Here’s the Reading Group Guide for Something Red!

I’d be thrilled to come to your book club or call in on Skype.

Please contact me at: jennifer@jennifergilmore.net to set up a time!

This reading group guide for Something Red includes an introduction, discussion questions, ideas for enhancing your book club, and a Q&A with author Jennifer Gilmore. The suggested questions are intended to help your reading group find new and interesting angles and topics for your discussion. We hope that these ideas will enrich your conversation and increase your enjoyment of the book.

Introduction

It’s 1980 in Washington D.C. and the domestic disturbances of the Goldstein family – a son going off to college, a daughter in the throes of adolescence, a mother’s mid-life crisis– inevitably collide with the shifting political landscape of Jimmy Carter’s presidency, the end of the Cold War and the grain embargo against the U.S.S.R. 

Navigating three generations, Jennifer Gilmore deftly intertwines the lives of her indelible characters as their marriages, faith and politics play out against the backdrop of history – the execution of the Rosenbergs, the Olympic boycott and the Iranian hostage crisis. Something Red is at once a poignant story of husbands and wives, parents and children, activists and spies and a brilliant novel crackling with energy, humor, and intelligence. 

Questions and Topics for Discussion

1.) Gilmore includes an epigraph selected from Grace Paley’s “Faith in the Afternoon” that reads “If you have something sensible to say, don’t wait. Shout it out loud right this minute.” Do you think these lines effectively capture the tone of the novel? Why or why not?

2.) The political landscape is a presence that directly affects the lives of the characters. Discuss the political events and situations that were relevant at the time? Do you have any memories of these events? 

3.) Food plays an enormous role in the novel—from the grain embargo to Sharon’s cooking, to Vanessa’s eating, to Tatiana’s meringue cookies. Discuss the many contexts in which Gilmore uses food, and the significance in each. 

4.) How would you compare the public opinion of Carter and his administration in the story with current attitudes towards the U.S. government? Can you relate to any of the characters in respect to this question? Who, and why?

5.) At the forefront of the novel is Sharon’s “mid-life crisis.” She claims that “she had lost touch with the earth, with the actual ground of this planet, with her home and the people in her home, and that she floated, wholly untethered, unsure as to what her role in the world now was and how she would ever get back down to realize it” (21). Do you think that this phenomenon can be seen as unique to her generation of women? Or is her predicament timeless? 

6.) The Olympics surface several times in the novel. Sharon attributes a greater power to the tradition, one that is echoed in Ben’s rally later on. She remembers that “it was the Soviets who swept the medals that year. It was 1956, just before she’d moved East, and they’d watched the Russians participate for the first time; it was as if they were watching the very moment they achieved world domination” (27). Do you think Sharon and Ben were right to believe that the Olympics are “outside” of politics? Has our perception and the importance with which we imbue the Olympics changed in the past three decades?

7.) Dennis muses that “socialism hadn’t saved anyone, had it? People were still hungry and poor and cruel and stupid. It hadn’t changed a thing” (42). It is clear that Dennis sees the misfortune of humanity as inevitably fixed. Which characters might disagree with him? What would they argue in their defense?

8.) Vanessa, a teenager struggling with bulimia, recalls a set of Russian dolls from her childhood: “Looking at them in a descending line, she would wonder if all these pieces together constituted one doll, or if they were really twelve different dolls, with separate selves and souls” (47). How do you think this thought reflects Vanessa’s own struggle with self-identity? Do you think this question of multiple selves carries over to any of the other members of her family? 

9.) Ben moves from being a high school athlete who hangs out with his teammates to a more radical, lifestyle when he goes to college. How does this change when he chooses to take action against the Olympic boycott? What parts of his personality do you see merge in these scenes?

10.) Sharon and Vanessa liken Ben’s rally speech to the “call and response of synagogue.” How much does Jewish identity play into the novel? Do you think it is overshadowed by their nationalistic loyalties? Why or why not?

11.) When Ben retrieves Vanessa after their night of partying, he wonders, “just as he said it, what it would mean exactly, but still he told his sister, his little sister, “Vanessa,” he said. “Let me take you home.” (246). What do you think this phrase means to Ben, and the rest of his family? How is it similar or different from Dennis and Sharon’s reconciliation at the Ritz?

12.) Discuss the role of music in the novel. How does it highlight both the differences and the similarities in the various members of the Goldstein family?

13.) All the characters seem to be reacting in some way to the past, whether it’s their own childhoods, or the lives of their parents. How does memory function in the novel and how does the past haunt the present? Does it affect the decisions these characters make? Are they running from the past or are they trying in some way to retrieve the past?

14.) Discuss the significance of the Snow Maiden story, a recurring thread throughout the novel: “The Snow Maiden listened to the song and tears rolled down her cheeks. And then her feet began to melt beneath her; she fell onto the earth and then she was gone, a light mist rising from the place she had fallen” (266). 

15.) Were you surprised by the end of the novel? Discuss the importance of secrets and trust in the novel. 

16.) In her last moments with Dennis and her husband, Tatiana feels it necessary to clarify that it was, indeed, Helen singing at a Workers Party years before. Why does she do this? What do you make of the rest of her confession? Can you sympathize with her? In what sense?

Tips for Enhancing your Book Club

1.) Visit www.jennifergilmore.net to learn more about Jennifer Gilmore’s past, present and future projects. You can even arrange to have her join your book group’s discussion!

2.) Host a screening of the movie Miracle, which chronicles the 1980 United States Ice Hockey team’s defeat of the Russians and brings to life Cold War tensions. 

3.) If in the area, visit Brandeis University to learn more about its unique activist background. 

4.) Bake meringue cookies to share with your book club. Here’s a link to some Tatiana might have made: http://www.marthastewart.com/recipe/cherry-pecan-meringues

5.) Want to be brave and try cherries jubilee, a la Sharon’s Food Matters party? Be careful! Here’s an easy recipe: http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/rachael-ray/cherries-jubilee-recipe/index.html

Click here for the on-line reading Group Guide for Something Red

Here is the Reading Group Guide for Golden Country.

I’m happy to call in to your book club!

And I’d love to schedule book group discussion for Something Red, in April.

Please  contact me at: jennifer@jennifergilmore.net to set up a time.

Golden Country Questions for Discussion:

1. How does the novel’s structure — chapters jumping back and forth in time and alternating between family members — strengthen the plot? What would change if the novel were written in chronological order?
2. There are many references throughout the novel to events marking “the beginning of things.” For example, the night Joseph creates Essoil he “could see it then, as clear as the streetlamp outside his window: he was at the start of his life. Everything that had happened to him . . . had made Joseph feel as if his life were beginning just at that moment” (p. 23). Frances recalls her father telling her, “in America, no end in sight. Only zhe beginnings here” (p. 50). Discuss the significance of this recurring idea of new beginnings. How does the idea of starting over carry a variety of meanings for the different generations of all three families?
3. Throughout the novel Joseph remembers his father promising him and Solomon “a golden country,” and Frances recalls how “[a]ll the men seemed to walk burdened by that horrible weight of promises made to their children . . . [she] imagined that somehow it was the children who were meant to lift the heaviness” (p. 47). Discuss the complicated relationship between the parents’ expectations of their own lives and their children’s lives. How do they and their children both carry the burden of creating a better life in a new country? How do Joseph, Esther, Seymour, and Sarah force their own desires onto their children?
4. What is your opinion of Sarah? Is she mentally ill or a product of her background and the time in which she lives? How is she different from all the other characters in the novel? Did you sympathize with her? What does Sarah represent?
5. What is the novel’s attitude toward love and marriage? Consider the different pairs: Esther and Joseph, Sarah and Seymour, Frances and Vladimir, Miriam and David and the generations of parents and grandparents before them. Compare and contrast the different relationships? Why do you think these couples were drawn to each other?
6. When Joseph spots Irving Berlin at Miriam’s wedding he wonders, “Do lives lived parallel make you look the same? . . . Or do our looks inform our parallel lives” (p. 223)? Discuss the recurring theme of physical appearance. Consider Esther’s obsession with Miriam’s nose, the way Seymour’s good looks help him in the gangster world and the divergent lives of Frances and Pauline. What do looks represent to these characters? Which character seems the most at home in his/her own skin?
7. Describing the gang Seymour and the Terrier belong to, Gilmore writes “Everything was connected, as intertwined as family, as ivy, as roses: punch someone in the gut here, over there, across the river, someone else bends over from the pain” (p. 93). Discuss how this statement is reflected within each of the three families in the novel. Is the nature of family ties altered over generations?
8. Gilmore writes, “Destiny is destiny. Either one stumbles upon it or it is completely elusive” (p. 130). What does she mean by this? Golden Country is full of references and events relating to destiny, from Joseph’s discovery of Essoil the night Miriam submerges herself in cleaning solution, to David and Miriam’s first meeting at the World’s Fair, to the closing of Seymour’s first Broadway show after a number of unforeseen incidents. Why does destiny tend to figure so prominently in stories of the immigrant experience? Why is it so important to the characters in this novel?
9. When Joseph dies, all of the members of the three families, even Pauline, are brought together. In what other ways is Joseph the link that joins all of the characters? What does his story represent? Do you consider Joseph the main character, or do you think someone else is? Do you think there is a main character at all?
10. In what ways is Golden Country not only a story of Jewish immigrant life in America, but also a universal story about love and family? To what other novels about immigrant families can you compare Golden Country?

Enhance Your Book Club:

1. Make Esther’s delicious kugel for a book club brunch. Visit Epicurious.com for the recipe. Browse amazon.com or your local bookstore and check out the large variety of Jewish cookbooks. Host a potluck and have everyone bring a different dish.
2. If you’re in New York, walk over the Brooklyn Bridge like Frances and Vladimir did on their wedding night. The lights are breathtaking at night. Learn more about the Brooklyn Bridge here and visit the site’s links for pictures of other notable New York landmarks.
3. Host a screening of movies set in New York in and around the decades during which Golden Country is set. For example, try 42nd Street or Guys and Dolls for a taste of Broadway, and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn for another look at growing up in tenement Williamsburg.
4. During the 1959 Thanksgiving scene, Esther and Frances discuss renowned novelist Philip Roth, and argue over his portrayal of the Jewish experience in America. If you’ve read books by Roth or other prominent Jewish-American writers who have chronicled the same decades as Golden Country — Saul Bellow and Bernard Malamud are two — discuss how their portrayals of American Jewish life, especially in and around New York, parallel Gilmore’s novel. How have these and other writers influenced her? What is unique about her take on the Jewish immigrant experience?

Click here to download the Golden Country reading group guide.

Click here to download a Q&A with me.