The next meeting of the TSS Book group will be meeting at 7:15 PM on Tuesday, December 17, at the home of Stuart & Susan Shmookler. Their address is 1495 Coventry Rd in Allentown. Please RSVP to either Margie Hertz at mhhertz @ ptd.net or Marcia Berkow at mhberkow @gmail.com
About the book:
The Family by David Laskin
David Laskin brings to life the upheavals of the twentieth century through the story of one family, three continents, two world wars, and the rise and fall of nations. A century and a half ago, a Torah scribe and his wife raised six children in a town at the western fringe of the Russian empire. Bound by their customs and ancient faith, the pious couple expected their sons and daughter to carry family traditions into future generations. But the social and political crises of our time decreed otherwise.
The torrent of history took the scribe’s family down three very different roads. One branch immigrated to America and founded the fabulously successful Maidenform Bra Company; another went to Palestine as pioneers and participated in the contentious birth of the state of Israel; the third branch remained in Europe and suffered the onslaught of the Nazi occupation.
In tracing the roots of this family—his own family—Laskin captures the epic sweep of the twentieth century. A modern-day scribe, Laskin honors the traditions, the lives, and the choices of his ancestors: revolutionaries and entrepreneurs, scholars and farmers, tycoons and truck drivers. The Family is a deeply personal, dramatic, and emotional account of people caught in a cataclysmic time in world history.