A welcome glimpse into a little-understood world.
A young woman struggles against strict Orthodox traditions to realize her inner artist.
Esther Kaminsky, a fictional character based on Carner’s grandmother, grows up in a Haredi (Ultra-Orthodox Jewish) compound in Jerusalem during the waning days of Ottoman rule. In part because of the exhortation to be fruitful and multiply, and in part because the men are left mostly free to study Torah, women’s work in this crowded enclave is never done. Esther will be married off as soon as her menses begin (an event she postpones by secretly eating special herbs). Mademoiselle Thibaux, a teacher at a local girls’ school, encourages Esther to develop her remarkable talent as a painter. However, Esther renounces her artistic yearnings after her mother dies of consumption—obviously a sign from Hashem (God) that Esther offended Him, not only by creating graven images but by stepping outside her circumscribed gender role. When her beloved father condemns her outspokenness, and her best friend, forced into marriage to a brutal man, kills herself, Esther plots to escape. Her musically gifted cousin Asher, also harboring forbidden artistic ambitions, wants her to marry him, so they can flee to Paris and pursue their callings. She agrees but is tricked into wedding Nathan, a wealthy Jaffa merchant. The story jumps ahead 10 years to 1924. Esther, mother of three, is the relatively content wife of Nathan, who is attractive and kind, if a bit stiff. Nonetheless, she still bridles at the restrictions on her life, exacerbated by meddling sisters-in-law. When Esther’s disgraced and divorced sister Hanna arrives to help with the children, and Nathan departs on an extended business trip, Esther seizes the opportunity to go to Paris. Will Esther manage to free herself of the prohibitions which she has internalized and achieve artistic expression and true love? Readers will fervently hope so.
A welcome glimpse into a little-understood world.Pub Date: May 31, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-06-200437-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 18, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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