BY RACHEL KADISH
REVIEW BY: MARCIA R. RUDIN


​“Never underestimate the passion of a lonely mind,” Helen Watt, a British expert in Jewish history, tells her research assistant, post-graduate student Aaron Levy.

Helen is referring to Ester Velasquez, a Sephardic refugee in 17th-century London. She and Aaron have found evidence that points to Ester as having been the anonymous scribe of a trove of newly-discovered documents in Portuguese, Hebrew, Latin, and Castilian found hidden behind a wall of a London mansion undergoing restoration.

In The Weight of Ink (Mariner Books, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), National Jewish Book Award winner Rachel Kadish alternates the personal narratives of Ester, Helen, and Aaron. While the premise of connecting historical figures to modern-day characters through objects or events has been overdone recently, in this remarkable novel, Kadish interweaves her themes and characters’ journeys so skillfully, one can’t help being drawn into their lives and empathizing with their personal struggles.

To escape the Inquisition, Ester Velasquez’ family fled from Portugal to Amsterdam, a thriving city tolerating Jewish refugees as long as they did not pose a threat to Christianity or attempt to convert Christians.

BY EVAN FALLENBERG
REVIEW BY: MARCIA R. RUDIN

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​I am approaching my fiftieth wedding anniversary, but I have vague memories from my long-ago youth of what it’s like to fall in love at first sight.

Such experiences did not end well for me; neither does the affair portrayed in the story The Parting Gift (Other Press), written by Evan Fallenberg, an Ohio-born writer who now lives in Israel.

I use the word “story” deliberately because as we read this remarkable novel, we feel as if we are sitting around a campfire listening to a tale beginning with the words, “It was a dark and stormy night…” From the first sentence, we are drawn into the narrator’s life, hanging onto his every word as we cheer him on to tell us what happens next.
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The narrator, unnamed à la Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, uses an intimate first-person voice to address a friend to whom he is composing a letter, but we feel he is speaking directly to us. The connection we feel toward the storyteller is all the more surprising because The Parting Gift is an epistolary novel (told via a letter or letters), a technique rarely used today because it can be awkward and emotionally distancing. Here, though, it serves to make the story more immediate, partly because the storyteller asks us to sympathize with and condone his behavior, while urging us to probe our own emotions and actions.

BY RUBY NAMDAR
REVIEW BY: MARCIA R. RUDIN

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​Our ancient sages placed great emphasis on knowing “from where you came” (Pirkei Avot 3:1). Andrew P. Cohen, the protagonist of The Ruined House (Harper Perennial, 2018), does not know this. He has cut himself off or, more accurately, has never even considered his connection to Jewish history and tradition.

The word “house” in the title of this fascinating novel by Iranian-born Ruby Namdar may refer variously to Bet Israel, the House of Israel (the Jewish people); to the magnificent Second Temple in Jerusalem; and also to Andrew’s moral and emotional life – the “house” of his soul. It may even refer to the messy, overly decorated house in the suburbs that Cohen occupies with his family, in contrast to his sparse modern apartment in Manhattan, where he lives by and for himself.

Namdar tells the story of what happened to what were once perfect houses.

At the beginning of the novel, Andrew has it all. A prominent professor of comparative culture at New York University, he is about to receive a coveted promotion. Loved by his students, he contributes brilliant articles to the best literary publications. He is handsome and in great physical shape for a man in his 50s, and an inheritance allows him to travel widely.

​BY DAVID R. GILLHAM
REVIEW BY: MARCIA R. RUDIN
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What if Anne Frank had survived the Holocaust?

David R. Gillham’s Annelies: A Novel  (Viking and Penguin Books) is a fictionalized portrayal of Anne Frank based on the premise that she recovers from her illness in Bergen-Belsen, returns to post-war Amsterdam, and is reunited with her father, Otto, whom she calls Pim.

Anne (Annelies in German) and Pim, the only other survivor of her family, immediately find themselves in conflict. Otto wants to “move on” with life, but Anne, mired in memories of the past, is incapable of doing so and obsessively clings to the past.
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Overcome with survivor’s guilt, she is haunted by the ghost of her sister Margot, whose death in Bergen-Belsen she believes she caused, and with whom she carries on often-painful imaginary conversations. In her memory, she also relives the arguments and antagonistic relationship she had with her mother.

BY DROR BURSTEIN
REVIEW BY: MARCIA R. RUDIN

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In this re-telling of the life of Jeremiah, the second major prophet in the Hebrew Bible, Dror Burstein, an Israeli poet and novelist who teaches literature at Tel Aviv and Hebrew universities, interweaves all aspects of the modern world, including cell phones, fax machines, computers, and high-speed transit with the ancient Jerusalem in which the First Temple dominates the horizon. The two timeframes exist side-by-side, with Jeremiah and the other characters straddling both worlds.

The setting of Muck: A Novel (published in Hebrew in 2016 by Keter, and in English translation by Gabriel Levin in November 2018) is both present-day Israel and  seventh-century B.C.E. Judea, where a struggling young poet named Jeremiah is called upon by God to be a prophet.
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It’s bad enough he has to contend with literary critics, one of whom hates Jeremiah’s work so much he hits him with the writer’s own computer in the novel’s opening scene. But that’s nothing compared to the backlash he endures after he warns every one of the impending foreign invasion and catastrophe, sometimes via intercom at the king’s castle or through a loudspeaker.