Book Thief by Markus Zuzak
Marilyn Hammerman has recommended this book as a must read. This is the story of a nine-year old girl from 1939 to 1943 in Nazi Germany. Liesel copes with life with a foster family, air raids, her best friend, Rudy, and a hidden Jew. She steals books, which sustain her during this difficult period.
A Marriage Sabbatical by Sabina Shalom
A book recommendation comes from our own “backyard”. “A Marriage Sabbatical” is the true story of Sabina Shalom who exchanged a brilliant single-life career for marriage and motherhood. After thirty years of making a home for her husband and their two sons, she felt frustrated in her role as live-in-maid and asked her husband for time off with pay! With a back-pack and only fifteen hundred dollars, she traveled fifty thousand miles alone around the world. Stranded in Iran, received by Indira Gandhi in India, she spent the night in a mud hut just a few miles from cannibal country in Papua-New Guinea. Granted an audience with the King of Tonga and trading her clothes for lodgings on Easter Island were some of her experiences that enabled her to rediscover new strengths and potential long since dormant in a marriage grown stale. But the adjustments the new liberated Sabina and her husband had to make upon her return home six months later (and thirty pounds thinner), proved to be the most difficult part of her "sabbatical." Ultimately their marriage becomes richer and stronger than either could have imagined.
A Marriage Sabbatical is a fascinating and inspirational account of a middle-aged woman's extraordinary, lone, global odyssey in search of herself, told with warmth, candor, and good humor.
Footnote: The book is available at Rhonda Zahler’s Beth El gift table on Sundays with profits being donated to sisterhood.