“This is the second time I have threatened to leave, swearing never to return. I had made this journey before but those other times, no one asked if I wanted to, and as a young child our coming and going seemed like an adventure … By the time I was twelve I had left Israel three times and could pack a suitcase in ten minutes flat.”
So begins Karen Levy’s memoir, “My Father’s Gardens.” Now a resident of Davis, where she lives with her husband and two children, Levy was born in Israel and spent most of her childhood traveling between her homeland and the U.S., straddling divided homes and alliances.
How she comes to terms with her fragmented upbringing and not-always-in-sync parents unfolds in her recently published book. Levy teaches composition and interpretation of literature at Sacramento State University.
“My Father’s Garden” by Karen Levy (248 pages, Homebound Publications, $17.95)
Leon Malmed recently spoke at the S.F.-based Jewish Family and Children’s Services’ Holocaust Center about his book, “We Survived … At Last I Speak.” His book recounts how he and his sister, Rachel, escaped the Holocaust in occupied France thanks to a courageous couple who took them in after their parents were arrested and taken away. Malmed recently relocated to South Lake Tahoe from Pleasanton, where he lived for the past 12 years.
“We Survived … At Last I Speak” by Leon Malmed (232 pages, Zea Books, $25)
Shulamit Sofia of San Francisco has written “Climbing the Sacred Ladder: Your Path to Love, Joy, Peace, and Purpose.”
Her book was “decades in the writing, as a parallel to my own spiritual growth and development,” she noted, and offers readers “a new way of embracing their Jewishness in a way that contributes to the world.“
Sofia will give a book talk 1 p.m. Sunday, June 9 at the Jewish Community Library, 1835 Ellis St., San Francisco.
“Climbing the Sacred Ladder: Your Path to Love, Joy, Peace, and Purpose” by Shulamit Sofia. (Available at www.soulstrengthseminars.com)