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This novel, based on the author's mother's life, reveals a legacy of cultural and religious tension. A rabbi decides, together with community members, to emigrate from Lithuania to Jerusalem in the late 1800s. With pushback from his wife, his two daughters' mutiny, and being turned away at their first attempt, they almost give up, but make enough bribe money to enter on the second try. The rabbi's eldest son, Yosef, becomes a scholar and scribe. Yosef's oldest granddaughter, Zipora, whose father Yosef's wife had given to another family to raise on the advice of a rogue rabbi after losing their first two children, is the author's mother and star of most of the book. Like her matriarchs, Zipora seeks advice outside Jewish law; she longs for more education than Jewish girls are permitted at the time. She falls in love with Reuven, a Zionist and law student. She emigrates to New York, working at an orphanage to support her family and Reuven during his studies at the Sorbonne. The couple's relationship is sustained and strained by letters exchanged over six years. Writing classes and new friends widen Zipora's horizons.
The book captures the growing pains at the personal and societal levels through Yosef and Zipora's perspectives. Seen through pre-teen Yosef's eyes, the harrowing journey to Jerusalem is a coming-of-age for him, and for Jews, "making Aliyah" (surges of immigration to the Holy Land) around the turn of the century. His quiet yearnings for Chana, his wife-to-be for many years, mirror the hard-fought and long-awaited struggle to establish a Jewish community in Palestine. Brief historical notes at the beginning of sections provide context for how Yosef's idiosyncratic story both diverges from and converges with his era. As he becomes a respected patriarch in his religious community, while remaining devoted to Chana, with her talismans and a more worldly family (they are businessmen), Yosef embodies the narrative's rooted yet curious spirit. The real suitcase Yosef and Zipora use deftly symbolizes the hardy container of incongruencies they each exemplify.
Zipora balances loyalty to a family she resists and love for a visionary with whom she doesn't always agree. The book's reliance on intimate letters between her and Reuven keeps the prose heart-centered. The Great Depression and WWI are backdrops to the big emotions on center stage. Reuven's visit to New York and her writing class mark turning points, leading Zipora to reconsider the feasibility of staying with Reuven. His letters reveal a contradictory figure, aspiring intellectually and professionally but patronizing Zipora as a dreamer he loves "as she is," without an education. While he remains stuck, often depressed, penniless, and complaining, the book shows Zipora developing as an independent thinker as she composes a story about the love between a prophet and a young woman for class. Taking her ways seriously, Zipora makes sense of her life in her story. The book's language is empowering.
Zipora also finds emancipation sexually. The book's openness about her and Reuven's intimacy is tantalizing and brazen. The freedom she experiences with him carries over into mature relationships with a doctor at the orphanage and an uncle she admires and trusts. These liaisons show the book charting inspiring new morays through Zipora's development. Walking the line between memoir and novel, the narrative tells the story of a changing people through the journey of one girl.