The Weight of Ink

“The Weight of Ink” by Rachel Kadish lives up to its title in many ways. At 560 tightly-written pages of magnificent prose, this novel can under no circumstances be called “light reading”. Indeed, the only reason I was able to complete it despite the protest of my arthritic hands and aging eyes was because it is unquestionably absolutely enthralling to a person with my specific interests.Those interests include theology and the incredible injustices which dogma-driven society has perpetrated against women, homosexuals, Jews, and others. This book touches on all these aspects, and many more. As the plot summary indicates, Helen Watt, an aging British historian and expert in Jewish studies, is invited by a former student to assist in the evaluation of some manuscripts found during the renovation of a house in a London suburb. Helen, suffering from Parkinson Disease, needs help in studying what she realizes is a treasure-trove of documents, and calls upon a colleague to recommend a post-graduate student to assist. Enter Aaron Levy, a young American secular Jew who has run into a roadblock on his own research attempting to find a “Jewish Connection” in the writings Shakespeare. Helen and Aaron find their collaboration both uneasy and deeply rewarding.Further dramatic tension is provided by the fact that Helen’s ploy of having the college (from which she is about to retire) acquire the documents for conservation and archiving immediately raises the specter of academic competitiveness. It soon becomes obvious that the papers include the writing of Ester Velasquez, the ward of the blind Rabbi Moseh HaCoen Mendes, a Portuguese Jew. Having fled Portugal for the relative safety of Amsterdam after the Inquisition killed his parents and blinded him, Rabbi Mendes has been sent to London to try to assist the struggling Jewish community there. The existence of a female scribe writing in 17th Century London just before plague and then fire decimated the city is remarkable enough. However, as Helen and Aaron continue to delve into Ester’s writings an incredible back-story emerges. This woman was not only a scribe, but a philosopher as well, determined to connect with some of the great – and, in the opinion of most other people of that era heretical – thinkers of her time. As the story weaves back and forth between Ester’s traumas and those of Helen and Aaron as they seek to discover the reality of who this woman was and what she really represented (before being “scooped” by other investigators), great depth and richness of thought evolves.As mentioned in my opening comments, this is not a book I could recommend to someone seeking light or trivial reading. However, it is profound, fascinating and deeply engaging for anyone who is concerned with the fundamental issues Rachel Kadish so brilliantly addresses through the words and thoughts of her extraordinary characters.

There are long passages in this book, letters written by Ester to the philosophers of her day, in contemplation of the likely impossibility of the existence of God. At one point, Aaron Levy, the present-day scholar, wonders if he is even able to understand her missives.And this is my problem with this good book. The writing was beautiful, but dense and often cryptic; I sometimes had trouble understanding it, and many of the letters and scenes went on for too long.And yet I highlighted 27 excerpts, whether for the beauty of the writing or its resonance.On the very first page, describing Helen Watt: "Hope against reason: an opiate she'd long abandoned." What great characterization. As was the subtle yet plainspoken paragraph alerting us that Watt is very ill. The writing was so beautiful at times, I read it aloud to my husband, savoring the work of a true craftsman.The story progresses along three lines: that of Ester Velasquez, who lives in London, c. 1660; and of the modern-day scholars Watt and Levy. One theme of the book could be "how will you use your life? Will you live it fully or squander it?"-- in self-containment (Watt); the cowardice of the late-maturer (Levy); or by accepting cultural repression of women (Velasquez).As Levy learns about Velasquez having to hide her intellect, and the degree to which she suffers isolation because of her mind, his understanding grows in regard to the woman he loves, and women in general. This is a coming-of-age story. Levy is twenty five, beautiful, gifted with women, and stuck. He's unhappy and unsure of himself.Watt, gravely ill but persevering at the unlocking of the mystery of Ester, also examines her own life, with a lengthy flashback to when she was a young woman in love. Her fear of that love shaped her entire life, and it's only at the end and through her work with Levy that she achieves clarity in this regard.So, good character arcs, incredibly rich historical details, lots of good in this book, but overall, too long, opaque, and subtle for me. My apologies to the author, who must be a gifted scholar herself to have completed this work.

This is a beautiful, complex, engrossing, and engaging novel that is more than worth the time it takes to read it. The best part of "The Weight of Ink" is that it doesn't sacrifice readability or character development for the sake of the story, which takes place in both the 1990's and the 1660's. I'm finding that a lot of recent novels that take place in different eras in history try and "mold" their narrative style so they sound like they were either written in that time period or somehow evocative of that time period, and in doing so they turn the book into one long "accent", sacrificing readability for style.Rachel Kadish did none of that- she managed to weave an engrossing story with rich, compelling characters that come to life on the page. And the fact that this is a 576 page novel about documents and correspondence between rabbis and remains more of a page turner than any recent "thriller" is not lost on me.The basic plot: Helen is an aging historian, and near the end of her academic career she's called out to the home of one of her students, after he's unearthed a trove of historical documents during a renovation. Aaron, an American graduate student who is finding his dissertation to be a dead end, is tasked to help her.What they found- and the implications of it- astound them both. Through Kadish's skillful writing, the reader is effortlessly shifted between the worlds of both Helen and Aaron's situations in modern-day London, Israel in the 1960's, London in the 1660's and the characters that inhabit all these worlds.I cannot recommend this novel enough. It's beautifully written, a pleasure to read, and the kind of book that keeps you invested from the first page to the last.

Freedom and thirst for knowledge: two essential drives in Jewish history. But this book is unfortunately historical fiction: it would be so great if all in it were true! However, as the author states in her final Note, the 17th century backdrop is real, the philosophers mentioned are real, Rabbi Menasseh ben Israel is real, as is the latter's journey to England and its aftermath. The book as a whole is a great quest for identity, love, passion and the Jewish mind. I thoroughly enjoyed it, notwithstanding its bulk: actually, I'd have liked more...

The main story is about two women: one is Helen Watt, a disagreeably crusty, frail, non-Jewish academic with Parkinson’s disease, who had been alerted to a pile of manuscripts, dated from 1657 to 1665 found under a staircase in a 17th century house. The other is Ester Velasquez, who had been the scribe for the blind rabbi HaCoen Mendes. Both were Jews of Portuguese origin who had moved from Amsterdam to London when Jews were allowed back in England in 1657. (But, according to a passage towards the end of the novel – but for which I can find no support in my books - in 1665 the Jews in England were by no means safe from violent mobs.)Helen tries to make sense of these documents, and her part of the story shows the struggle she had, initially with her co-worker, Aaron Levy, whom she had had to employ because her Parkinson’s disease made it unsafe for her to handle the manuscripts, and, throughout, with rival academics favoured by the Head of her Department.As for Ester, she is that unusual thing, a 17t century female Jewish scholar, whose activities and philosophical interests go far beyond being merely a scribe foe the rabbi, and there is a strong feminist angle to the book. Ester even writes, under a false male name, to Spinoza, who had been excommunicated by the Amsterdam rabbis - defying the ban which prohibited all Jews from being in contact with him. She shares his heretical ideas about a God (or Nature) being indifferent to human suffering. (She had taken the false name from an actor she knew, and that actor would in due course be acclaimed as a significant, if yet unknown, philosopher.) She regards all this correspondence a betrayal of the rabbi. We learn at one stage in the book that, having lost two homes, she had married; but the author teases us with apparent contradictions as to who the husband was.Near the end of the novel there is a real tour de force, as an additional archive, hidden elsewhere is the house and even more significant than the previous one, is discovered. The previous one had shown Ester asking Spinoza questions; but this one shows wresting respect from that philosopher by the arguments she deployed in criticism of his ideas. It needs a reasonable acquaintance with Spinoza’s ideas to understand what the arguments were about, and here, even more than elsewhere is the novel, Kadish takes previous knowledge by her readers for granted.It is a learnéd book. Just how much research has gone into the book is revealed in an appendix. Kadish conveys a lot of information about the Jewish communities in Amsterdam, in London, and even in Florence, and that is both interesting and relevant to the main story. The passages about Spinoza, difficult though they are, turn out to be at the very heart of it.However, that main story is excessively diluted by the back history of some of the characters, notably that of Helen (for example, a love affaire she had had as a young woman on a visit to Israel with a soldier who was also a Shin Beth operative), and, especially, that of Ester which goes back three generations (and will be referred to again near the end of the book.Rachel Kadish also devotes an enormous amount of space in this very long novel of nearly 600 pages to a number of subplots. Some of these are not without some interest (examples: the sexual encounters of various characters; Ester’s feelings about men who were courting her; her experiences as a paid companion to a Jewish woman who behaves in a very unJewish manner; a trip on the Thames), but they have nothing to do with the story of the manuscripts. That may not bother some readers, who may enjoy the “sweep” of the book; but I found it an irritant.I found the 17th century dialogue quite obscure in places, and some of the later 17th century scenes in the book so badly written as to be well-nigh incomprehensible to me. And I am ashamed that much of the meaning of the last few chapters quite eluded me. To my surprise, this quite difficult, mannered and sprawling book has found enough readers to make it an American best seller. Somewhat more understandably, a knowledgeable panel has chosen it for the American National Jewish Book Award; but I found its discursiveness a massive distraction, and the increasing obscurity towards the end of the book exasperating. The shortcoming may be mine – though I have to say that I have rarely been so defeated by difficult novels.So I find rating this book very hard. Its knowledge deserves five stars, but I rate my enjoyment of it, for reasons set out above, at no more than the two stars I have given it.

This book is not one I could recommend. It's too long, and too crowded. Some of the threads are superfluous and detract from the whole. I don't feel the author was completely certain whose story she was telling. Unless one has, as I do , an interest in 17th Century London and it's Jewish community, or are inclined to read the Enlightenment philosophers, or have a strong view about women's rights...I'm not sure that this is a book for you... personally I think this should have been three books.

An extraordinary book. Its measure can be gauged by the fact that I didn’t want to finish it. How Kadish gets into the minds of 17th century philosophers is miraculous. The book’s overwhelming message, for me, was the restriction placed on women for hundreds of years and how women of different centuries have dealt with it. Both Kadish’s 17th and 21st protagonists have similar approaches. Most enjoyable were her scathing portraits of 17th century London Jews, in all their cross-wearing snobbery. But bravo to Ester and Helen for defying social niceties and going their own way. And wouldn’t it be wonderful to think that Kadish’s concept of dialogues with Spinoza really did span time and place and gender?

Awesome book. For anyone interested in European or Jewish History, or for anyone wanting a good book, this is unputdownable. Beautiful prose, gripping characters, seamless mix of fact and fiction, this book is perfect. A direct entry into my top favourite books ever.