Please join us for a very special Literary Luncheon event with two best selling authors, Lisa Barr and Lauren Grodstein as they talk about their latestt Warsaw Ghetto themed books, The Goddess of Warsaw & We Must Not Think of Ourselves, on Wedenesday, January 15th at 12:30 pm.

The Goddess of Warsaw depicts Bina Blon­s­ki and her hus­band, Jakub in the Warsaw Ghetto.  cramped into the War­saw Ghet­to along with the rest of the Pol­ish Jew­ish pop­u­la­tion. Jakub is a jour­nal­ist work­ing hard to doc­u­ment all the heart­break­ing cur­rent events for pos­ter­i­ty; Bina, an actress works for the resistance.

Mean­while, the author turns to 1956 Hol­ly­wood to fol­low the sto­ry of actress Lena Brown­ing, for­mer­ly known as Bina, who is still oper­at­ing as a spy and assas­sin. She becomes inter­est­ed in Oper­a­tion Paper­clip, a top-secret intel­li­gence pro­gram in which high-rank­ing Nazi sci­en­tists are being released from pun­ish­ment. Next we move to 2006, when Lena Brown­ing is an old actress, still known for her per­fect face. When Lena finds out that old ene­mies have sur­vived, she is moved to work with Sien­na, a fellow actress, as a means of enact­ing a final vic­to­ry over the Nazis.

This book is a fast read, with vivid descrip­tions of places and time peri­ods.

We Must Not Think of Ourselves is based on the story of Emanuel Ringelblum, who began a secret project at the Warsaw Ghetto in 1941. The project’s name was “Oneg Shabbat” — the pleasure of the Sabbath. Its mission was to record interviews with confined Jews, collect their testimonies, archive them, and pre­serve them for posterity. The central character is the teacher Adam Paskow, who participates in this dangerous project and finds love, risking his life.

Lisa Barr is The New York Times best­selling author of Woman on Fire, The Unbreak­ables, and the award-win­ning Fugi­tive Col­ors. She has served as an edi­tor for The Jerusalem Post, man­ag­ing edi­tor of Today’s Chica­go Woman and Moment mag­a­zine, and as an edi­tor and reporter for the Chica­go Sun-Times. She has appeared on Good Morn­ing Amer­i­ca and Today for her work as an author, jour­nal­ist, and blog­ger. She lives in the Chica­go area with her hus­band and three daughters.

Lau­ren Grod­stein is the author of Our Short His­to­ry, The Wash­ing­ton Post Book of the Year The Expla­na­tion for Every­thing, and The New York Times best­selling A Friend of the Fam­i­ly, among oth­er works. Her sto­ries, essays, and arti­cles have appeared in var­i­ous lit­er­ary mag­a­zines and antholo­gies, and have been trans­lat­ed into French, Ger­man, Chi­nese, and Ital­ian, among oth­er lan­guages. Her work has also appeared in Elle, The New York Times, Refinery29, Salon.com, Bar­rel­house, Post Road, and The Wash­ing­ton Post. She is a pro­fes­sor of Eng­lish at Rut­gers Uni­ver­si­ty-Cam­den, where she teach­es in the MFA pro­gram in cre­ative writing.