By Rachel Kadish
An highbrow and emotional jigsaw puzzle of a singular for readers of A. S. Byatt’s Possession and Geraldine Brooks’s People of the Book
Set in London of the 1660s and of the early twenty-first century, The Weight of Ink is the interwoven story of 2 girls of outstanding mind: Ester Velasquez, an emigrant from Amsterdam who's authorised to scribe for a blind rabbi, in advance of the plague hits town; and Helen Watt, an ill historian with a love of Jewish history.
As the radical opens, Helen has been summoned by means of a former pupil to view a cache of seventeenth-century Jewish records newly chanced on in his domestic in the course of a maintenance. Enlisting assistance from Aaron Levy, an American graduate scholar as impatient as he's fascinating, and in a race with one other fast-moving staff of historians, Helen embarks on one final venture: to figure out the identification of the records’ scribe, the elusive “Aleph.”
Electrifying and impressive, sweeping in scope and intimate in tone, The Weight of Ink is a sophisticated work of old fiction approximately ladies separated via centuries, and the alternatives and sacrifices they have to make in order to reconcile the lifetime of the guts and brain.
Set in London of the 1660s and of the early twenty-first century, The Weight of Ink is the interwoven story of 2 girls of outstanding mind: Ester Velasquez, an emigrant from Amsterdam who's authorised to scribe for a blind rabbi, in advance of the plague hits town; and Helen Watt, an ill historian with a love of Jewish history.
As the radical opens, Helen has been summoned by means of a former pupil to view a cache of seventeenth-century Jewish records newly chanced on in his domestic in the course of a maintenance. Enlisting assistance from Aaron Levy, an American graduate scholar as impatient as he's fascinating, and in a race with one other fast-moving staff of historians, Helen embarks on one final venture: to figure out the identification of the records’ scribe, the elusive “Aleph.”
Electrifying and impressive, sweeping in scope and intimate in tone, The Weight of Ink is a sophisticated work of old fiction approximately ladies separated via centuries, and the alternatives and sacrifices they have to make in order to reconcile the lifetime of the guts and brain.
