Thanks for the Memoirs Book Club

Thanks for the Memoirs Book Club will focus on memoirs from authors representing a variety of backgrounds and lived experiences. We will meet on the 2nd Thursday at 10am, every other month, starting in February.

This month we're reading The White Mosque: a Memoir by Sofia Samatar. Discussions will be facilitated by Mary Sussman, who previously led Shakespeare and Company (2003-2005), dedicated to the works of William Shakespeare; and League Café, dedicated to books about racial equity (2018-2023).

Longlisted for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award

A historical tapestry of border-crossing travelers, of students, wanderers, martyrs and invaders, The White Mosque is a memoiristic, prismatic record of a journey through Uzbekistan and of the strange shifts, encounters, and accidents that combine to create an identity.

In the late nineteenth century, a group of German-speaking Mennonites traveled from Russia into Central Asia, where their charismatic leader predicted Christ would return. Over a century later, Sofia Samatar joins a tour following their path, fascinated not by the hardships of their journey, but by its aftermath: the establishment of a small Christian village in the Muslim Khanate of Khiva. Named Ak Metchet, zThe White Mosque,y after the Mennonites' whitewashed church, the village lasted for fifty years.In pursuit of this curious history, Samatar discovers a variety of characters whose lives intersect around the ancient Silk Road, from a fifteenth-century astronomer-king, to an intrepid Swiss woman traveler of the 1930s, to the first Uzbek photographer, and explores such topics as Central Asian cinema, Mennonite martyrs, and Samatar's own complex upbringing as the daughter of a Swiss-Mennonite and a Somali-Muslim, raised as a Mennonite of color in America.

Future Selections Include:
October 9 – The Liars’ Club: A Memoir by Mary Karr; December 11 - The Color of Water: A Black Man’s Tribute To His White Mother by James McBride.