Join the Shoah Remembrance Committee’s Holocaust Book Club for their next book discussion – “Something Beautiful Happened: A Story of Survival and Courage in the Face of Evil” by Yvette Manessis Corporon
Monday, September 15th
8:15 p.m.
Blue Room and on TIGN Zoom
Our mission is to read Holocaust literature (fiction and nonfiction) to enhance our commemoration and knowledge.
In this “engrossing peek into a little-known chapter of World War II, and one family’s harrowing tale of finding the lost pieces of its own history” (Karen Abbott, New York Times bestselling author of Liar Temptress Solider Spy), a woman sets out to track down the descendants of the Jewish family her grandmother helped hide seventy years earlier.
Yvette Manessis Corporon grew up listening to her grandmother’s stories about how the people of the small Greek island Erikousa hid a Jewish family—a tailor named Savvas and his daughters—from the Nazis during World War II. Nearly 2,000 Jews from that area died in the concentration camps, but even though everyone on Erikousa knew Savvas and his family were hiding on the island, no one ever gave them up, and the family survived the war.
Years later, Yvette couldn’t get the story of the Jewish tailor out of her head. She decided to track down the man’s descendants—and eventually found them in Israel. Their tearful reunion was proof to her that evil doesn’t always win. But just days after she made the connection, her cousin’s child was gunned down in a parking lot in Kansas, a victim of a Neo-Nazi out to inflict as much harm as he could. Despite her best hopes, she was forced to confront the fact that seventy years after the Nazis were defeated, remainders of their hateful legacy still linger today.
As Yvette and her family wrestled with the tragedy in their own lives, the lessons she learned from the survivors of the Holocaust helped her confront and make sense of the present. In beautiful interweaving storylines, the past and present come together in a nuanced, heartfelt “story of compassion and collective resistance” with “undeniable emotional power” (Kirkus Reviews).
Please RSVP to Carol Smolinsky at smohome6@aol.com and let us know if you’ll be joining us in person or via zoom and if you need help getting a book.
Upcoming book discussions on Mondays at 8:15 p.m.
10/27 – Story of a Life by Aharon Appelfeld
12/8 – One Good thing by Georgia Hunter
1/26 – Saints and Liars by Deborah Dwork
3/9 – The Sisterhood of Ravensbrück: How an Intrepid Band of Frenchwomen Resisted the Nazis in Hitler’s All-Female Concentration Camp by Lynne Olson
4/20 – Jazz Survivor the Story of Louis Bannet and Dawn by Elie Wiesel
