A mesmerizing tale of love in a time of extraordinary trials.
In this historical novel, an unlikely Jewish couple—she’s an obsessed bibliophile and he can’t read—struggles under an increasingly antisemitic Russia in the late 19th century.
Esther Leving is a remarkable young woman—a voracious reader, she can write in six languages by the age of 15. She’s also defiantly independent and opinionated. Esther angrily chafes at the “subordination of women and persecution of non-believers” as well as the oppression experienced by Jews, a phenomenon she’s familiar with living in Horodno in the Pale of Settlement in the Russian Empire. For all her intellectual liveliness, Esther is essentially friendless, hampered by an injured foot, and completely disinterested in the “array of suitors” her parents send her way. She pines to be a writer and expresses disdain for the restrictions of marriage. But when she meets Bernard Garfinkle, the son of a vodka distiller, she falls in love, even after she learns his peculiar secret—despite a nimble mind, he never learned to read, a failing that makes for an odd pairing astutely captured by Freed-Thall: “I love a boy who can’t read. If I hadn’t gotten to know him first, he’d be a book returned to the shelves unopened. Single words aren’t the problem, but when they gather, all talking at once, he lurches forward, pauses, sounds out, only to lose his way and backtrack.” Esther agrees to teach Bernard to read and opens a bookshop he builds for her. But with the ascension of Alexander III comes virulent, violent anti-Jewish sentiment, a historical development rigorously researched and dramatically conveyed by the author. Nevertheless, this novel is at its core a love story—Freed-Thall sensitively limns the ways in which the couple’s devotion transcends their deep differences, not just literary, but also religious. Bernard is devoutly spiritual, and Esther tends to see religious belief as an instrument of thoughtless prejudice. This is a captivating book, historically authentic and movingly romantic.
A mesmerizing tale of love in a time of extraordinary trials.Pub Date: Sept. 21, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-57869-067-1
Page Count: 330
Publisher: Rootstock Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 10, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as...
An unlikely love story set amid the horrors of a Nazi death camp.
Based on real people and events, this debut novel follows Lale Sokolov, a young Slovakian Jew sent to Auschwitz in 1942. There, he assumes the heinous task of tattooing incoming Jewish prisoners with the dehumanizing numbers their SS captors use to identify them. When the Tätowierer, as he is called, meets fellow prisoner Gita Furman, 17, he is immediately smitten. Eventually, the attraction becomes mutual. Lale proves himself an operator, at once cagey and courageous: As the Tätowierer, he is granted special privileges and manages to smuggle food to starving prisoners. Through female prisoners who catalog the belongings confiscated from fellow inmates, Lale gains access to jewels, which he trades to a pair of local villagers for chocolate, medicine, and other items. Meanwhile, despite overwhelming odds, Lale and Gita are able to meet privately from time to time and become lovers. In 1944, just ahead of the arrival of Russian troops, Lale and Gita separately leave the concentration camp and experience harrowingly close calls. Suffice it to say they both survive. To her credit, the author doesn’t flinch from describing the depravity of the SS in Auschwitz and the unimaginable suffering of their victims—no gauzy evasions here, as in Boy in the Striped Pajamas. She also manages to raise, if not really explore, some trickier issues—the guilt of those Jews, like the tattooist, who survived by doing the Nazis’ bidding, in a sense betraying their fellow Jews; and the complicity of those non-Jews, like the Slovaks in Lale’s hometown, who failed to come to the aid of their beleaguered countrymen.
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as nonfiction. Still, this is a powerful, gut-wrenching tale that is hard to shake off.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-279715-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
These letters from some important executive Down Below, to one of the junior devils here on earth, whose job is to corrupt mortals, are witty and written in a breezy style seldom found in religious literature. The author quotes Luther, who said: "The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn." This the author does most successfully, for by presenting some of our modern and not-so-modern beliefs as emanating from the devil's headquarters, he succeeds in making his reader feel like an ass for ever having believed in such ideas. This kind of presentation gives the author a tremendous advantage over the reader, however, for the more timid reader may feel a sense of guilt after putting down this book. It is a clever book, and for the clever reader, rather than the too-earnest soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1942
ISBN: 0060652934
Page Count: 53
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1943
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