Book lovers gather for Hadassah philanthropy, author talks

MIDDLETOWN, R.I. — On a warm summer afternoon in early August, 200 people gathered at the Wyndham Newport for Books on the Beach. The annual fundraiser, hosted by Hadassah Rhode Island and Hadassah of Southern New England, attracts women (and a few men) from all over New England to a luncheon featuring well-known authors as well as Hadassah leadership.

After lunch and schmoozing, Carol Ann Schwartz, national president of Hadassah, opened the program with passionate words about the medical advances fostered by Hadassah’s hospitals in Israel. Her remarks focused on the work of the organization and its reach.

“One out of nine Jewish women in the United States belongs to Hadassah,” she said. “I travel the country and talk about how we are the bridge to peace (through medical advancements).”

Hadassah, the Women’s Zionist Organization of America, was founded in 1912, before the State of Israel and before American women could vote. Today, Hadassah has more than 300,000 members, associates and supporters who work to advance women’s health, to fight hate and antisemitism, to support a strong and healthy nation for all the citizens of Israel and to instill Jewish values in future generations.

Books on the Beach, originally organized by the Newport chapter of Hadassah, is now in its 11th year. The event brings Jewish authors to talk about their work.

This year’s author-speakers were B.A. Shapiro and Jenna Blum. Each discussed her unique writing process, featuring comments about her latest best-sellers.

Barbara Ann Shapiro, who writes as B.A., has spoken to the Books on the Beach crowd before. Now, she has written her 10th novel, “The Lost Masterpiece,” and she talked about the general writing process.

For her, the writing process involves a lot of research, diagrams and notecards. With a doctorate in sociology, she loves to do research. She puts her research and ideas on index cards and moves them around to see how the story will work, and then she writes. “There is no writer’s block,” she said. “You just have to get to work.”

She told the story of how she started with several books that failed. But she kept on with the encouragement of her husband. “What a writer really needs is a spouse with benefits,” she said.

He told her to forget writing in a genre; “write a book of your heart.” She always wanted to be an artist and instead became an art appreciator. So she decided to write about art.

In Shapiro’s case, she has chosen to write about unsung female artists. The first book was “The Art Forger,” and it was a success.

Her latest, “The Lost Masterpiece,” is based on tireless research with a little backstory added. According to Shapiro, that is the beauty of historical fiction. “You do just enough research, and then you can make up the rest!”

She said she works on more than one novel at a time because of the way the work process flows. She is currently working on her next novel, which promises to be a little different. Of all her novels, she said, “This one is giving me more trouble than the others.”

Jenna Blum discussed her writing process with an equal measure of humor. The best-selling author’s fifth novel, a thriller, “Murder Your Darlings,” is in development for a film adaptation. In addition to writing novels, Blum is a podcaster and interviewer for Steven Spielberg’s Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation. She also runs the online interview platform A Mighty Blaze.

Blum, like Shapiro, knew how to engage her audience.

“It is such an act of joy to see readers read the books and buy the books,” she said. She gave a shout-out to Hadassah, saying “The power of women is unparalleled.”

Blum has been writing since she was 4 years old and was inspired by her father, a news writer for CBS.

After college, she wrote stories while doing a variety of other jobs in food service — and sending out those stories. “Writing takes perseverance and grit,” she said.

In graduate school, she started working on stories about what it means to be Jewish and German. Those stories resulted in the novel “Those Who Saved Us.”

Readers made her first novel. She spoke to a book group and suggested they recommend it to others, and they did. Pretty soon, it was on the New York Times best-seller list. “When you recommend a book, it means everything,” she said.

The latest book, which Blum called “very spicy,” reflects her publishing journey, and some of the characters are right out of her life.

She switched from writing historical fiction to thrillers after another author told her “to write what you want.”

“So I wrote 125 pages and never had so much fun. The Sam character is very much my own voice. The publishing part of the book is so much me.”

For more information on Hadassah Rhode Island and its variety of programming, contact chapri@hadassah.org.

FRAN OSTENDORF is the former editor of Jewish Rhode Island.