This is an open group that welcomes all readers interested in expanding their understanding of the wide variety of Jewish experiences throughout history and across the world.
 
The Zoom information for this meeting will be shared closer to the event via email. To make sure you’re on the Book Group email list, contact the Circle Book Group committee co-chairs at bookgroup@circleboston.org
 
Click here to learn more, see our current book of the month, and view books we’ve read in the past.
 
To make a donation for the Book Group, visit this page.

This month we are reading East West Street by Philippe Sands. 

About the book:

A profound, important book, a moving personal detective story and an uncovering of secret pasts, set in Europe’s center, the city of bright colors—Lviv, Ukraine, dividing east from west, north from south, in what had been the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

A book that explores the development of the world-changing legal concepts of “genocide” and “crimes against humanity” that came about as a result of the unprecedented atrocities of Hitler’s Third Reich.

It is also a spellbinding family memoir, as the author traces the mysterious story of his grandfather as he maneuvered through Europe in the face of Nazi atrocities. This is “a monumental achievement …  told with love, anger and precision” (John le Carré, acclaimed internationally bestselling author).

East West Street looks at the personal and intellectual evolution of the two men who simultaneously originated the ideas of “genocide” and “crimes against humanity,” both of whom, not knowing the other, studied at the same university with the same professors, in “the Paris of Ukraine,” a major cultural center of Europe, a city variously called Lemberg, Lwów, Lvov, or Lviv. (Source: Penguin Random House)