Congregation for Humanistic Judaism of Fairfield County

Lionel Essrog is Brooklyn’s very own self-appointed Human Freakshow, an orphan whose Tourettic
impulses drive him to bark, count, and rip apart our language in the most startling and original ways.
Together with three veterans of the St. Vincent’s Home for Boys, he works for small-time mobster
Frank Minna’s limo service cum detective agency. Life without Frank Minna, the charismatic King of Brooklyn, would be unimaginable, so who cares if the tasks he sets them are, well, not exactly legal. But when Frank is fatally stabbed, one of Lionel’s colleagues lands in jail, the other two vie for his position, and the victim’s widow skips town. Lionel’s world is suddenly topsy-turvy, and this outcast who has
trouble even conversing attempts to untangle the threads of the case while trying to keep the words straight in his head. Motherless Brooklyn is a brilliantly original homage to the classic detective novel
by one of the most acclaimed writers of his generation. (311 pp) Fiction

Join Women to Women via Zoom, to stay connected at a distance. All CHJ women members are welcome. It’s a great way to get to know each other.

The Zoom link will be sent just prior to the meeting date.If you plan to attend please RSVP Roberta Frank.

Twelve-year-old Bird Gardner lives a quiet existence with his loving but broken father, a former linguist
who now shelves books in a university library. Bird knows to not ask too many questions, stand out too
much, or stray too far. For a decade, their lives have been governed by laws written to preserve
“American culture” in the wake of years of economic instability and violence. To keep the peace and
restore prosperity, the authorities are now allowed to relocate children of dissidents, especially those of
Asian origin, and libraries have been forced to remove books seen as unpatriotic—including the work of Bird’s mother, Margaret, a Chinese American poet who left the family when he was nine years old.
Bird has grown up disavowing his mother and her poems; he doesn’t know her work or what happened to her, and he knows he shouldn’t wonder. But when he receives a mysterious letter containing only a cryptic drawing, he is pulled into a quest to find her. His journey will take him back to the many folktales she poured into his head as a child, through the ranks of an underground network of librarians,
into the lives of the children who have been taken, and finally to New York City, where a new act of defiance may be the beginning of much-needed change.
Our Missing Hearts is an old story made new, of the ways supposedly civilized communities can ignore the most searing injustice. It’s a story about the power—and limitations—of art to create change, the lessons and legacies we pass on to our children and how any of us can survive a broken world with our hearts intact. (335 pp) Fiction

Join Women to Women via Zoom, to stay connected at a distance. All CHJ women members are welcome. It’s a great way to get to know each other.

The Zoom link will be sent just prior to the meeting date.If you plan to attend please RSVP Roberta Frank.

  In the early 1900s, teenaged Sunja, the adored daughter of a crippled fisherman, falls for a wealthy
stranger at the seashore near her home in Korea. He promises her the world, but when she discovers she
is pregnant — and that her lover is married — she refuses to be bought. Instead, she accepts an offer of marriage from a gentle, sickly minister passing through on his way to Japan. But her decision to
abandon her home, and to reject her son’s powerful father, sets off a dramatic saga that will echo down through the generations.
Richly told and profoundly moving, Pachinko is a story of love, sacrifice, ambition, and loyalty. From bustling street markets to the halls of Japan’s finest universities to the pachinko parlors of the criminal underworld, Lee’s complex and passionate characters — strong, stubborn women, devoted sisters and sons, fathers shaken by moral crisis — survive and thrive against the indifferent arc of history. (496 pp)
Fiction

Join Women to Women via Zoom, to stay connected at a distance. All CHJ women members are welcome. It’s a great way to get to know each other.

The Zoom link will be sent just prior to the meeting date.If you plan to attend please RSVP Roberta Frank.

CHJ in collaboration with Fairfield University is pleased to present a major exhibition of the artwork of Arthur Szyk.

This special exhibition, organized around the theme of human rights features more than 50 works by acclaimed Polish Jewish miniaturist and political cartoonist Arthur Szyk (1894-1951), including political cartoons, and images that honor the power and importance of democratic ideals.

This exhibition takes place from Sept. 28 through Dec.16, 2023.

For more info see exhibition.

Join leading scholars and curators from across the country to hear their perspectives on Szyk’s impact on art, politics, and culture. Speakers include Glenn Dynner, PhD; Samuel D. Gruber, PhD, Wendy Lower, PhD; Jonathan Petropoulos, PhD; Gavriel Rosenfeld, PhD; Ori Z. Soltes, PhD; Francesco Spagnolo, PhD; and Ellen Umansky, PhD,

For additional information see

                                         symposium

First published in 1939, these three short novels secured the author’s reputation as a master of short
fiction.
From the gothic Old South to revolutionary Mexico, few writers have evoked such a multitude of
worlds, both exterior and interior, as powerfully as Katherine Anne Porter. This collection gathers
together the best of her Pulitzer Prize-winning short fiction, including Pale Horse, Pale Rider, where a
young woman lies in a fever during the influenza epidemic, her childhood memories mingling with fears
for her fiancé on his way to war, and Noon Wine, a haunting story of tragedy and scandal on a small
dairy farm in Texas. In all of the compelling stories collected here, harsh and tragic truths are expressed in prose both brilliant and precise. (208 pp) Fiction

Dr. Deborah Varat lectures on “How Arthur Szyk’s Cover Art for Collier’s Magazine Helped Americans Visualize the Evil of Fascism”.

This will be held at Diffley Board Room, Bellarmine Hall, Fairfield U., and livestreamed on thequicklive.com .

For more info see Varat.

Join Women to Women via Zoom, to stay connected at a distance. All CHJ women members are welcome. It’s a great way to get to know each other.

The Zoom link will be sent just prior to the meeting date.If you plan to attend please RSVP Roberta Frank.

By an acclaimed writer at the height of his powers, The Sense of an Ending extends a streak of
extraordinary books that began with the best-selling Arthur & George and continued with Nothing to Be
Frightened Of and, most recently, Pulse.
This intense novel follows a middle-aged man as he contends with a past he has never much thought
about – until his closest childhood friends return with a vengeance, one of them from the grave, another
maddeningly present. Tony Webster thought he’d left all this behind as he built a life for himself, and by
now his marriage and family and career have fallen into an amicable divorce and retirement. But he is then presented with a mysterious legacy that obliges him to reconsider a variety of things he thought he’d understood all along, and to revise his estimation of his own nature and place in the world.
A novel so compelling that it begs to be read in a single sitting, with stunning psychological and emotional depth and sophistication, The Sense of an Ending is a brilliant new chapter in Julian Barnes’s oeuvre. (150 pp) Fiction

Join Women to Women via Zoom, to stay connected at a distance. All CHJ women members are welcome. It’s a great way to get to know each other.

The Zoom link will be sent just prior to the meeting date.If you plan to attend please RSVP Roberta Frank.

In the highly anticipated Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman takes us on a groundbreaking tour of the
mind and explains the two systems that drive the way we think. System 1 is fast, intuitive, and
emotional; System 2 is slower, more deliberative, and more logical. Kahneman exposes the
extraordinary capabilities—and also the faults and biases—of fast thinking, and reveals the pervasive
influence of intuitive impressions on our thoughts and behavior. The impact of loss aversion and
overconfidence on corporate strategies, the difficulties of predicting what will make us happy in the
future, the challenges of properly framing risks at work and at home, the profound effect of cognitive
biases on everything from playing the stock market to planning the next vacation—each of these can be understood only by knowing how the two systems work together to shape our judgments and decisions.
Engaging the reader in a lively conversation about how we think, Kahneman reveals where we can and cannot trust our intuitions and how we can tap into the benefits of slow thinking. He offers practical and enlightening insights into how choices are made in both our business and our personal lives—and how we can use different techniques to guard against the mental glitches that often get us into trouble. Thinking, Fast and Slow will transform the way you think about thinking. (499 pp) Nonfiction

Join Women to Women via Zoom, to stay connected at a distance. All CHJ women members are welcome. It’s a great way to get to know each other.

The Zoom link will be sent just prior to the meeting date.If you plan to attend please RSVP Roberta Frank.