(by John Reiff)

Last summer my friend and fellow Servas member Tom Weiner and I spent some time traveling in northwest Germany staying with hosts in Hamburg and Heidelberg. We so much enjoyed the conversations we had with them and the friends they introduced us to that, after we returned to the U.S., we invited them to form a German American book club with us. Three of them accepted the invitation, and for the past year the five of us have been meeting on Zoom about every six weeks to discuss another book (and, of course, how it connects us and our lives). We choose books in English (which they can read, although most of their book choices are originally in German and translated into English). We take turns suggesting the next book.

One of our recent choices was An Eye for an I: Growing up with Blindness, Bigotry, and Family Mental Illness by James Francisco Bonilla the personal story of a blind Puerto Rican boy in New York who transcends a harrowing childhood to become a lifelong advocate for social justice. Through a personal connection, we were able to invite the author to spend an hour with us in our Zoom conversation. We recently discussed Where You Come From by Saša Stanišic, a novel drawing on his family story of fleeing the war in Yugoslavia in 1992 and growing up in Germany. Our next book is The Long Haul by Myles Horton. Myles was the founder of the Highlander Center, which was the cradle of the civil rights movement and is still doing the work of training people to organize for social justice; the book is his memoir which is crammed with great stories. The title comes from a statement of his something like this: "If you care about social justice, you have to understand that you are in it for the long haul." You can imagine the rich conversations that these and other books we’ve chosen have enabled us to have.

In fact, our club is growing. Tom and I proposed adding an American friend, and one of the Germans has proposed adding two of her friends, so we will grow from five to eight.

I shared this experience at our US Servas conference in Minneapolis, and someone immediately said, “Write a piece about this for Open Doors!” so here ‘tis.