Gaon Books at the URJ Biennial 2013

Thank you to the hundreds of people who came by the Gaon Books booth in the first two days of the URJ Biennial, to those who stopped to look at the books and talk, to those who bought books from Ruth Sohn's Crossing Cairo about being Jewish in Egypt to Reb Zalman's A Hidden Light about early Hasidic rabbis in eastern Europe, Patricia Shapiro's The Privilege of Aging about Jewish women and the new super agers, Arthur Gross-Schaefer's The Rabbi Wore Moccasins, about a rabbi/lawyer  who solves a murder mystery, and Gloria Abella Ballen's just published The Power of the Hebrew Alphabet that was described by a buyer as "ravishingly beautiful" and to the buyers of all the other books. Here are some of the photos at the booth and of a few of the people who stopped by.

We welcome you to visit Gaon Books in Booth 104 at the URJ Biennial in San Diego this week. We will be displaying all Gaon books, and we will be featuring recent titles, especially those of three authors who will be there signing their books - Gloria Abella Ballen, The Power of the Hebrew Alphabet. 

Also Arthur Gross-Schaefer will be signing his book, The Rabbi Wore Moccasins.

And Rabbi Ruth H. Sohn will be signing her book

Crossing Cairo: a Jewish Woman's Encounter with Egypt.

The hours for the signings of each author are listed

on the Gaon Books page of the URJ Biennial website.

We hope to see you there.

In Celebration of the

Jewish Book Month

Gaon Books honors Sephardic Legacy

Sephardic Legacy: Stories and Songs from Jewish Spain is Dr. Samelson’s record of his family’s Sephardic heritage from the Turkish tradition, using the Ladino romance (Judeo-Spanish ballad) as the means of telling this story. He summarizes Sephardic history, as well as the history of the Sephardic ballad, which developed from the Spanish romance tradition. Many of the romances included here were collected from his family members. Sephardic Legacy is a unique record of Sephardic culture and history.

William Samelson, Ph.D. is a Professor Emeritus, Holocaust & Genocide Studies, University of Texas. He was born in Poland and lived there until the age of eleven when he was interned in various Nazi labor and concentration camps in Poland and Germany. He was a member of the partisans at the age of thirteen. Captured by the Nazis, he was taken to Buchenwald Concentration Camp where he spent three and a half years. He was liberated by the U.S. Army in April 1945, and emigrated to the United States in 1948.

Dr. Samelson holds a Ph.D. degree from the University of Texas at Austin, and has taught at Kent State University, The University of Illinois at Urbana and the University of Texas at Austin. Dr. Samelson has written extensively on the Holocaust and lectured widely on it. Among his publications are All Lie in Wait, One Bridge to Life, Warning and Hope.

For more information on Sephardic Legacy, go to:

www.gaonbooks.com/SephardicLegacy.html

Celebrating the Jewish Book Month -- Moroccan Sephardic Romancero

Jewish Book Month

Gaon Books Proudly Presents

Moroccan Sephardic Romancero is an anthology of Sephardic Romances in the Moroccan tradition, based on four decades of research. Starting in the 1970s’ the author has collected more than two hundred variations on ballads from people living in the different countries of the Moroccan Diaspora. 

For all of us who work on the traditional Romancero—and for all Hispanists whatever their speciality—we need to thank and congratulate Shoshana Weich...for having created and published a splendid book that is invaluable and full of pleasant surprises for the study of one of the most important branches of Spanish poetry: the traditional Romancero. 

Samuel G. Armistead, University of California

Susana Weich-Shahak’s anthology of the Moroccan Sephardic Romancero vividly brings to life the Judeo-Spanish ballads transmitted by Moroccan women over the course of time and in scattered locales.  Through its careful presentation of more than two hundred songs and details of their transmission processes, this volume serves both to document a remarkable repertory in great detail and to memorialize the women who sustained these songs. This is a collection that speaks eloquently to the importance of music in Jewish life.  

Kay Kaufman Shelemay, Harvard University

Susana Weich-Shahak

Translator's Note:

Translating Susana Weich-Shahak’s Moroccan Sephardic Romancero has been a pleasure and honor. Having followed her writings for close to twenty years, I have been privy to the consistency of her detailed attention to the historical, textual and musical nuances within Judeo-Spanish song. Her fieldwork has been extensive, collecting songs from Morocco and from various countries in the Moroccan Diaspora, especially first generation émigrés to Israel. Bringing this anthology of Moroccan Sephardic repertoire to an English speaking public I hope will elucidate the complexities in this rich oral tradition to a wider audience.

Vanessa Paloma

Casablanca, 2013

For more information about the Moroccan Sephardic Romancero, go to www.gaonbooks.com/MoroccanRomancero.html

In Celebrating the Jewish Book Month -- The Power of the Hebrew Alphabet

Jewish Book Month

Gaon Books Proudly Presents

The Power of the Hebrew Alphabet by Gloria Abella Ballen is a new book, a fusion between mysticism, art, and Jewish spiritual traditions. Abella Ballen leads the viewer through the labyrinth of the twenty-two letters that changed the world. The letters brought us the stories of Abraham, Moses, and the Ten Commandments. The adventures of David and his songs came to us on the wings of these twenty-two letters, as did the wisdom and poetry of Solomon. The lyrical images of Abella Ballen spread across the pages in full color filled with insight into religious truths drawn from the well of Jewish traditions. 

The Hebrew letters, their shapes and colors give enlightenment and wisdom. Otiyot Mach’kimot. In Jewish mysticism they are also the building blocks of the universe. Enjoy the flight of consciousness this glorious book affords you.

--Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi

ALEPH: Alliance for Jewish Renewal

The melodious art of Gloria Abella Ballen, who also dreams of flying alphabets, fixes the Hebrew letters in time. Suddenly, we appreciate not only the texts they deliver but the texture they are made of.  

--Ilan Stavans

Lewis-Sebring Professor in Latin American and Latino Culture

Amherst College

Gloria Abella Ballen is a student of the Hebrew aleph bet, doing research on the Sephardic illuminated manuscripts at the British Museum and the Bodleian Library, Oxford, as well as studying the Zohar and contemporary works such as The Alphabet of Creation by Ben Shahn and The Book of Letters by Rabbi Lawrence Kushner.

Prof. Abella Ballen has been visiting lecturer on Jewish art, Jewish illuminated manuscripts, and her own work from the Mishkan Omanim, Herzliya, Israel to the University of Essex and the Camberwell School of Art in the U.K. and University of Xinjiang in China among others. She has exhibited at Christie’s in London and Louis Stern in Los Angeles, from the Carrillo Gil Museum in Mexico City to the Bellevue Art Museum in Seattle. In addition to her graduate degree in art from SUNY-Buffalo, she did specialized work with Larry Rivers and John Cage.

Abella Ballen has taught at the University of the Andes in Bogota and Inter American University in Puerto Rico. She is of a Sephardic family, born in South America. She has exhibited in the United States, Israel, Japan, Colombia, Mexico and England and received awards for her work from the Latin American Graphics Biennial, Pan American Graphic Arts, UNESCO and National Endowment for the Arts and others. Her art is in museum, corporate and private collections, from Colombia (National Museum) to the United States (Fort Lauderdale Museum of Art, Occidental Petroleum, Mayo Clinic, et.al.) and Canada (Royal Bank of Canada).

For more visit

http://www.gaonbooks.com/HebrewAlphabet.html

https://www.facebook.com/ThePoweroftheHebrewAlphabet

New e-books -- Crossing Cairo and The Privilege of Aging

Crossing Cairo Kindle

In Crossing Cairo, Rabbi Ruth Sohn has written an exceptional family portrait of the experience of living in Egypt with her husband and children. Would it be possible to cross the boundaries of language, culture and religion to form real friendships and find a home among Egyptians? As she navigates new routines of daily life to make friends, find an Arabic teacher, and get to know the mysterious veiled woman that came with the rental of their apartment, Sohn takes us on a remarkable journey as she encounters the many faces of Cairo. In the Epilogue she returns to Cairo after the fall of Mubarak to find a newly exuberant and infectious patriotism and hope. Throughout this probing contemplation of self and other in a world that is foreign and in many ways inimical to her own as an American Jew, Sohn shows how even the seemingly mundane events of daily life can yield unexpected discoveries. 

"With remarkable evenhandedness and...openness, Sohn has written a provocative and mesmerizing book of extraordinary passion and insight. I could not put it down!" Rabbi David Ellenson, President Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion

The Privilege of Aging -- Kindle

In The Privilege of Aging Patricia Shapiro (M.S.W.) opens a window for us into the lives of women from 75 to 102 years old and explores their successes and challenges, longevity and vitality. Each woman has lived a different path of life, and their examples show us that the resources for successful aging are within us. Anthropologist Doris Francis says that we need "to seize the challenges and honors of growing old." 

"Patricia Gottlieb Shapiro introduces us to ordinary women who model growth, resiliency, creativity and vibrancy in later life. These women are our guides; they beckon all of us to age fearlessly." Rabbi Dayle A. Friedman, M.A., M.S.W., B.C.C. Author of Jewish Visions for Aging Director, Growing Older: Wisdom + Spirit Beyond Midlife

Women and Aging Today -- Elegance and Resilience

Pat Shapiro

The Privilege of Aging

Award-winning author Pat Shapiro has written a new book entitled The Privilege of Aging, portraits of 12 women from 75 to 102 years old. After looking at the lives of these women who are living active, dynamic lives in their 80's and 90's, she asks what is common to their lives to allow living to advanced ages. She has identified 10 factors that contribute to aging successfully and happily, and that resilience is one of the most important of these factors. These interviews and life stories are varied and fascinating, and they keep the reader's attention in page after page of new insights. This is a generation of Jewish grandmothers like none before them.

Women and aging is a subject of national importance, as can be seen in CNN's articles on Style and Elegant Senior Women. CNN looks at the evolving elegance of older women, emphasizing what Shapiro argues that this generation of seniors is living well, better than seniors did in the past. The CNN stories on women and aging in style can be seen at:

http://edition.cnn.com/2013/07/29/living/advanced-style-coloring-book/index.html?hpt=li_bn3 and
http://edition.cnn.com/2012/04/27/living/aging-fashion-style






Pat Shapiro, M.S.W., has written extensively on women and aging and gives talks on the subject across the United States. The Privilege of Aging was recently selected by the Jewish Book Council for its Author's Network, and Shapiro has been invited to JBC sponsored Jewish Book Festivals from the Southwest to the East Coast. For more information on the author's work, visit her website at: www.wisewomenalive.com

For more information about The Privilege of Aging, go to: www.gaonbooks.com.

You are invited to launching of The Privilege of Aging at

Collected Works Bookstore

Galisteo and Water Streets in downtown Santa Fe

Wednesday, August 7, at 6:00 pm

The author will be present. 
She will talk about women and aging and sign books.