this week in lectures, signings, panel discussions, workshops, and Q&As

NOVA REN SUMA: THE WALLS AROUND US BOOK LAUNCH WITH LIBBA BRAY

THE WALLS AROUND US (Algonquin Young Readers, March 24, $17.95)
McNally Jackson
52 Prince St. between Lafayette & Mulberry Sts.
Monday, March 23, free, 7:00
212-274-1160
mcnallyjackson.com
novaren.com

“We went wild that hot night. We howled, we raged, we screamed. We were girls — some of us fourteen and fifteen; some sixteen, seventeen — but when the locks came undone, the doors of our cells gaping open and no one to shove us back in, we made the noise of savage animals, of men.” So begins Nova Ren Suma’s third YA novel, the ghost story The Walls Around Us. Her follow-up to Imaginary Girls and 17 & Gone, Suma’s latest book is told from the point of view of a convicted killer and a ballerina (Suma herself danced from the age of six to sixteen) and includes quotes from Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones, and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale to help set the mood. Suma, who we once had the extreme pleasure of working with in the children’s books business, is a master of her craft, creating warm, believable characters, writing sharp, realistic dialogue, and bringing intriguing situations to life with atmospheric dexterity. A very active member of the YA community, Suma took a big leap of faith with The Walls Around Us, letting her ideas run wild and trusting her instincts instead of worrying what her editor, agent, reviewers — and she herself — expected.

The result is a novel that was named the #1 Indie Next pick for Spring ’15, is an Amazon Best Book of the Month, and has garnered numerous starred reviews. Suma, who gave her first official public YA reading at twi-ny’s tenth anniversary celebration in 2011, will be at McNally Jackson in SoHo on March 23, launching The Walls Around Us with her friend and colleague, Michael L. Printz Award winner Libba Bray (The Diviners, Going Bovine). There will be a short reading, a conversation between the two literary stalwarts, a Q&A with the audience, and a signing. In addition, Suma will be giving away lots of Walls tattoos. And don’t worry; Suma isn’t really like one of her narrators, Violet, who explains early in the book, “I slip behind the curtain — it’s almost time, get the spotlight ready, soon I’ll be on. This’ll be my last dance before I leave town. My last chance to make them remember me, and remember me they will. When I’m onstage, I’m all for them, and they’re all for me. I feed off what they give me, and they bask in what I give them. When I’m offstage, these people are nothing to me. I’ve got some level of hate for practically almost everyone I run into on any given day. But in the midst of dancing? When they’re watching me and I’m letting them watch? I’ve got so much love, I’m like a whole different person.” Suma, who teaches writing workshops around the country, will also be participating in the “Exploring Feminist YA” panel on March 21 at 1:10 at the NYPL on Forty-Second St. with keynote speaker Bray, Gayle Forman, Scott Westerfeld, and moderator David Levithan for the 2015 NYC Teen Author Festival.

STRANGER THAN FICTION: THE MUSES OF ISAAC BASHEVIS SINGER

Documentary delves into Isaac Bashevis Singer’s love of women and their work as his translators

THE MUSES OF BASHEVIS SINGER (Asaf Galay & Shaul Betser, 2014)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
Tuesday, March 24, 8:00
212-924-7771
www.stfdocs.com
www.the-muses-of-bashevis-singer.com

Who ever thought that little old Yiddish mensch Isaac Bashevis Singer was such a horndog? Asaf Galay and Shaul Betser begin The Muses of Bashevis Singer, their light and playful documentary, with the following quote from the Nobel Prize-winning author: “In my younger days I used to dream about a harem full of women. Lately I’m dreaming of a harem full of translators. If those translators could be women in addition, this would be paradise on earth.” Well, it seems that Singer, who was born in Poland in 1902, emigrated to the United States in 1935, and died in Florida in 1991 at the age of eighty-eight, found that paradise, as Galay and Betser meet with a series of women who were among many hand-picked by Singer, the man who nearly singlehandedly preserved Yiddish literature in the twentieth century, to serve as his translators, and not necessarily because of their language skills. “There were certain women who were more than just translators to him. It happened quite often,” says his Swedish publisher, Dorothea Bromberg, who also talks about Alma, Singer’s wife of more than fifty years. “He loved her, I’m sure, in his own way,” she adds. “She was very jealous of him, and she was completely right.” Galay and Betser meet with translators Eve Fridman, Evelyn Torton Beck, Dvorah Telushkin, Marie-Pierre Bay, Duba Leibell, and Dr. Bilha Rubenstein as well as Singer biographers Florence Noiville and Janet Hadda, his granddaughters Hazel Karr and Merav Chen-Zamir, Yentl the Yeshiva Boy playwright Leah Napolin, and his longtime secretary and proofreader, Doba Gerber, who share intimate, surprising tales about the author of such books as The Family Moskat, The Magician of Lublin, Shosha, and Enemies, a Love Story and such short stories as “Gimpel the Fool,” “A Friend of Kafka,” and “Zlateh the Goat.”

The seventy-two-minute film, lifted by a bouncy, airy soundtrack by Jonathan Bar-Giora, also includes footage of Singer making speeches, appearing on interview programs, going to a Jewish deli, walking on the Coney Island boardwalk, and writing with pen on paper and on a typewriter with Yiddish characters. But as the title implies, The Muses of Bashevis Singer doesn’t depict him as a callow cad but as a determined writer — and father and husband — who just loved women, loved being surrounded by women, using them as inspiration for his marvelous stories that mixed fiction with reality. “Isaac was a very frisky old man,” says Leibell, who worked with Singer in his later years after he moved to Florida with Alma. “That’s to put it very mildly.” The Muses of Bashevis Singer concludes the IFC Center’s winter Stranger than Fiction series on March 24 and will be followed by a Q&A with the director.

WONDER OF WONDERS: A CULTURAL HISTORY OF FIDDLER ON THE ROOF

Who: Drama critic and author Alisa Solomon
What: Theatre for a New Audience’s Open Books Series 2015
Where: Polonsky Shakespeare Center, 262 Ashland Pl. between Fulton St. & Lafayette Ave., 212-229-2819
When: Monday, March 23, free with advance RSVP, 7:00
Why: Theatre for a New Audience’s Open Books series continues with Alisa Solomon presenting her book Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of Fiddler on the Roof (Picador, September 2014), an engaging analysis of one of Broadway’s most popular musicals ever, which was adapted into an Oscar-nominated film. “As the first work of American popular culture to recall life in a shtetl — the Eastern European market towns with large Jewish populations — Fiddler felt tender, elegiac, even holy,” Solomon writes in the introduction. “It arrived just ahead of (and helped to instigate) the American roots movement. It was added to multicultural curricula and studied by students across the country in Jewish history units, as if Fiddler were an artifact unearthed from a destroyed world rather than a big-story musical assembled by showbiz professionals.” The free evening will include a conversation between Solomon and moderator Jonathan Kalb, an audience Q&A, a book signing, complimentary food and drink, and a meet-and-greet with Solomon.

ALBERT MAYSLES TRIBUTE AND MAYSLES DOCUMENTARY CENTER OPEN HOUSE

The life and career of Albert Maysles will be celebrated on March 22 at the Maysles Documentary Center

Maysles Documentary Center
343 Lenox Ave./Malcolm X Blvd. between 127th & 128th Sts.
Sunday, March 22, free with advance registration, 11:00 am – 11:00 pm
maysles.org

In the 1960s and ’70s, Albert Maysles, his brother, David, and Charlotte Zwerin changed the face of documentary filmmaking and cinéma vérité with such genre-redefining works as What’s Happening! The Beatles in the USA, Salesman, Gimme Shelter, and Grey Gardens, breaking down the fourth wall as they photographed their subjects. “As a documentarian I happily place my fate and faith in reality,” Albert explained. “It is my caretaker, the provider of subjects, themes, experiences — all endowed with the power of truth and the romance of discovery. And the closer I adhere to reality the more honest and authentic my tales. After all, knowledge of the real world is exactly what we need to better understand and therefore possibly to love one another. It’s my way of making the world a better place.” David passed away in January 1987 at the age of fifty-five, Zwerin died in 2004 at seventy-two, and now Albert has left us, saying farewell on March 5 at the age of eighty-eight, having helped make the world a better place. Of course, his legacy lives on, in the works of so many other documentarians, from Errol Morris to Andrew Jarecki, as well as with the film center that bears his name, the Maysles Documentary Center in Harlem. On Sunday, March 22, the MDC will host an all-day tribute to its legendary founder with an open house, screenings, and special introductions; admission is free with advance registration. The celebration begins at 11:00 with the 1965 short Meet Marlon Brando, 1964’s What’s Happening! The Beatles in the USA, and a reception. Other programs include With Love from Truman and Salesman at 2:00, Ozawa and Muhammad and Larry at 5:00, and Running Fence, Cut Piece, Salvador Dali’s Fantastic Dream, and excerpts from Muhammad and Larry and Iris at 8:00. “Remember, as a documentarian you are an observer, an author but not a director, a discoverer, not a controller,” Maysles said in describing his craft. “Don’t worry that your presence with the camera will change things. Not if you’re confident you belong there and understand that in your favor is that of the two instincts, to disclose or to keep a secret, the stronger is to disclose.” He changed things indeed.

SOCIALLY RELEVANT FILM FESTIVAL NY

Tribeca Cinemas, 54 Varick St., Maysles Cinema, 343 Malcolm X Blvd., the Quad, 34 West 13th St., the SVA Theatre, 333 West 23rd St., the Center for Remembering and Sharing, 123 Fourth Ave., and the CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Ave.
March 16-22, free – $15 (all access pass $200)
www.ratedsrfilms.org

Started last year by Nora Armani as a response to the violence in mainstream movies, both in the narrative as well as the style of filmmaking, the Socially Relevant Film Festival consists of fiction and nonfiction films from more than thirty countries focusing on “human interest stories that raise awareness to social problems and might offer positive solutions through the powerful medium of cinema.” The festival, running at Tribeca Cinemas, Maysles Cinema, the CUNY Graduate Center, the SVA Theatre, the Center for Remembering and Sharing, and the Quad, opens March 16 with a free screening (advance RSVP recommended) of Hϋseyin Karabey’s Come to My Voice, in which a young Kurdish girl, with her grandmother, has to find a gun to free her imprisoned father. Other programs include Michael Buckley’s Plundering Tibet with Giordano Cossu’s Umudugudu! Rwanda 20 Years On; Justin Thomas’s Truth Through a Lens, about the evolution of onetime Brooklyn street kid Dennis Flores; Matthias Leupold’s Lighter than Orange, which looks at the human cost of the use of Agent Orange in Vietnam; and Kaouther Ben Hania’s mockumentary Challat of Tunis, about the vicious slashing of eleven women in 2003. Most screenings will be followed by a Q&A with the filmmakers and other guests. There will also be panel discussions on distribution, storytelling, casting, and, closing the festival, “Next: An Open Dialogue on the Potential of Art as a Revolutionary Tool,” with Jessica Vale and Cherrell Brown, moderated by Adam Kritzer.

MEET VERONICA ROTH: INSURGENT MOVIE TIE-IN EDITION AUTHOR EVENT

Veronica Roth, seen here on the set of DIVERGENT, will be in town to celebrate the release of INSURGENT (AP Photo/Summit Entertainment, Jaap Buitendijk)

Veronica Roth, seen here on the set of DIVERGENT, will be at the Union Square B&N to celebrate the release of INSURGENT (AP Photo/Summit Entertainment, Jaap Buitendijk)

Who: Veronica Roth
What: Discussion, Q&A, and signing
Where: Barnes & Noble Union Square, 33 East 17th St., 212-253-0810
When: Sunday, March 15, free, 12 noon
Why: In another part of our life, we are involved in the publication of Veronica Roth’s bestselling trilogy, Divergent, which was turned into a film last year; Insurgent, which is opening in theaters March 20; and Allegiant. So it is with somewhat of a bias that we recommend this special afternoon at the Union Square B&N, where Ms. Roth will discuss her writing, answer questions, and sign copies of the movie tie-in edition of Insurgent. You’ll have to purchase a copy of the book in order to receive one of the limited wristbands that will get you into the event; the line will start forming at 10:00 am. (There will not be separate queues for Abnegation, Candor, Amity, Erudite, and Dauntless factions.)

HAGIGAH IVRIT

Who: Assaf Gavron, Shira Averbuch, Yuval Hamevulbal, Roy Noy, Tal Mosseri, the Power Girls (Tuti and Naama), Rabbi Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, Mesiba Ivrit, Reuven (Ruby) Namdar, and more
What: Hagigah Ivrit (חגיגה עברית)
Where: JCC in Manhattan, B’nai Jeshurun, Israeli-American Council (IAC), Symphony Space, the Highline Ballroom, Jewish Theological Seminary of America, Park Avenue Synagogue, Yeshiva University Museum, and other locations
When: March 14-30
Why: The first-ever North American cultural festival celebrating the Hebrew language features a book talk with Assaf Gavron, author of The Hilltop; an interactive educational performance of Peter and the Wolf; the Festifun2 musical production with Israeli child stars; a talk by Rabbi Eliezer Ben-Yehuda on “The Importance of the Hebrew Tongue to the Rebirth of the People in Their Land — and the Continued Existence of Judaism in the Future”; a dance party with live music; Hebrew classes for beginners; Shabbat dinner; a Passover family workshop; a conversation with Sapir Prize for Literature winner Ruby Namdar; a screening of Sharon Maymon and Tal Granit’s The Farewell Party; and other special and ongoing events.