The Weight of Ink, by Rachel Kadish. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017

In the 1600s, Esther Velasquez is denied by Judaic law the right to read or write religious or philosophical works. In the 2000s, historian Helen Watt is having things mansplained to her by the department head. Some things never change.

Esther, a Portuguese Jew whose family fled to the Netherlands when Portugal expelled the Jews, is in a unique position. Not only does she long to read and write, she doesn’t want to marry and take the standard position of mother and housekeeper. She and her brother live with a blind Rabbi, and the brother is the official student, reader, and writer for him, with Ester listening in. But when they move to England and the brother leaves, Ester is the available scribe. And no one will find out a woman is doing the transcription. And it’s perhaps a gray area; she is, after all, just writing down a man’s words, not her own.

Helen Watt receives a call from a former student. He and his wife, while renovating an old house, have found a cache of old papers, looking to be in Arabic, Hebrew, or Spanish. Could Helen come and take a look? She’s not eager; she doesn’t imagine they could be anything important. Probably old shopping lists. But she’ll take a look, taking a grad student to do the grunt work. The papers are from 1691, and Helen realizes that they could be an important find. Now she must race against the rest of the history department, her own worsening physical state, and her impending mandatory retirement to get the papers bought, stabilized by the university library, and translated. The story that emerges is one no one imagined.

“Weight of Ink” has been compared to A.S. Byatt’s “Possession”, and it does certainly have similarities. But “Possession” is in large part a tale of two passionate love stories, while “Weight of Ink” certainly has passionate love stories in it, they are minor streams merging into the larger river of Ester’s desire for education and her evolution from scribe to something much more.

This is a great literary mystery, with new things turning up right up to the end. I really liked Ester; I warmed up to Helen as I found out more about her. The cast of characters is huge; not all are likable but that’s how life is. There are a lot of issues dealt with; homosexuality, pregnancy out of wedlock, Jewishness in the time of William and Mary, women’s issues, class, interfaith relationships, and philosophy all both entertain and educate the reader. While the book is slow in places, I never found it boring and it was actually a pretty fast read for a 600 page book! Five stars out of five. 

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The Marriage of Opposites, by Alice Hoffman. Simon & Schuster, 2015

I have loved pretty much every book Alice Hoffman has written, so I was excited to receive this one for early review. For the most part, I was not disappointed.

In 1817, on the small Caribbean island of St. Thomas, teen aged Rachel Pomie, member of the small Jewish community, is told by her father that he has arranged a marriage for her. Her father and the prospective groom wish to merge their businesses, and the groom, thirty years older than Rachel, is a recent widower with three small children. Despite her dreams of going to Paris, Rachel enters the marriage with surprising dignity and maturity. Now she is trapped on St. Thomas.

Luckily Monsieur Isaac Petit is a man ahead of his time. He loved his first wife and is gentle and thoughtful with Rachel, viewing her as a partner in the job of raising a family.  Rachel makes friends with the Petit’s maid, as well as with the ghost of the first Mrs. Petit. But when Isaac suddenly dies, she finds herself alone with seven children, and no money- in their community, women cannot inherit anything. Everything she has thought she owned is now the property of Isaac’s family in France. A nephew will be sent to sort things out and run the business. Rachel finds this infuriating.

When the nephew- several years Rachel’s junior- appears, they fall in love. According to their community’s laws, they are family even though there is no blood shared between them, and thus cannot marry. Shunned when they have an affair despite lack of blessing from a rabbi, Rachel moves heaven and earth to obtain the blessing of the rabbi and be married after several years of effort. Anything can be done for love.

Which is why it is so ironic that when their youngest son, Camille Pizarro who will be acclaimed as the father of Impressionism, falls in love with the cook’s daughter, Rachel refuses to give her blessing to the match. The girls is both working class and not Jewish.

This is not just the story of Rachel and her husbands. It’s also about the love between sisters- even when the sister cannot be acknowledged; parental love; love that must be kept hidden; the horror of slavery; the lack of women’s rights in the 19^th century; the persecution of Jews; and magic. There is a lot going on in this story, on several levels. It’s told so beautifully that the story leapt into my mind in glowing color. St. Thomas is a place of incredible physical beauty and the sense of place, both there and in Paris, is very important to the story. I have to admit that while Rachel is a very sympathetic character in the first portion, she is much less so later on, and we have no way of knowing why she changes so. But people do change when the shoe is on the other foot. A wonderful story that held me totally. 

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I received this book free from the Vine program in return for a fair review. 

Neither of these things influenced my review.