A Continuing Saga : Women’s Book Club Has Met Monthly for 26 Years

TARZANA — In December, 1967, Sandra Klasky had just moved to the Valley, had two children and was pregnant with her third. She had more than enough to do, but there was something missing.

Unlike her mother and grandmother, who devoted their lives to raising their children, she had had a glimpse of another kind of life. She had been to college and had worked four years as a teacher.

But while she gave all that up when she had her first baby, she said she still could not imagine a life comprising only diapers and dinner menus, preschool and party giving. So she and three friends decided to devote one afternoon a month to their intellects and started a book club. Their first book together was Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice.”

This was no encounter group. It was not a political exercise and not an experiment in the kind of feminism they saw burgeoning around them. This was a literary group, dedicated to fine writing both classic and contemporary.

And 26 years later, with two of the founding members and 12 others who joined them sometime along the way, Klasky still meets with a group of women, on the second Tuesday of every month, to talk about a book.

“We never heard of anyone doing it, we just thought it would be a savior of our sanity,” Klasky said. “We didn’t really want to change our lives, but we were starving to continue to develop the intellectual sides of ourselves. It was an end in itself, the learning and the reading.”

Over the years, the lives of the women in the group--it has never been called anything but The Book Club--changed along with the times, altering the club in subtle ways as well.

They tackled concepts that they had missed when they were in college, educating themselves on subjects like women’s studies and African American studies through the books they read.

Many remember reading Betty Friedan’s “The Feminine Mystique” in their first year of the club.

“(The club) raised our consciousness,” said Judy DuRoff, Tuesday’s host and a founding member. “We were never out of it, we were just beginning to learn that there were options. Because of the age we were and that point in our lives, we weren’t privy to these options.”

This year’s list has included Edith Wharton’s “The Age of Innocence,” “The Tempest” by William Shakespeare, “Jazz” by Toni Morrison and “Dear Corpus Christi” by Eve La Salle Caram.

For December the group took on Susan Sontag’s “The Volcano Lover.” Lunch was, as it had been for 26 years, a catching-up time, a chance to talk about a movie, a child’s paramour, holiday plans. After lunch, when the group moved into DuRoff’s Tarzana living room, the talk was serious and about books only.

Each session has a leader, who is always the previous month’s host. The structure is modeled loosely on the Great Books method, in which the leader posits an interpretive, debatable series of questions, with no right or wrong answers. The group tackles novels about 70% of the time, and reads nonfiction for the rest.

While the group’s structure has remained the same, their lunches and lunch conversations have changed. As children grew up and some members returned to graduate school and careers, elaborately prepared dinners evolved into takeout food from restaurants for many of the busier hosts.

Klasky, who went back to school in the mid-1980s for her doctorate in education and is now the development director at Cal State Northridge’s School of Education, as well as a part-time faculty member, held one session of the group at the University Club.

“We’ve really gone through the life cycle together,” said Kathy Weiss, a 12-year member who quit the group to work full time but who was revisiting Tuesday.

Added Bobbi Endler, a member of the past 11 years: “Our children have evolved from babies to adults--from sleeping problems to driving problems to weddings to births, again. That’s where we are now.”

Some women dropped out of the club because they divorced and moved away or went back to careers that had been on hold. But the number of participants has always hovered around 14, Klasky said. The women are all talkers and debaters; too many people and the discussion would be cacophony.

Once a much-needed intellectual stimulus, the group has become, for many of the women, a delightful interruption in an already stimulating month. Having developed careers, many use the club as a way to force themselves to take time out and enjoy reading simply for the sake of reading.

They never considered inviting men. “It’s been this women’s connection in viewing the world,” Klasky, 54, said, noting that her husband and a group of other men started their own literary group in Northridge about two years ago. “I think we like the camaraderie of female company in this context.”

Tuesday’s leader, Faith Henkin, opened the session on Sontag’s book with a discussion about the history of the period and characters on which Sontag based her story.

From there, she lead the participants through a variety of issues: the transitory nature of the characters, the author’s choice of time structuring, writing style and perspective.

Participants do not raise hands and try not to interrupt, an endeavor at which they are only partially successful. Sometimes they all jumped in to answer a question at once. Other times, the group fragmented into side conversations only to be hauled back into the main discussion by Henkin. They joked and debated throughout the session.

“I don’t think we realized for a long time how special we really were,” Klasky said. “I think it’s rather unusual that in a city like L. A., for 26 years, raising children, getting degrees, going back to work, that this group survived.”