Sue's Bookshelf

May 2024

By Sue Littauer

The novel “California Dreaming,” a debut work of fiction by Noa Silver, was recently brought to my attention. Generally, I tend to race through a lot of books to determine whether or not they’re worth recommending for my Center of Jewish Education Book Club, but “California Dreaming,” written in a strong expressive voice, slowed me down. I wanted to appreciate each beautiful sentence for its descriptive word choices.

The storyline interested me because it seemed to parallel my niece Megan’s life to a point. Like the book’s main character, Elena Berg, Megan grew up in New England, graduated from college, and was hired by Teach for America (TFA). While Megan taught middle school English in Compton, a challenging school district in LA, Elena taught middle school English in Fruitvale near San Francisco, where the students were primarily new immigrant Spanish speakers. Both young teachers faced many difficulties trying to engage and control their students. As a former middle school English teacher who taught in a difficult middle school myself, I quite frequently acted as a sounding board for my niece during her first year of teaching — so I was quite familiar with Elena’s struggles.

Inspired by her mother’s early experiences as a hippie in Berkeley during the 1960s, and highly motivated by her grandfather, a Holocaust survivor and outspoken high school geography teacher, Elena sets off to San Francisco to discover her identity as an adult and as a teacher. Initially, she foolishly expects to connect with her students through the study of poetry. However, as time goes on, she realizes through the advice of others that these students need basic written and verbal communication skills rather than the ability to dissect lines of poetry for their meaning. The highlight of her teaching’s impact is shown when one of her students references the Robert Frost poem “The Road Not Taken,” a metaphor for the journey of life, and a major theme of the book.

After two years, Elena leaves TFA to work for an educational technology start-up, which later loses its educational focus to concentrate solely on technology. As she follows this path, she questions her journey as it has now diverted from teaching and wanting to make a difference in the world to becoming just another job in Silicon Valley.

Much of the book centers on Elena’s years in San Francisco, her friends and boyfriends, the pros and cons of living in California, and her journey of self-discovery.

I believe we will be hearing a lot more from Noa Silver and I look forward to reading more of her work. This book will be published on May 21. I hope you will enjoy it as much as I did.

Be sure to read the acknowledgements at the end of the book. The author thanks each of the members of Charlotte’s Cohen family for their love and support – Tammy and Andy are her inlaws, and she is married to Jack Cohen. She and Jack currently live in Berkeley, California with their two daughters.

The next CJE Book Club meeting is Wednesday, May 8 when we will be discussing “Signal Fires” by Dani Shapiro. For more information, please contact sueb.littauer@jewishcharlotte.org.