Literary Luncheon at MBJCC with Lisa Barr & Lauren Grodstein

Description

Please join us for a very special Literary Luncheon event with two best-selling authors, Lisa Barr and Lauren Grodstein as they talk about their latest Warsaw Ghetto themed books, The Goddess of Warsaw & We Must Not Think of Ourselves, on Wednesday, January 15th at 12:30 pm.
The Goddess of Warsaw depicts Bina Blonski and her husband, Jakub in the Warsaw Ghetto. cramped into the Warsaw Ghetto along with the rest of the Polish Jewish population. Jakub is a journalist working hard to document all the heartbreaking current events for posterity; Bina, an actress works for the resistance.
Meanwhile, the author turns to 1956 Hollywood to follow the story of actress Lena Browning, former-ly known as Bina, who is still operating as a spy and assassin. She becomes interested in Operation Paperclip, a top-secret intelligence program in which high-ranking Nazi scientists are being released from punishment. Next we move to 2006, when Lena Browning is an old actress, still known for her perfect face. When Lena finds out that old enemies have survived, she is moved to work with Sienna, a fellow actress, as a means of enacting a final victory over the Nazis.
We Must Not Think of Ourselves is based on the story of Emanuel Ringelblum, who began a secret project at the Warsaw Ghetto in 1941. The project’s name was “Oneg Shabbat” — the pleasure of the Sabbath. Its mission was to record interviews with confined Jews, collect their testimonies, archive them, and preserve them for posterity. The central character is the teacher Adam Paskow, who participates in this dangerous project and finds love, risking his life.
Lisa Barr is The New York Times bestselling author of Woman on Fire, The Unbreakables, and the award-winning Fugitive Colors. She has served as an editor for The Jerusalem Post, managing editor of Today’s Chicago Woman and Moment magazine, and as an editor and reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times. She lives in the Chicago area with her husband and three daughters.
Lauren Grodstein is the author of Our Short History, The Washington Post Book of the Year The Expla-nation for Everything, and The New York Times bestselling A Friend of the Family, among other works. She is a professor of English at Rutgers University-Camden, where she teaches in the MFA program in creative writing.