Review: The Weight of Ink

The Weight of Ink by Rachel Kadish
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I admire and enjoy three-quarters of this book.

Half of this is set in the 17th century when Esther, an orphaned Jewish girl (later an adult woman), comes from Amsterdam to serve as a maid and then scribe for a thoughtful rabbi in London. Exposed to writing and philosophy – and wrestling with the devastation of losing her entire family to tragedies that challenge her faith in a benign providence – she grows into a philosophe, a thinker wrestling with modern philosophy as it’s emerging in the work of Thomas Hobbes and, above all, Baruch Spinoza.

When this novel is set in the past, it comes alive. Kadish has a real skill in mimicking the careful written voices of her long-ago characters, and she has some nice success at paraphrasing the stakes of serious philosophical arguments. At the heart of this conflict, though elegantly presented, is a complicated question about whether it’s possible to be a martyr for one’s faith if one has come to believe that life itself – absent either human or divine intent – is the ultimate engine of the universe. That thinking puts her at odds with the gentle and wise rabbi who’s taken her in, and it leaves us with a beautifully realized intellectual crisis.

The other half of this is set at the beginning of the 21sth century. Half of that half is compelling. When aging scholar Helen and her grad student partner Aaron make connections among the different documents they uncover, and when they reconstruct Esther’s life from 300 years earlier, we get the feeling that real scholarship can convey. I’ve dug in archives – though never with such momentous work at hand – and it has those moments of real power. When you feel you’re solving a puzzle no one else has quite seen before, it’s a rush.

Kadish is often clever in the way she uses the 21st century discoveries to move the older story forward. When the archives reveal, for instance, that someone has died, it moves the older story forward weeks, months, or even years. As scholars, these characters have weight.

But the other half of this contemporary half strikes some sour notes for me. Aaron is involved – or no longer involved – with a woman who has gone to Israel. He’s apparently quite the handsome catch, but he’s also self-absorbed. Some of his early emails to her fall flat; in a novel with some real eloquence, they seem bland, a problem compounded by the fact that Kadish uses them to dump information we need to understand the implications of the Esther papers.

Helen has a lost love of her own, an Israeli who, though he loved her, loved his country more. And [SPOILER:] by the end, Kadish is twisting things uncomfortably to keep their stories alive. At one point Aaron tears a document in order to keep it from rival scholars. (There’s no way this man would do such a thing if he were realized as Kadish otherwise presents him.) At another, a sickly Helen cashes in her retirement account to buy some of the documents from the ignorant family who owns the house where they were discovered. Again, it’s an absurd move for such a scholar to do since, among other things, it would put the very provenance of the papers into question and would compromise her for taking financial advantage of someone uninformed.

When you add in that the book is really too long – too long, perhaps, by a quarter – it makes me wish Kadish had simply cut out the drama in the contemporary account. She doesn’t need it, and it distracts from the excellence of the rest of this. [SPOILER:] Kadish gives in to a similar impulse to exaggerate what’s already sufficient when, having created a wonderful myth about a woman who masquerades as a succession of men to correspond with the great thinkers of her time, she adds in the possibilty that Esther might be Shakespeare’s granddaughter by way of the famed Dark Mistress of the sonnets. It’s a throwaway concept, and one that – by its outsized premise – dims the fundamental creativity of the project.

Those complaints aside, this really is a rewarding novel. It does what historical fiction is supposed to do, and then it amplifies that by giving us the perspective of scholars of today piecing together a long-ago puzzle.


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