BOOK SALE!

Today was our local library's annual USED BOOK SALE! People come from miles around and surround the roped-off area in the town square until the clock strikes noon, and then they descend like happy vultures. For $6 I got 6 paperback novels. The first two are of particular interest to me and I plan on reading them first once I've completed my other commitments.

Anzia Yezierska's Bread Givers was first published in 1925. Yezierska (1880-1970) was born in Maly Plock, Poland and came to the United States around 1890. She is best known for writing about the difficulties faced by Jewish and Puerto Rican immigrants in New York's Lower East Side. Set in the tenements of the 1910s and '20s, Bread Givers is a semi-autobiographical novel about the daughter of a deeply traditional Torah scholar whose yearning for individuality and self-expression clashes with her father's Old World culture. The story is also deeply concerned with the divisions between Orthodox and assimilated Jews.

Snow, a 2002 novel by Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk, was translated from Turkish by Maureen Freely and named Best Book of the Year by the New York Times Book Review. Like Bread Givers it deals with the conflict between Western values and traditional religion (in this case, Islam). A Turkish poet named Ka, who has spent the past twelve years in Germany, has traveled to the small town of Kars to investigate the suicides of young women forbidden to wear the hijab. Ka encounters the various competing groups - ranging from Kurdish separatists to idealistic students - that characterize modern Turkish society and a deeply complex mystery emerges.

Other acquisitions:


Reminder: I am giving away a copy of Andreas Maier's Klausen! I didn't like but hopefully you will!