On My Nightstand: Spring 2023

The Matchmaker’s Gift, by Lynda Cohen Loigman

This rich and rewarding novel is based on Jewish history. Sara, age 10, searches for someone to lend her older sister a clean handkerchief while traveling by ship from Eastern Europe to New York City in 1910. In choosing the man to lend her sister the handkerchief, Sara accidentally starts her career as a Jewish matchmaker, typically a man’s job during that time period.

While settling into New York’s Lower East Side, Sara goes on to make several matches between people she knows and interacts with regularly. The male shadchanim of her community are threatened by her success, and speak out against losing their livelihood to a young unmarried girl (even as she becomes a woman). Sara tries to stop making matches as a result of their criticisms, but when that proves to be too painful, she stands up for herself and advocates to the community for her right to her chosen profession.

The chapters alternate between Sara in the early 1900s and her granddaughter, Abby, who works at a divorce firm in the 1990s. As Abby learns more about her grandmother’s past, she begins to wonder if she has some of her grandmother’s abilities. This book is an interesting peek into US Jewish immigrant history, our matchmaking tradition, and strong women who are not afraid to go after their dreams.

Review by Marisa Lewitan

The Art of Gathering, by Priya Parker

It has been abundantly clear to me since joining Prizmah that there’s something special about the organization’s approach to bringing people together. I soon learned that Priya Parker’s insights have helped mold and strengthen the organization’s principles for engaging its constituents. The Art of Gathering is an excellent read that explores the potential depth of bringing people together skillfully. Drawing on her extensive experience as a professional facilitator, Parker offers simple yet insightful guidance on how to design and host gatherings that are engaging, impactful and memorable.

Parker’s approach to creating successful gatherings includes an emphasis on purpose and trust while also creating a sense of belonging. By cultivating empathy, curiosity and vulnerability, hosts can create a sense of safety that encourages participants to share and connect in ways that are both meaningful and transformative. Parker’s approach is grounded in the belief that gatherings have the power to transform individuals and communities.

I’m grateful to have observed these principles and strategies leveraged throughout the Prizmah Conference’s planning and execution. The lasting bonds and memories from the Conference, both among the staff and the participants, clearly demonstrated the effectiveness of Parker’s ideas. The strategies outlined in the book will greatly help enhance your time spent with others.

Review by Josh Craddock

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, by Gabrielle Zevin

When I first heard about this book, a novel about the gaming world, it really didn’t appeal to me. But after reading a review, I decided to go outside my comfort zone and give it a try.

Despite my reservations, I really enjoyed this book. I was fascinated to learn that for some people, gaming can be a safe way to try on a new persona or take a risk, knowing that if you fail, you can simply try again, and again, until you succeed. As the book makes clear, this can be particularly liberating for someone with a chronic illness or a disability, since they can create an avatar without those limitations and behave accordingly in the game. So, for example, someone confined to a wheelchair in real life could run a marathon in the virtual world.

One of the most interesting things to me about this book was the insight into the minds of the people who design these immersive games. As the story unfolds, the main characters imagine entirely new worlds and create them in intricate detail, and in the process, they choose to correct some of the injustices they see in their actual world.

Despite numerous personal challenges, the protagonists in this book are the ultimate optimists. They create their digital worlds as an antidote to the evil and injustice they see in their lived experience, believing, or hoping, that someday, perhaps life will imitate art.

Review by Aimee Close

Islands of Abandonment, by Cal Flyn

An island off Scotland with houses occupied solely by cows. A demilitarized zone where rare and endangered species flourish. Mountainous slag piles from the 19th century carpeted with green growth. A WW1 trench with buried armaments leaching poisons, topped by trees and vegetation. A ship graveyard clogging an old tidal strait next to the New York Harbor. A city in the Caribbean evacuated like Pompei when overrun by a volcanic explosion 25 years ago.

These and other scenes are the hellscapes described in this riveting book by a celebrated Scottish journalist. Each chapter paints in words a region of the world that was once occupied by people and abandoned due to war, nature, or most often, toxicity. She bravely interlopes upon these desolate landscapes, sometimes with a guide but often alone, to portray them for us and take in their full significance.

These are places that are in some sense utterly ruined, lost, like Chernobyl, parts of Detroit where people fled and Newark’s empty factories. At the same time, they provide odd windows of hope, showing how nature–partly, brokenly–returns or regenerates in the absence of human domination. In Chernobyl, herds of horses thrive and roam upon the contaminated landscape. The abandoned Soviet state farms, where people were forced to work for “reeducation,” are the world’s biggest carbon sink. Citing an earlier essay, she summarizes, “There is some intrinsic value in untouched nature that he compares to a work of art.” This haunting book finds the art in these “post-human landscapes,” and in so doing, the author creates new art that lives indelibly in the reader’s mind.

Review by Elliott Rabin

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Spring 2023