Tailored to the time-starved readership. No need to organize a group. Pull in a companion only if you want to.
Step 1) Read the brief literary sample below.
Step 2) Resolve the subsequent multiple-choice problem.
Step 3) Deal with the rest of your day.
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Today’s passage, from Outpatient, a novel in the works by Naama Goldstein:
Rakefet’s Aperol tonic to Inbal’s neat bourbon. A pretended clink of glasses. A video hangout in disparate time zones. The Tel Aviv evening connecting to the Boston noontide, a weekend.
Inbal is the participant benefiting from a dose of spirit at lunchtime. Concomitantly she is undertaking to persuade Rakefet that the lunacy distinguishing the influential wings of Israeli government presently does not amaze her.
The political discourse when they were growing up in the same country, different. No argument there. Women of advanced middle age. One persists on her native soil, and she cannot believe that the hometown friend who relocates to the United States in late youth observes the extremism in her onetime homeland and discerns a familiar behavior.
Rakefet expects that the woman resettled in Boston is astounded by what has become the Israeli leadership standard. Inbal refuting that assumption. Insisting that even from the profoundest distance the expatriated individual identifies a thinking in which she was trained. She sees the leaders that her original circles admired or tolerated. She sees a familial mode thriving.
Two daughters of the urban Israeli interior having disaffiliated from a charismatic theopolitical faction, a frustrated minority then.
Girls who rejected the regimens of messianic nationalism. Rakefet Badishi and Inbal Or, the prayerful life did not do it for them. A defection in their adolescence. A shared youthful chapter, covert. They did not conceive of it as a political gesture.
They could not get into the necessary character. Two girls unable to stick to an overelaborate script, preferring to meander where they are not seen.
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The emigrant opinion failing to land in Tel Aviv, unsurprising. Inbal, undeterred.
Interrupted. A surprising question from Rakefet. An uncharacteristic prying: Did Inbal’s childhood homelife incorporate violence.
Did yours?
I asked first, Rakefet says.
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To complete today’s multiple-choice exercise, resolve the following statement:
The literature I just read leaves me…
1) Wanting to find out how this conversation plays out. Expecting interesting revelations.
2) Sensing the parallels between my context and that of people navigating other circumstances. Inclined to imagine that my own life’s movements tie into the universal human struggle.
3) All of the above.
4) None of the above. I did not understand the passage or it failed to affect me. I am tending hostile or indifferent.
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