Larchmont Temple Library

Library Corner by Ze’ev Aviezer

Below is a sampling of the eclectic collection of books that were recently added to our library’s shelves, including 32 volumes Mishnah to our reference section.

The Séance by Isaac Bashevis Singer

These amazing stories, by a Nobel Prize winner, will stay with you. The strange, sad characters afflicted by poverty and by life, bring us face to face with common human personalities from all times and places, while also depicting the conditions and peculiar relationships of Jews in Poland. Magic, religion, animals, thieves, rabbis, prostitutes, mystics, Holocaust survivors, Talmudic scholars, prisoners, books, butchers and shopkeepers crowd the pages. In each story, you find pathos and tragedy, happiness and satisfaction, tensions and transformations.

The Hotel Neversink by Adam O’Fallon Price

Thirty-one years after workers first broke ground, the magnificent Hotel Neversink in the Catskills finally opens to the public. Then a young boy disappears. This mysterious vanishing—and the ones that follow—will brand the lives of three generations. At the root of it all is Asher Sikorsky, the ambitious and ruthless patriarch. Told by an unforgettable chorus of Sikorsky family members—a matriarch, a hotel Maid, a traveling comedian, the hotel detective, and many others—the book is a gripping portrait of a Jewish family in the Catskills over the course of a century.

The Gospel According to Lazarus by Richard Zimler

According to the New Testament, Jesus resurrected his friend, but the Gospel of John omits details of how he achieved this miracle and whether he had any special purpose in doing so. Zimler takes up the tale and recreates the story of the Passion from Lazarus’ point of view. He places Jesus in the historical context of ancient Jewish practice and tradition; he is at once a charismatic rabbi and a political activist who uses his awareness of a transcendent reality—culminating in the Kingdom of Heaven—to try to bring justice to his people and a broader compassion for humankind.

The Accusation: Blood Libel in an American Town by Edward Berenson

On Saturday, September 22, 1928, Barbara Griffiths, age four, strayed into the woods surrounding the upstate village of Massena, NY. Hundreds of people looked everywhere for the child but could not find her. At one point, someone suggested that Barbara had been kidnapped and killed by Jews, and as the search continued, police and townspeople alike gave credence to the quickly spreading rumors. The allegation of ritual murder, known to Jews as “blood libel,” took hold. More than just the disturbing story of one town’s embrace of an insidious anti-Jewish myth, The Accusation is a shocking and perceptive exploration of American and European responses to anti-Semitism.