THE WEIGHT OF INK A Novel by Rachel Kadish Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publication Date: June 6, 2017

How is this historical novel? About 570 pages.

No, but seriously, it is a worthwhile, entertaining Summer opus of a read (for those in the Northern Hemisphere)

The Weight of Ink is set in London during the 1660s, and in the past two decades. Meet Ester Velasquez, an new immigrant to London from Amsterdam. She is employed as the scribe to a blind rabbi. As she writes, we observe the happenings at the rabbi’s place in 17th Century England. And there is Helen Watt, an ailing historian of British History, with a love of Jewish history. She is weeks from retirement and not too well. Did I mention she was a volunteer on a kibbutz in Israel in 1948? As the novel opens, Helen has been invited to the home of a former student to view a cache of newly discovered Jewish documents (from the 1660s). Enlisting the help of a grad student, Aaron Levy, Helen embarks on a project that can be her apex, namely to identify the documents’ scribe, the person they call “Aleph.” Maybe it will be a woman. Maybe it is Ester. Maybe it will be a story of two women and their choices, their interfaith possibilities, their sacrifices (or martyrdoms) over the span of over three centuries of Jewish life.

Let me add one more thing… Rachel Kadish is hear becuase of the bravery of a Japanese man. In 1940, Chiune Sugihara, the Japanese vice-consul in Kovno, Lithuania, issue travel documents that saved Jewish refugees from Nazi murderers. Kadish’s ancestors had fled Krakow, and were captured attempting to cross the Lithuanian border. They’d endured interrogation in a Russian prison and then escaped, only to find themselves moored in Kovno, with war closing in and no way out. Sugihara saved them.