Book Club Meeting

Our next meeting will be Sunday, June 27 in the comfort of your own home via Zoom!

We will be discussing Alison Pick’s Between Gods: A Memoir.

Join Zoom Meeting:

https://zoom.us/j/94680832340?pwd=NXk0eHl5RFozNEpldS95UEFlUEYvZz09 

Meeting ID: 946 8083 2340

Password: 1955

SYNOPSIS

Alison Pick was born in the 1970s and raised in a supportive, loving family. She grew up laughing with her sister and cousins, and doting on her grandparents. Then as a teenager, Alison made a discovery that instantly changed her understanding of her family, and her vision for her own life, forever. She learned that her Pick grandparents, who had escaped from the Czech Republic during WWII, were Jewish–and that most of this side of the family had died in concentration camps. She also discovered that her own father had not known of this history until, in his twenties, he had a chance encounter with an old family friend–and then he, too, had kept the secret from Alison and her sister.

In her early thirties, engaged to be married to her longtime boyfriend but struggling with a crippling depression, Alison slowly but doggedly began to research and uncover her Jewish heritage. Eventually she came to realize that her true path forward was to reclaim her history and indentity as a Jew. But even then, one seemingly insurmountable problem remained: her mother wasn’t Jewish, so technically Alison wasn’t either. In this by times raw, by times sublime memoir, Alison recounts her struggle with the meaning of her faith, her journey to convert to Judaism, her battle with depression, and her path towards facing and accepting the past and embracing the future–including starting a new family of her own. This is her unusual and gripping story, told in crystalline prose and with all the nuance and drama of a novel, but illuminated with heartbreaking insight into the very real lives of the dead, and hard-won hope for the lives of all those who carry on after.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Alison Pick was the 2002 winner of the Bronwen Wallace Award for the most promising young writer in Canada. She has published three acclaimed volumes of poetry, and her first novel, The Sweet Edge (2005), was a Globe and Mail “Best Book.” Her second novel, the bestselling Far to Go (2010), was nominated for the Man Booker Prize, won the Canadian Jewish Award for Fiction, and was named a “Top Ten of 2010” book by the Toronto Star and NOW Magazine. It was also published internationally to acclaim. Her memoir, Between Gods, was also published internationally, was a finalist for the BC National Award for Non-Fiction, and was a Globe and Mail “Best Book” of 2014. The author lives in Toronto, Ontario.