Month: April 2016

Safekeeping Discussion

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Originally posted on present perfect book club:
Okay…so I loved this book. I didn’t find it life changing but I did instantly want to look up everything I could about Jewish history and Israel. I thought it was so well done showing each character’s individual plot. I also think it would make a great movie. So here we go with a discussion: DISCUSSION QUESTIONS Q1: So there are many characters in this book and they each had their own path to take.?Did anything unite them in particular? ?Did anything make them seem as if they were in separate worlds? Q2: Each of these characters seems to live by a different set of moral codes. I kept wondering if one of them was “right” or “wrong”, or simply if they were doing the best they could under different life circumstances. Do you think one character is more moral than the other? Do you think any of them found redemption? Q3: This one is a direct steal but I really like it: The title Safekeeping applies to…

Backwards and Forwards

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So, I got some cool news today: After being placed on the TAPIF waitlist (as all returning assistants are) I’ve finally been accepted to teach at the primary level in the Académie d’Aix-Marseille! When I reapplied to TAPIF, I decided that I would only go back if it was for a good reason. Yes, it’s fantastic to be young and un-attached and travel and do whatever, which would be reason enough for some…but I’m getting to the point where I’m tired of living temporarily, figuring things out one year at a time. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t regret a single thing about doing TAPIF the first time, and I wouldn’t change that year for anything. But coming back afterwards, I felt like I had taken a gap year from life and found myself pretty much back at square one in terms of being a poor, unemployed recent college grad, while many of my friends had a full year of ‘adulthood’ under their belts. I want to live in France again. I miss the language, …

April Book Club: Safekeeping

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Originally posted on present perfect book club:
Safekeeping, by Jessamyn Hope published June 9, 2015 Synopsis from author’s website:  It’s 1994 and Adam, a drug addict from New York City, arrives at Kibbutz Sadot Hadar with a medieval sapphire brooch. To redress a past crime, he must give the priceless family heirloom to a woman his grandfather loved when he was a Holocaust refugee on the kibbutz fifty years earlier. But first, he has to track this mystery woman down—a task that proves more complicated than expected. On the kibbutz Adam joins other lost souls trying to turn their lives around: Ulya, the ambitious and beautiful Soviet émigrée; Farid, the lovelorn Palestinian farmhand; Claudette, the French Canadian Catholic with OCD; Ofir, the Israeli teenager wounded in a bus bombing; Eyal, the disillusioned kibbutz secretary; and Ziva, the old Socialist Zionist firebrand who founded the kibbutz. Driven together by the confines of the commune, by love and hate, by their irreconcilable dreams and a shared sense of insecurity, their fates become forever entangled as they each get one last shot at redemption. In…