Our Little Histories
Every human being has their own little history. The seven little histories in this book come from imagined characters in an extended Jewish family beginning in 1850 in Eastern Europe. Working from the present day backwards to that time, the author has beautifully and poignantly shared their little histories with the world. We meet Jews in this book who are Americans, Israelis, Germans, Lithuanians, Russians, and Poles. We meet believing and non-believing Jews. We meet freethinkers, Socialists, Zionists, and Talmudic scholars. Each chapter about a different person is a story unto itself, yet it fits into the larger sense of family, culture, and time periods that connect all of them together. The thread that connects them are words of poetry written long ago in Yiddish which were saved by family members and passed on to future generations.
The author’s words that tell these stories are themselves translucent. She has so skillfully rendered thoughts and conversations in the different time periods that the reader will feel transported to that era simply by reading her words on the page. Along with this sense of immersion, the reader will also feel an increasing urgency to see how all the pieces of the various stories will finally fit together. Serving as a testament to the grief and suffering endured by the Jewish people, along with their strength, resiliency, and fortitude, we see how little histories do indeed become history. Hard to put down, this novel will remain with a reader long after the last page is read.
