5+++ stars Thanks to Amazon Prime Reading for this book, which I now want to share with everyone. This review is going to be long because this book is so, so good. This is the kind of book I’ll always remember, at least snippets of it, because it is so expansive and all-encompassing. It covers generations, or maybe it just seems that way because it jumps back and forth between centuries and characters, connecting them in unforeseeable and shocking ways. It’s a masterpiece of writing, and the research that went into it is epic. In fact, as soon as I finished it, I immediately launched into the notes at the back and learned the true extent of Kadish’s efforts to not only understand, but also to impart the lives and philosophies of Jews in London during the 1600s. She does a truly amazing job of sharing what she learned, and I chuckled when I read how she struggled to understand the religious philosophies and confided to her agent that she felt like “the Milli Vanilli of metaphysics.” Prompted by the question posed by Virginia Woolf in A Room of One’s Own: if William Shakespeare had had an equally talented sister, what would her fate have been? Kadish creates Ester, a young girl of the 1600s, nearly forbidden (though not completely) from learning, yet fascinated by the Torah and other religious teachings. Through several cruel twists of fate, she becomes the scribe for the renowned Rabbi HaCoen Mendes, and this allows her to pursue her desire. It also causes her to question faith itself and to lie to the rabbi to conceal her writing. This, despite the love she feels for him, and the unquestionable love he feels for her which, at times, is poignant. At one point, she considers, “Lying had become her clothing—without it she’d freeze.” The two other main characters are Helen and Aaron, living in 2001. Helen is an aging history professor, preparing to retire, and filled with regret for choices made in her youth. Like Ester, Helen chose knowledge over any other desires she might have had. Aaron is a postgraduate history student, struggling with his thesis, and with his life. He struggles with self-doubt and strives to become a man he can be proud of. He and Helen make an unlikely pair, neither particularly liking the other, but as they come to know one another better, and as they come to know Ester, they gain respect and care for one another. In fact, later in the story, Aaron reflects: “...he knew that he would never be able to tell her that he loved her as a foundering ship loves a lighthouse, even though the lighthouse is powerless to save it.” Kadish tells this story with sentimentality that never veers into the maudlin, and with poetry that never becomes arcane. Helen is described thusly in chapter one: “On a narrow window beside the door, a reflection of her own bent figure. As she leaned closer, it rippled as though on the dark surface of a stream: a pale, aging professor in her outdated suit. Tilted to one side, leaning on her cane.” Sitting through a stilted meeting over tea, we’re told, “The amber liquid was loud in the silent room.” Not long after meeting Helen, Aaron describes her: “She’s the sort of person you can’t imagine having an actual home. It’s as though she turns a corner leaving her office and is shelved overnight in some storage unit for the terminally pedantic, and only materializes again on her return to work the next morning.” This reminds me of what children often think about their teachers, and as one teacher told me, they are often shocked to find that same teacher at the local grocery store or out enjoying life with her own family. Helen is struggling with Parkinson’s and her doctor prescribes a medication that “had left long, dark spaces between her thoughts, each thought an island in a sea of nothing, the islands few and far between. The feeling had not been unpleasant, and that was the problem. Waking in the middle of the night to an inky peace that stretched on and on with no break, she’d become frantic. She could not recognize her own mind. The quiet in her head was the silence of defeat. She’s spent the night shivering in her thin nightdress, terrified. Unable to lie down lest she lose what remained of herself as she slept, her hands climbing at her throat, her temples.” She decides she prefers her tremor. Obviously, history is a recurring theme, and it is depicted as a living being—actually, another character. Aaron, long frustrated by “lifeless months of dissertation research” feels “History, reaching out and caressing his face one more…The gentle, insistent touch of something like a conscience, stilling him. Waking him to a lucid new purpose….his bones had balked at supporting his weight…” And now, we’re also introduced to another recurring character: death. “He’d felt himself waver, almost fail as he caught his balance—as though they (the papers discovered under the stairs) understood already decades ahead of Aaron, about death.” They did. Not surprisingly, Ester is quite familiar with death and finds herself longing for the end of each day for “the sweet sleep she now craved more than almost all else. The death of each day’s life.” And as she witnesses the death of the rabbi, she realizes “For death—so it seemed to Ester now—awaits agreement, even where it must persuade and threaten and insist without mercy until agreement is granted.” Ester struggles with the desire for death and the desire to live. Later, she tells someone, “Death tarries and tarries, then speeds when we beg for just another hour.” Kadish’s description of Ester traversing London Bridge is spellbinding, but too long, and too good in its entirety, to quote it here. However, it is here that she wants to warn people: “never let your true thought be known, for it is by truth that you are noosed and for truth burnt.” Most of the noteworthy phrases come from Ester’s portion of the story, probably because Helen and Aaron are simply reacting to it and applying it to their own lives. Ester is warned by her friend Mary’s mother, “If you find a way to live as you wish, unnatural though it might be, you’ll carry on your shoulders the weight of thousand wives’ wishes. Though aloud all may curse you as a very devil.” Ester’s thoughts on the nature God and of life take up a good portion of the story: “How could desire be wrong—the question seized her—if each living being contained it? Each creature was born with the unthinking need to draw each next breath, find each next meal. Mustn't desire then be integral—a set of essential guideposts on the map of life’s purpose? And mightn’t its very denial then be a desecration?” “A woman’s body, said the world, was a prison in which her mind must wither.” “The greatest act of love—indeed, the only religion she could comprehend—was to speak the truth about the world. Love must be, then, an act of truth-telling, a baring of mind and spirit just as ardent as the baring of the body. Truth and passion were one, and each impossible without the other.” “Yet how can a kindness that blights the life of even one—though it benefit others—be called good? Is it in fact kindness to sever oneself from one’s own desires? Musn’t the imperative to protect all life encompass—even for a woman—her own? Then must we abandon our accustomed notion of a woman’s kindness, and forge a new one.” She sounds like one of the original feminists, although the term would have been foreign to her. There are also a few situations in which Ester finds herself in danger, with Rivka (the rabbi’s housekeeper) at her side. Stuck in the darkness, she has an out-of-body experience: “No candle, no light from the street. Ester had the sensation that neither she nor Rivka was real—that were she to try to locate her own body in the room, try to touch her own arm or leg or shoulder, she’d touch nothing.” Of course, that’s nothing compared to the eternal darkness experienced by the rabbi, who was blinded by the Inquisitors in Portugal. He tells her the first thing he realized after losing his sight, and continued to realize every day, “The distances between things are vast.” He understands her love of the written word because “the weight of ink” is one of the first things he realized he would miss. She reads to him, but it’s only a substitute for what he really loves. When London is afflicted by the plague, a frightening man decides he will have the house and everything within it, even though Ester and Rivka are living inside of it. “Through the mullioned panes, Bescos looked like a man assembled out of tiles, each laid alongside the next to form the semblance of a man.” She goes on to surmise that he is suffering, probably from the loss of the woman he loved, and has tried to piece himself back together, with partitions to protect himself from the pain. Understanding him doesn’t mean she lets down her guard. He’s dangerous and poses a great risk to the women. Aaron has the ultimate realization at the end: “He’d always pitied those ensnared in the time periods he studied—people captured in resin, their fates sealed by their inability to see what was coming. The greatest curse, he’d thought, was to be stuck in one’s own time—and the greatest power was to see beyond its horizons. Studying history had given him the illusion of observing safely from outside the trap. Only that’s what the world was: a trap. The circumstances you were born to, the situations you found yourself in—to dodge that fray was impossible. And what you did within it was your life.” This book has one of my favorite endings of any book because, although it doesn’t tell the full story and I would have loved for it to go on, it ends simply and with a message of hope. Ester realizes she doesn’t need to carry her load alone. There’s someone else offering her rest. And after the many tragedies she has endured, she truly deserves this. If someone like Ester could find hope in her life, surely, the rest of us can. June 11, 2022
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Elizabeth J ConnorWriter. Editor. Proofreader. Archives
September 2022
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