The German Bride

By Joanna Hershon

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It’s Berlin, 1865, and Eva Frank, the romantic daughter of a Jewish banker, falls in love with a handsome painter commissioned by her father to paint her portrait and that of her older sister, Henriette. By the time Eva realizes the painter is not the man she believed, the affair has tragically involved her family. To flee the scandal, Eva quickly marries the merchant Abraham Shein and leaves Berlin, following him across the Atlantic. At home in Santa Fe, New Mexico, she feels isolated, Abraham falls woefully short of her expectations, and, eventually, Eva must come to grips with her past.

The German Bride is a story about overcoming personal demons. It is an inner journey that shows the protagonist first as an immature, gullible adolescent, then a guilt-ridden, homesick young bride, afraid of everything, and, finally, a young woman who faces her present by struggling foremost against herself. The transformation makes for a readable page-turner. An evocative, well-paced novel with an elegant style and a cast of believable characters, it spins the familiar Western yarn with an unlikely heroine, a young Jewish woman. It is world full of possibilities and of danger, a landscape where Eva discovers that being different is “both a luxury and a curse,” and where she ultimately forges her own redemption.