16th Street book club
Join us for our upcoming discussion of a graphic novel!
Tuesday, August 20 at 7pm
at the Center for Jewish History, 15 West 16th Street, NY, NY

All book club sessions are free and open to the public. Please try to bring your books or e-reading devices with you.

About the book:

Unterzakhn by Leela Corman

A mesmerizing, heartbreaking graphic novel of immigrant life on New York’s Lower East Side at the turn of the twentieth century, as seen through the eyes of twin sisters whose lives take radically and tragically different paths.

For six-year-old Esther and Fanya, the teeming streets of New York’s Lower East Side circa 1910 are both a fascinating playground and a place where life’s lessons are learned quickly and often cruelly. In drawings that capture both the tumult and the telling details of that street life, Unterzakhn (Yiddish for “Underthings”) tells the story of these sisters: as wide-eyed little girls absorbing the sights and sounds of a neighborhood of struggling immigrants; as teenagers taking their own tentative steps into the wider world (Esther working for a woman who runs both a burlesque theater and a whorehouse, Fanya for an obstetrician who also performs illegal abortions); and, finally, as adults battling for their own piece of the “golden land,” where the difference between just barely surviving and triumphantly succeeding involves, for each of them, painful decisions that will have unavoidably tragic repercussions.

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The 16th Street book club recently celebrated its first anniversary. To see a list of books we’ve read, visit cjh.org/bookclub.

Click here to view the Facebook event and RSVP.