JRC Book Group: House on Endless Waters by Emuna Elan

Join the engaging conversation with your JRC community! JRC’s Book Group meets on the second Sunday of every month, typically over Zoom but this month we will meet in-person Leslie Rosen’s house on July 21, 6334 N. Sheridan Road, Chicago. All are welcome! Please RSVP to Jill Berkeley to let her know you’ll be attending and email with any questions about parking.

This month’s book is: House on Endless Waters by Emuna Elan.

Genre:  Holocaust Fiction

Renowned author Yoel Blum reluctantly agrees to visit his birthplace of Amsterdam to promote his books, despite promising his late mother that he would never return to that city. While touring the Jewish Historical Museum with his wife, Yoel stumbles upon footage portraying prewar Dutch Jewry and is astonished to see the youthful face of his beloved mother staring back at him, posing with his father, his older sister…and an infant he doesn’t recognize.

This unsettling discovery launches him into a fervent search for the truth, shining a light on Amsterdam’s dark wartime history—the underground networks that hid Jewish children away from danger and those who betrayed their own for the sake of survival. The deeper into the past Yoel digs up, the better he understands his mother’s silence, and the more urgent the question that has unconsciously haunted him for a lifetime—Who am I?—becomes.