We have a terrific book club in our chapter!
As our reading guide, we’re taking the list of 2014 Great Group Reads titles recommended for book clubs during WNBA’s National Reading Group Month.
Our book for our March 3 meeting is….
MARCHING TO ZION
by Mary Glickman
(Open Road Media)
The forbidden, tempestuous, and tragic love story of a beautiful Jewish immigrant and a debonair black man in the South during the early twentieth century.
Mags Preacher, a young black woman with a dream, arrives in St. Louis from the piney woods of her family home in 1916, hoping to learn the beauty trade. She knows nothing about Jews except that they killed the Lord Jesus Christ. Then she begins working for Mr. Fishbein, an Eastern European émigré who fled the pogroms that shattered his life to become the proprietor of Fishbein’s Funeral Home. By the time he saves Mags from certain death during the 1917 race riots in East St. Louis, all her perceptions have changed. But Mr. Fishbein’s daughter, the troubled redheaded beauty Minerva, is a different matter. There is something wrong with the girl, something dangerous, something fateful. And it is Magnus Bailey, Mags’ first friend in the city, who learns to what heights and depths the girl’s willful spirit can drive a man.
Marching to Zion is the tragic love story of Minerva Fishbein and Magnus Bailey, a charismatic black man and the longtime business partner of Minerva’s father. From the brutal riots of East St. Louis to Memphis, Tennessee, during the 1920s and the Depression, Marching to Zion is a tale of passion, betrayal, and redemption during an era in America when interracial love could not go unpunished. Readers of Mary Glickman’s One More River will celebrate the return of Aurora Mae Stanton, who joins a cast of vibrant new characters in this tense and compelling Southern-Jewish novel that examines the price of love and the interventions of fate.
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Born Mary Kowalski on the south shore of Boston, Massachusetts, Mary Glickman grew up the fourth of seven children in a traditional Irish-Polish Catholic family. Her father had been a pilot in the Army Air Force and later flew for Delta Air Lines. From an early age, Mary was fascinated by faith. Though she attended Catholic school and as a child wanted to become a nun, her attention eventually turned to the Old Testament and she began what would become a lifelong relationship with Jewish culture. “Joseph Campbell said that religion is the poetry that speaks to a man’s soul,” Mary has said, “and Judaism was my soul’s symphony.”
Since she moved permanently to South Carolina in 2008, Mary’s life long dream of publishing a novel has been realized. Her first novel, Home in the Morning, is in development for film by Jim Kohlberg, director of The Music Never Stopped (Sundance 2011). Her second novel, One More River, was a Finalist for the 2011 National Jewish Book Award in Fiction. Her third novel,Marching to Zion, was launched in November, 2013.
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Our meetings take place on the first Tuesday of each month, 7 PM, at the Panera on Fairview near SouthPark – see dates below. We have chosen books to take us through to next October when there will be a new Great Group Reads list released. If you have questions about our Book Club, please contact Kristen Knox at whitreidsmama
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These are the books we’re reading in 2014-2015:
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