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good morning and welcome to 'mosaic'. i am rabbi eric weiss and honored to be your host this morning. we are about to have a wonderful conversation in anticipation of jewish book month. we have an author who has recently written a book . welcome. howard, jumping in. tell us what is new at the jewish community library. >> there are always things new. there is no shortage of new books and we do different programs every season. one of the programs we are excited about is a new year of one day, one book which is a year-long program in which we encourage all the numbers who are interested to read a single book and discuss it seems. the book we have for this year is michael shaven's upcoming novel called, moonglow. it is well written and we look forward to getting together with groups of people and that could be friends talking about it or

groups that assist at a synagogue or jcc and discussing the book and getting a lot out of it. >> if someone is interested in participating, how do they connect to you? >> go to community jewish library.org and learning about the program or coming to the library . >> one of the wonderful things about the jewish community library and book month, we get to feature an author. welcome, michael. you wrote a book. let's jump in and tell us what is your book all about? >> about a little girl who becomes an advisor to the sultan of the ottoman empire maybe changes the course of history. >> is it complete fiction or somehow based a little bit? >> like a historical context that is real but the idea of a little girl becoming an advisor to the sultan is made up. >> people who read books like

to know, how did an author come up with that idea. what did it take to get that idea into a book form so that people can enjoy it. >> i was living in tunisia at the time and i was on a run and i have this image of a little girl playing backgammon with two older men and i did not know as she lived or when she lived or any of that. and i thought about it for a long time and after a while put it aside and i ended up going to visit my girlfriend at the time , and was deported from the country , that is another story we will not go into. and ended up with a week by myself in istanbul. so i spent my days wandering around the city and on the third or fourth day , i happened upon an antique shop and at the back of the antique shop in a crystal bowl was a stack of pictures and at the top was this little girl , leaning on a pedestal. and i

knew right then and there that this was the protagonist of my novel and it was set in istanbul in the 19th century and i went back to my hotel and spent the night feverishly writing. >> the essential outline? >> the outline . in the basics of it. and that is the only time i have ever spent the night feverishly writing in my life . >> otherwise, how do you write? >> i am usually a plotting writer . a donkey with a huge load on his back. i do every morning for a couple of hours and chip away at it toward that end goal. >> so many people who write and think of writing wonder about what is the difference between or maybe the interrelationship between discipline of writing and inspiration of writing. i know that is a big question. for you and your style, how does that interact. >> you have to have inspiration

and you have to have a reason that you come to that page because it is a hard job and it does not pay to get really well. in addition to that inspiration you have to have the discipline and this desire to come to the work day after day after day and you will not be inspired every morning at 8:00 a.m. you have to have some way to access that reason that you are writing that inspiration and sit down and do it. not every day will be good. >> howard, one of the things the library likes to do is find authors in future authors and to support others in the sense of getting their work out and i wonder, before we take the next break, how did you come across michael? >> michael's book , we featured it , we have a book club program and i know it was featured, and the book was a

selection in marin county's version of a similar program where we had , groups discuss the book and it is a very rich book in part because it does what literature can often do for us which is to take us some place in our imagination when the pastor someplace we don't have in the united states or in my life , direct contact with and make it real for us . >> thank you. will take a quick break and come back in a moment here on 'mosaic'.

good morning and welcome to mosaic. we are in the middle of a wonderful conversation in anticipation of jewish book month with howard freedman the director of the jewish community library and michael lucas was written a book called the oracle of istanbul. michael we were talking about your book and how you were inspired and a postcard you saw in istanbul . in this day and age, it is a big question but why do people write and why do people read and in the sense of why do people read and they read differently with an audiobook. what are your thoughts about all of that.

>> i am aware as a writer we have competition. if you're reading on your ipad you can click and look at your email or play a little game of angry birds or something like that. but i think writing has this unique and special attribute which is , you are connected into the readers mind. your voice, your words are going directly into their mind and that is an amazing technology. when you take about why people write i think about he and forrester the british author and he had a maxim for the importance of literature which is only connect. when i sit down and feel like i have , struggling to remember what this is about i think about that. just about connection with other people and about building connections between other people. >> do you find in that case people can connect and you can be inside a readers mind

whether they have book literally in front of them or whether they are on an e-book or if they are listening to the book, books on tape ? >> i love books on tape . since i recently had a young daughter , i have not found quite as much time to read . to listen to books on tape in my commute and actually i met the woman who read my book , the audio version and i was at an event in l.a. and it was the end of a long book tour and was losing my voice and i said to the crowd, i said , is there anyone who can read this book instead of me. this one woman raised her hand and she said okay, how about you ? she said i read the audiobook and i am an actor and that is my job. who better to do this reading instead of me? >> she did a wonderful job.

>> it brings to mind the different ways that we all need our sense to have connection for a writer to be inside a readers mind . >> there is a time for tv shows at the end of the day you are tired and you want to decompress. that makes sense. time for angry birds but i hope there is a time for books. >> howard, is there a way you have seen over time, the art of the use of technology the way people engage books is different ? do you see a pattern in that ? >> it is hard to see patterns but we do see changes. i ride the bus several times a day and a decade ago it was very common to see physical books being read . five years ago it was common to see kindles . many which have displaced physical books and today the truth is most people are checking on their phones either

playing a game or checking facebook or doing possibly work and i think it is a source of concern for me that people, especially michael being a new parent and i am a parent and i know a lot of people between all of our demands from work and demands from parenting and technology, that many of us are spending less time reading. i think it is not a value that gets promoted enough in our society and i think we have to be sometimes more conscious with our life. i don't really care whether somebody reads an e-book or an audiobook through a physical book, for me it is really what michael was talking about, the connection and the engagement that is possible in any number of ways. we need to make that decision for ourselves, how they will allow that experience to happen in the lives . >> michael, if we take the notion of reading a large in the notion of connection and flip it back to you as an author, can you talk about the

ways in which writing the book itself and your experiences being out in the public promoting the book and talking about it has become more of a connection for you with your topic, with your process, with your reading public. >> definitely. being a writer you are basically in a cave by yourself, hacking away at this thing you never know whether it will get out into the world. when it does get out into the world and you visit a library like the jewish community library or you go to a book club , it is really an amazing experience. i think what was most transformative to me, is realizing that there were people reading my book. and to get to meet them and to hear their concerns . a lot of people were upset about the ending of my book and engage with them about that , was really amazing experience. >> michael and howard we will take a quick break and we'll

say goodbye to michael but welcome another author. please join us back here on 'mosaic' .

good morning and welcome back to 'mosaic'. we are in the middle of a conversation about books in anticipation of jewish book a month . i would like to reenter issued to howard freedman, director of the jewish community library and introduce you to elizabeth, her book has recently been released. welcome. welcome back , howard. elizabeth, chasing portraits, what is that about? >> my great-grandfather was a painter in warsaw in the interwar period and he painted the joe -- polish-jewish community and he was a prolific artist. after the war he had died in the war and my parents, my father and his parents were survivors and after the war,

brought the surviving paintings with them to the united states eventually. i grew up surrounded by the paintings but not knowing much about what happened. chasing portraits was my quest to find out what happened to my great-grandfather and to discover what happened to the lost and missing pieces of his original art collection. >> finding things that were once lost is such a complex layer of exploration. to ask you this, do you by chance know where the paintings were in the interim before he refound them? >> an excellent question. in the early days of the second world war my great-grandfather became concerned about his body of work and he decided to take the collection of his work , about 800 pieces or so and divide them into bundles and hide them in and around the city of warsaw. so he hid to them and after the war my great grandmother who survived only sound one of those

original bundles. today we have far more survived and that is what the book is about and actually there is a documentary film in postproduction editing that follows that story line. i have found pieces in poland and israel , the united states, canada and france . somewhere in museums and other pieces are in private collections. >> did your great-grandfathers sell his art during his lifetime? the 800 are works he had not yet sold? >> that is a little bit of a tricky question. and it goes kind of to the heart of my story. a lot of stories about holocaust looted art about the restitution and recovery of the paintings. my project has been more about rescuing his legacy and acting more as an historian rather than at the claimant. and that goes , to

your question, did he sell artwork? we don't know precisely what he sold and what he did not sell. we do know he showed in the interwar years that there are documents and newspaper clippings that show evidence from exhibits as well as some price tags on the back of paintings that still exist. the question is, what did he have in his own personal possession? what did he sell and give away? trade with other artists? and it became incredibly difficult to answer those questions. my energies have been focused on building bridges with the people who have his artwork and to say, let this not be about reclaiming the painting, but about reclaiming what we know about my great-grandfather and to share the artwork and the more pieces that come forward, the better we can understand , not only my great-grandfather's legacy but the legacy of the polish -jewish community which

is the community he painted. as we have discovered more pieces, more of that jigsaw puzzle of understanding his body of work has really come into focus. >> in a moment, i want to ask howard a question about the notion of the legacy of memoir the jewish community memoir has books on this topic. since we have you in front of us, the notion in the world of art and creating art, there is an undercurrent of creating art to give it away. that brings up a lot of issues about who owns a work of art . a book or a photograph or a painting or a sculpture. i am just wondering in the big world, especially in the context of war and trauma and were something ends up, in your process with your own family and your work as an artist writing this, what are your reflections on those topics? does it come down basically to ownership of legacy as opposed to literally

ownership of a piece of art? how do you reflect on that kind of a concept? >> i love that question and it is a really complicated one. both legally and personally. something that is hard to navigate. for my own personal , circumstances, i decided that what was really important was to rescue the legacy. my great-grandfather was not an incredibly famous painter. he was known, but not really known after the war and certainly not abroad. in the front of my book there is a dedication that says culture belongs to all of it -- all of us and i feel that is essential. >> we will come back in just a moment and continue our conversation in anticipation of jewish book month.

good morning and welcome back to mosaic . we are in the middle of a wonderful conversation in anticipation of jewish book month with howard freedman, the director of the jewish community library and author, elizabeth rynecki whose book , 'chasing portraits' has recently come out and you are finishing a documentary on the topic as well. welcome back . we were talking about notions of writing and who owns a

piece of art and what are its purpose is ultimately. i wonder if you can reflect from the library perspective that another library has so many books on memoir and books on recollection and books around itself and i am wondering what your thoughts are around that ? >> i think this is a really -- i started reading elizabeth's book and it is a fantastic book , in part because it has those two elements. the questions about art and about an artist but really requests to relate to somebody who otherwise is not somebody she could have a conversation with . this is somebody , and what do we want to do with someone whose voice is not there. the art exists as one part of the conversation and she has chosen to be the person on the other side. i think we do have a lot of books that are part -- i will not

let necessarily a trend but the idea of her grandchildren and great-grandchildren to try to understand the past to what sometimes could be a really , quite a quest to establish a relationship and an understanding. was also a generation, which often never spoke about terrible things that happened and there is a break in our understanding. i mentioned moonglow, our upcoming book selection which is about -- the setting is a grandson who is at the deathbed of his grandfather and the grandfather is on his ep medicines which cause him , he is not particularly talkative but he starts spilling all the details of his whole life and that is what you do with learning all the stories. >> it occurs to me without naming sort of products, but just to say that technology

has really formed a way in which communication takes place a lot in writing. at the computer and in some form or another which means people are engaged in reading in one form or another. and i am just wondering , from your perspective, how the use of technology has changed , influenced, the way we take in information and the way we offer information , and in that way , the way we form our way of seeing the world or being in the world? >> i think it is huge and it is from little things but also one of the reasons i am excited about technology is that it has enabled noncommercial communication to become accessible to us. an example would be, i have been involved in the translations of a book from one of the towns my family is from , a town in eastern europe , where the survivors, those who did not parish in the holocaust wrote books of

recollection. this happened in many communities. these were not commercial enterprises but it was for the sake of preserving the memory of these towns. >> you use the hebrew word which means, memory, essentially. >> a lot of these sat dormant for a while and not translated into english and lately there has been an effort to translate many. they have no commercial potential but the information they give you on the finished communities is absolutely priceless and technology has enabled that sharing to happen. >> elizabeth, we did not ask earlier but to ask you this, do you write using technology or do you write using pen and paper or pencil and paper? >> i like the computer. i like to type. i am often a handwritten editor. i will print it out and read out loud and hand insert changes. but

i wanted to bounce back to the question about technology and say for my own project, which is really would not have been possible without it. in early 1999 we built a website about my great-grandfather's artwork . and that open doors in connections to other people. people who had his art but i do not know about contacted me because they searched the name and discovered us. i have accessed books and found people who have helped me translate things from polish and yiddish, all through the internet. it has been a fantastic resource. >> that is wonderful. we have a moment left and i want to ask you very quickly who your publisher is , and a word of encouragement to anyone who is writing and looking for a publisher. >> my publisher is penguin random house and the word of encouragement is persistence and perseverance and believe in yourself. >> wonderful. persistence, perseverance and believe in

yourself. go out and write and read and visit the jewish community library. thank you for being with us. - [crowd] touchdown! - did you see that? - whoa, whoa, we scored? - yeah we scored, we're going to the playoffs. - i can't believe i missed that. (bell dings) every time i'm buzzed i spend too much time on my phone. - what? i should take your phone away. - no, no, no, i'll call for a ride. - hey, why does my face look like that? - (laughing) i'm playing with these new face filters. - okay you know what? that's mine. - [buzzed guy] i'm gonna need that back. - [kevin] nope. - [buzzed guy] kevin.

from cbs news bay area, this is the morning edition. >> this morning a memorial for an oakland police officer killed in the line of duty continues to grow. we are learning