A poignant, informative portrait of Jewish life under Turkish and British rule before Israeli statehood.
Kehlmann presents a multi-generational historical novel based upon the migration of his Orthodox Jewish ancestors from Eastern Europe to Jerusalem and onward to New York.
In 1879, Rabbi Moshe Yitzchak Siev, who lives with his wife and children in the small town of Ariogala (in present day Lithuania), announces to his wife Shayna Sara that it is time for them to heed the religious and spiritual calling of Jerusalem and to breathe the sweet sacred air of the Jews’ ancestral home (“as children of Abraham, we’re going to follow in his footsteps, leave our home, our father’s home, and heed the Lord’s words”). A year later, despite the reluctance of his wife and offspring, Rabbi Siev leads his family out of Ariogala on a journey to the coast, where they embark on the Tikvah, a rusted steamship that will bring them to the Turkish-controlled Holy Land. So begins a long and arduous trip, including a year’s stay in Cyprus. During this period, the Siev’s eldest son, Yosef, only 11 years old when they begin their migration, meets Chana (Chanke) Rosen, the young girl who will one day win his heart. The immigrants finally arrive in Jerusalem in 1882, and in 1886, Yosef and Chana marry. (Many years later, the author will be born as their great-grandson.) Jerusalem is beset by poverty. Yosef studies for the Rabbinate and begins drafting samples of his talent for calligraphy. He travels to New York, hoping to sell his work, and while there becomes a naturalized American citizen. His granddaughter Zipora Siev (the author’s mother) will one day make New York her home. Kehlmann’s prose carries the hint of Sholem Aleichem’s charming linguistic lilt (although only a bit of his humor), and it is liberally peppered with Yiddish phrases. He tenderly captures the essence of Orthodox shtetl–style life—the customs, the superstitions, and the mannerisms. Zipora, the novel’s chief protagonist, struggles against the strict religious constraints of her Orthodox upbringing in a relatable way, and her love affair with the more cosmopolitan Reuven Borstein is depicted passionately (and very graphically) through his letters to Zipora from Paris.
A poignant, informative portrait of Jewish life under Turkish and British rule before Israeli statehood.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9798888246993
Page Count: 374
Publisher: Koehler Books
Review Posted Online: March 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.
Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.
This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781954118812
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
The queen of social activist novels has done it again. Impressive, important, and fun to read.
The World Trade Center attacks are at the center of an intricate, twisty family drama spanning decades in both directions.
“You could brace for your sister to die of a terminal illness, only to have your healthy sibling killed in a random car wreck. You could carry a baby safely to term and then, on a bright blue day in September, walk into a building that collapsed beneath your feet.” Or you could be a character in a Jodi Picoult novel and face all of the above and much, much more. Fans of My Sister’s Keeper (2004) will notice a reference to that novel in the preceding quote and be glad to hear a character from that book is back. During the Covid-19 pandemic, former teenage delinquent Jesse Fitzgerald, now a detective on the Providence, Rhode Island, police force, meets Molly Ambrose, a 19-year-old prodigy who runs the state’s emergency preparedness and response program. “Despite the fact that there were fifteen years between us and we both had enough baggage to fill a cargo hold,” as Molly puts it, the two fall madly in love. The baggage she’s referring to includes, on her side, a mother who died on 9/11 when Molly was less than three months old. Picoult supplies her signature delightful banter and gift for depicting passion and romance to win the reader’s sympathy for this possibly questionable match between dedicated public servants, whose favorite game at bedtime is “Who can think of the most terrifying worst-case scenario?” Very little more can be revealed without spoilers, but trigger warnings for this book would be a long list indeed, ranging from suicide and filicide to rape and mental illness (welcome to Picoultland!). Subplots visit evangelical and Navajo cultures as well as the ins and outs of polygraphy. Make sure to read the afterword in which Picoult explains her real-life sources of inspiration.
The queen of social activist novels has done it again. Impressive, important, and fun to read.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2026
ISBN: 9780593726259
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2026
SEEN & HEARD
PERSPECTIVES
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