UAlbany Professor Martha Rozett to Lead “Synagogue Scholars” Book Discussion at B’nai Sholom

Rozett will lead the conversation immediately following the congregation’s Friday, January 29, Shabbat service. The service and program, open to all who wish to worship and learn, begin at 8 p.m. B’nai Sholom is located at 420 Whitehall Road, Albany, New York.        

Set partly in Cuba and partly in Chicago, Days of Awe explores issues of religious and cross-cultural identity. The Cuban-American narrator is a young woman named Alejandra San Jose, born on the day Fidel Castro assumed control of Cuba, January 1, 1959. She travels to Cuba in 1987 in the course of her work as a professional translator and begins a process of self-discovery that takes her back through the history of the San José family and of Cuba and its Jewish community as well. The novel comes together in an intricate mingling of times and places, with a contemporary love story, the reconstruction of history and the uncovering of secrets interwoven throughout.

Rozett’s own most recent work is When People Wrote Letters: A Family Chronicle (The Troy Book Makers, 2011), a story told through family letters and autobiographies about the travels and careers of her mother and great aunt and about a romance threatened by the differences between New England Episcopalians and New York Jews. A Shakespeare scholar, she authored Constructing a World: Shakespeare’s England and the New Historical Fiction, a look at the way historical novelists challenge our assumptions about the past, and Talking Back to Shakespeare, which examined the way Shakespeare’s plays have been appropriated and transformed. Rozett is a professor of English at UAlbany with an affiliate appointment in Judaic studies. She frequently teaches contemporary historical fiction, including fiction on the history of the Jews, and lectures in the community at Bethlehem Institute for Lifelong Learning and at the Albany Public Library.  Rozett holds a doctorate in English from the University of Michigan.

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