Date/Time
Date(s) - 11/10/2026
6:30 pm - 8:30 pm
Categories
We are reading Paradiso 17 by Hannah Lillith Assadi.
From the Publisher:
The intimate, sweeping tale of one man’s restless search for home the world over, as the pendulum of fate swings between loss and life, grief and euphoria, regret and hope All his life, exile has been the shadow stitched to the sole of Sufien’s shoe. Born in Palestine on the precipice of 1948’s Nakba, Sufien is forced to leave the only home he’s ever known, the one on the hill with a beautiful blue door. This is the precise moment when time stops making sense. He spends the rest of his life propelled forward, always on the way-although in search of what, he is never quite sure. . . . The lyrical pages of “Paradiso 17” weave in and out of time and space, beginning at the end and ending at the beginning. They are haunting, haunted with grief, struck through, as Dante once wrote, with “the arrow that the bow of exile / shoots first,” and yet they throb with light—not just the light that Sufien sees as he approaches his own end, but the brilliant light of a life lived. Like all of our dead, Sufien still tries to speak, the book begins. Listen, this is his story.
Review from The New York Times is at this link.
E-mail us at northnj@jewishvoiceforpeace.org to get details about the location for this club meeting. There are many copies of Paradiso 17 available in the Bergen County Coöperative Library System (BCCLS).