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
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.
A lifetime’s worth of letters combine to portray a singular character.
Sybil Van Antwerp, a cantankerous but exceedingly well-mannered septuagenarian, is the titular correspondent in Evans’ debut novel. Sybil has retired from a beloved job as chief clerk to a judge with whom she had previously been in private legal practice. She is the divorced mother of two living adult children and one who died when he was 8. She is a reader of novels, a gardener, and a keen observer of human nature. But the most distinguishing thing about Sybil is her lifelong practice of letter writing. As advancing vision problems threaten Sybil’s carefully constructed way of life—in which letters take the place of personal contact and engagement—she must reckon with unaddressed issues from her past that threaten the house of cards (letters, really) she has built around herself. Sybil’s relationships are gradually revealed in the series of letters sent to and received from, among others, her brother, sister-in-law, children, former work associates, and, intriguingly, literary icons including Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry. Perhaps most affecting is the series of missives Sybil writes but never mails to a shadowy figure from her past. Thoughtful musings on the value and immortal quality of letters and the written word populate one of Sybil’s notes to a young correspondent while other messages are laugh-out-loud funny, tinged with her characteristic blunt tartness. Evans has created a brusque and quirky yet endearing main character with no shortage of opinions and advice for others but who fails to excavate the knotty difficulties of her own life. As Sybil grows into a delayed self-awareness, her letters serve as a chronicle of fitful growth.
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780593798430
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
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
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