very personal level and through the wide lens of political and social change.”

Organizers of the project hope it will attract not only individual readers, but also book clubs, synagogue groups and families, resulting in a wide variety of conversations within the community.

To facilitate this, Spertus has issued a booklet with discussion questions, a timeline of Polish-Jewish history, a list of events and other information related to the book.

Information is available at spertus.edu. #