SAVE THE DATE--Jewish LIterary Voices Series
Registration will open soon.
At twenty-three, Michelle Ephraim was failing at everything. The only child of reclusive Holocaust-survivor parents who were dismayed by her literary studies, she found herself dumped by her boyfriend and bombing out of graduate school. Then, one night, she crashed a Shakespeare recitation party. Loopy from vodka and never having read a single line of Shakespeare, she was transfixed. Shakespeare, she decided, was the lifeline she needed.
Green World: A Tragicomic Memoir of Love & Shakespeare is the hilarious and heartbreaking story of Ephraim’s quest to become a Shakespeare scholar and to find community and home. As she studies Shakespeare, Ephraim’s world uncannily begins to mirror the story of the Jewish daughter in The Merchant of Venice, and she finds herself in a Green World, an idyllic place where Shakespeare’s heroines escape their family trauma. Green World reckons with global, historical, and personal tragedy and shows how literature—comic and tragic—can help us brave every kind of anguish.
Green World received the 2023 Juniper Prize for Creative Nonfiction from the University of Massachusetts Press, a national book award.
Michelle Ephraim is a Professor of English at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. She’s the author of Reading the Jewish Woman on the Elizabethan Stage and co-author of Shakespeare, Not Stirred: Cocktails for Your Everyday Dramas.
This Knosh and Knowledge program held at Hevreh is part of Jewish Literary Voices: A Federation Series in collaboration with The Jewish Book Council.
Books will be available for purchase and book signing after the event or purchase the book HERE in advance and a portion of the proceeds will be donated back to a local independent bookstore in the Berkshires.
