The Weight of Ink

by Rachel Kadish

Author Rachel Kadish bridges nearly four centuries to connect two strong women who have made heavy sacrifices to pursue a life of the mind.

Starchy Helen Watt is in the twilight of a career as a professor and researcher of Jewish history. Facing retirement and in failing health, she has seen much, been disappointed often and expects little from the world.

Her heart and her hopes lift when a former student calls her to evaluate a cache of ancient documents found in cubby hole beneath a staircase in a house he is renovating. When she sees the pages, written in Hebrew, Portuguese and Spanish and dated from 1657 to 1665, she knows the find is significant.

As she and her assistant, American doctoral student Aaron Levy, sift through the letters, they realize that the pages have been written by a scribe initially known only as Aleph. Aleph is working for Rabbi Moseh HaCoen Mendes, blinded by the Inquisition, formerly from Amsterdam and brought to London by the Jewish community as a teacher for the next generation. As Helen and Aaron work, they learn that Aleph is Ester Velasquez, a highly educated young woman.

Kadish weaves the stories of Helen and Aaron with that of Ester. Ester, a refugee from the Portuguese Inquisition, was left an orphan when her family’s home caught fire in Amsterdam. Taken into the home of Rabbi Mendes, her brother Isaac was intended to be the rabbi’s scribe, but he runs away from the responsibility and the Jewish community.

Ester finds herself in an impossible situation. She feels most alive when working with ideas, but the role that society defines for her is that of wife and mother. Her education and her sharp mind are considered liabilities for acquiring a husband. The idea of a life without access to books, paper and ink is impossible for Ester to consider. As she describes it, “A woman’s body, said the world, was a prison in which her mind must wither.”

As the rabbi grows more frail and the community’s support for his household dwindles, Ester engages in a desperate act of self-assertion and rebellion.

This story is part mystery and part jigsaw puzzle. How historians Helen and Aaron sift, research and speculate about the meaning of the material in the cubby hole is fascinating.

Equally fascinating are the times in which Ester lives. Ester and Rabbi Mendes arrived in London when the Puritans, with their austere and restrictive lifestyle, are in control. Their leader Oliver Cromwell, while not ready to fully open the door to Jewish settlement in England, allowed the small colony of Sephardic Jews living there to build synagogues and burial grounds. Antisemitism was strong, but Jews were no longer subject to prosecution or death if found worshipping in the Jewish tradition.

Three years later, in 1660, King Charles II is restored to the throne. Almost overnight society flings off Puritan austerity and dives into gaudy clothing, theater, gambling and licentiousness. Five years later, the Great Plague of London arrives, killing nearly a quarter of London’s population in 18 months between 1665 and 1666. This last outbreak of bubonic plague comes to an end with the Great Fire on Sept. 2 to 6, 1666, which guts the medieval city.

This was also the period in which philosopher Baruch Spinoza, excommunicated by the Jewish community of Amsterdam, was writing his masterpiece, “Ethics.” The Age of Reason was only a half century away.

At 559 pages, this is a long book. While it deals with complex philosophical issues, it never gets pedantic. The issues never bury the humanity of the characters. Any lover of historical fiction will enjoy this work.

The Author: Rachel Kadish (1969 - )

The Weight of Ink is Rachel Kadish’s fourth novel. She has said in an article on Goodreads.com that she often begins a book when something is bothering her.

Years ago, she remembered a question Virginia Woolf posed: what if Shakespeare had had an equally talented sister? Kadish asked herself: What would it take for a woman of that era, with a capacious intelligence, not to die without writing a word? What would it take for a woman not to be defeated when everything around her is telling her to sit down and mind her manners?

She started writing with two characters in mind, both women who don’t mind their manners: a contemporary historian (Helen Watt) and a 17th century refugee of the Inquisition (Ester Velasquez).

Her award-winning works also include the novella From a Sealed Room, Tolstoy Lied: A Love Story and I Was Here.

She has been a fiction fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts and the Massachusetts Cultural Council, has received the National Jewish Book Award, the Association of Jewish Libraries Fiction Award, and the John Gardner Fiction Award, and was the Koret Writer-in-Residence at Stanford University Award for a Young Writer on Jewish Themes. She was named a 2019 Sami Rohr Prize Fellow for The Weight of Ink.

She holds a bachelor's degree from Princeton University and a master's degree from New York University.

She lives outside Boston and teaches in Lesley University's MFA program.